Tag: france

Wingwomen

  By

★★
“A wing and not much prayer.”

Netflix describes this as “Charlie’s Angels meets Lupin, with a dash of Killing Eve.” Um. About that… While I haven’t seen Lupin, I can confidently state any similarity to the others is tangential at best. For example, the only thing this really has in connection with Charlie’s Angels, is that there’s three of them. But here, it’s more like 2.25, since the third member is largely useless. It’s almost entirely the story of Carole (Laurent) and Alex (Exarchopoulos), two thieves who work for the enigmatic Marraine (Adjani). But Carole has discovered she’s pregnant and wants out of the business. Marraine is not happy, but agrees, providing Carole does that hoariest of film clichés: One Last Job.

This involves stealing a piece of art from a church, and they ordered to bring a getaway driver on board. She is Sam (Bresch), and is entirely pointless. Carole does the actual thieving, and Alex is a crack shot. But Sam? I can only presume she’s there to fulfill some kind of diversity quota. Because she has no talent past driving, and at no point in the movie subsequently is a quick getaway required. The same goes for other elements. There’s a John Wick-like thread where Alex’s bunny is killed. But the film forgets all about it for an hour, before suddenly remembering. Only to dispose of it in a scene, that seems to exist more so Carole and Sam can do a spot of flamenco.

Laurent has been here before, albeit a while ago. Back in 2011, we reviewed Requiem pour une Tueuse, in which she played an assassin who goes on… [all together!] ONE LAST MISSION! So it’s ironic to see her now directing a movie based around the same trope. It is very focused on the Alex/Carole dynamic, and that might be where the Killing Eve comparisons come from. But there’s nothing remotely adversarial about things here. It is nicely handled, the pair possessing the easy dynamic that only results from long familiarity and comfort with each other. However, this arguably sits closer to Thelma & Louise than anything, and certainly is more intense than you’d find on the male side of the genre. 

To be honest, Laurent seems to prefer this aspect to the action. For instance, she cuts from the meat of a fight between Alex and an assassin, to (presumably!) his tarpaulin wrapped corpse being dropped into the ocean. The stuff which is present, is not especially memorable. Even the art heist turns into more of a comedy of errors, as the target has become the location of a movie shoot. While there are some cool ideas – the stunningly well-disguised hideout in the middle of a forest being one – this feels like a relationship drama disguised as an action movie. It’s especially so at the end, when it almost topples over into hysteria. Give me an Alex solo film instead, and I would probably have been more interested and entertained.

Dir: Mélanie Laurent
Star: Mélanie Laurent, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Manon Bresch, Isabelle Adjani
a.k.a. Voleuses

Vesper

  By

★★★½
“Battle Angel Nausicaa”

As the above suggests, I was getting a strong manga influence, in particular from the works of Hayao Miyazaki: it feels like the script could have been something he’d have written on a gloomy Wednesday in January. Feisty teenage heroine? Check? Ecological message? Check. For this takes place after some kind of change in the world, which has left the bulk of the population clinging on to existence by their grubby fingernails, in a world now owned by bizarre flora. Vesper (Chapman) is one such, tending to her paralyzed father (Brake) whose consciousness has been transferred into a drone. She trades with her uncle, Jonas (Marsan), swapping blood for the seeds they need to survive.

Yet there’s also elements of Battle Angel Alita, with a sharp delineation between the haves and the have-nots. The latter live privileged lives in Citadels, served by artificial lifeforms called “jugs”, and as suppliers of the seeds, hold everyone else in their control. One day, a Citadel craft crashes near Vesper’s home, and she rescues Camelia (McEwen) from the wreckage. She promises to take Vesper and her father back to her home. Yet it eventually becomes clear that Camelia is not being 100% honest about her own situation either. On the other hand, she is potentially the key to liberating everyone from under the thumb of the Citadels, and ending their monopoly on the resources necessary for survival. It’s not something the rulers will give up easily, however.

This is rather ponderous in its progress, running close to two hours, and is clearly content to take its time getting to any of its points. If you’re willing to accept that, there’s a lot to appreciate here, not least some great visual style and world-building. This has to be one of the most fully convincing post-apocalyptic landscapes I’ve seen, a remarkable achievement considering its budget was a mere five million Euros. Vesper is a heroine right out of the Nausicaa playbook: someone who is smart and brave, rather than physically strong, devoted to her family, and who has an inherent affinity for the natural world. Her mother left the family, under circumstances best described as murky, and Camelia is a surrogate, to some extent.

It does feel as if the makers fell in love with their creation a little more than I did, and wanted to wallow in the imagination, at the expense of developing the plot. No-one seems in a particular hurry here, and for every scene which moves the story forward, there’s another that seems to exist purely as a visual showcase. I think it might work better at 90 minutes than 120 – or alternatively, expanded beyond the confines of a feature film. This is the kind of thing I could certainly imagine HBO developing into a series. The ending came close to toppling into “Eh?” territory, before a final shot where it made sense, and wrapped things up on easily the most optimistic note we’d heard. Miyazaki would likely approve.

Dir: Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper
Star: Raffiella Chapman, Rosy McEwen, Eddie Marsan, Richard Brake

Home-Sitters

  By

★★★
“Home not-so-sweet home”

June Williamson (Guillot) is an out-of-work actress, who just broke up with her boyfriend, Oliver (Vernet), and is behind on the rent to her creepy landlord. An unexpected lifeline arrives in the shape of a very well paid gig, house-sitting a large house, deep in the countryside. Things get annoying when Oliver and his asshole pal Marcel (Thevenoud) show up. They get worse when Oliver admits they had an accident on the way, and there’s a body in the car boot. A stare of “terrible” is reached when the body vanishes. And we reach peak awful, when the house comes under siege from Wolfströeme (Bary) and his heavily-armed gang of mercy, who are looking for…

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? June doesn’t have a clue, yet Wolfströeme is very insistent she does. Fortunately, the house has some defensive systems, which help delay the inevitable. There’s also an underground section, with a firmly locked gate, which may be keeping everyone out… or keeping something in. It’s quite a lot for the film to handle in just 90 minutes, and doesn’t all get the exposition needed to work. To be fair though, it’s mostly a delivery system for the action, and there’s no shortage of this, in the second half at least. June leads the way here: Oliver is fairly useless (both as a boyfriend and as a fighter), and all you need to know about Marcel is, he’s wearing a T-shirt depicting Donald Trump as Rambo.

I do have to wonder why she is quite as competent as she appears. Are unemployed French actresses usually able to wield automatic weapons effectively, and go toe-to-toe with professional soldiers? I kept expecting an explanation for her skills to be forthcoming. Never showed up. Taking this as read though, it’s not badly-staged, without the frenetic editing style which I hate. Truth be told, there were times when this could perhaps have used quicker editing – probably the first time I’ve ever said that! – in order to punch up the impact and heighten the pace. There is also some underwhelming CGI blood that, for example, flies through the air without landing on anything. I’d be inclined not to have bothered with it at all.

I did like the ending, which has a glorious sense of the makers deciding they might as well go big or go home. It might not work for everyone, to put it mildly. Yet it did for me, in a way that’s hard to describe. The end credits then thank the likes of John Carpenter, John McTiernan and Tsui Hark, which made me wonder if the director had been rifling through my DVD collection. They finish by acknowledging the owner of the Chateau de Laye, where this was filmed, and justifiably so, as it’s almost an additional character. As an indie effort, the heart here is always apparent; for me, that goes a good way towards balancing the less effective elements.

Dir: Chris Rakotomamonjy
Star: Chloé Guillot, Francis Vernet, Boris Thevenoud, Bary
The film is now available to view on Tubi – depending on your region, perhaps!

Joan of Arc (2019)

  By

★★★½
“Joan the Younger”

I liked this considerably better than its predecessor. Part of that was, perhaps, knowing what to expect going in: a minimalist retelling, with occasional musical numbers. Except, this proved rather more than minimalist (though still very restrained), and there was hardly any singing at all. Curse you, Dumont, for confounding my expectations. It begins, much as Jeanette ended: with a lot of standing around in sand-dunes, chatting. However, the cast this time cannot be counted on the fingers of one hand, and there aren’t any staggeringly bad performances to take you out of the movie. You still don’t get any great battles. Instead, these are basically represented by team dressage, two groups of horses and riders, swirling around near each other.

But, you know what? It works, far better than you might expect. Similarly, the capture of Joan (Prudhomme) is simply portrayed by her galloping off on her horse, then cutting to her horse trotting on without a rider. Again, it gets the point over, with an elegant simplicity, befitting the understated nature here. Most of this second part is concerned with her trial for heresy, and the church’s efforts to manipulate proceedings so they could let the secular authorities do their dirty work. Yet Joan’s refusal to co-operate proves increasingly problematic to this “show trial” end. There’s a great scene where she’s being lectured by one of the prosecuting clerics, and her silence triggers increasing frustration in her interrogator.

The way Prudhomme is a far younger actress than typical also merits discussion. She was only 10 when she made this, barely half the age of Joan at her death. This certainly enhances the elements of childlike innocence throughout, and it’s hard not to feel for the little girl. Yet her spiritual backbone is made of steel, and leaves her accusers in a no-win situation. I liked the little inserts where “common people” such as her guards would discuss the topic of the trial, which again brings some much-needed humanity to proceedings. The star of the second half though, is the amazing setting of Amiens Cathedral where the trial takes place. It looks stunning, and Dumont wisely decides not to pack it with people, a decision which allows its grandeur to shine.

There’s definitely a better sense of the sacred and divine here, or at least it is generated with a higher degree of effectiveness. That seems to have been the overall focus of these two movies, albeit successful only intermittently. I did appreciate the effort to try and do something different with the concept, even if – to put it mildly! – I would not have made all of the same artistic decisions. The results unquestionably fall into the “something different” category. After being distinctly underwhelmed by the first half of the story, I felt this was a significant improvement, though it’s not a spiritual journey I think I will take again, any time soon.

Dir: Bruno Dumont
Star: Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Jean-François Causeret, Daniel Dienne, Fabien Fenet
a.k.a. Jeanne

Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc

  By

★★½
“Joan of Arc: The Musical”

I initially intended to review this and its sequel, Jeanme, by Dumont as one entity, for a couple of reasons. They really only work as a single item. This confused the hell out me, because the second film turned up on a streaming service by itself. Five minutes in, I was so confused, I started searching the Internet, only to find I had, in effect, joined a movie already two hours in progress. Also, I suspected I would be hard-pushed to deliver 500 words on each of these. I’m not saying they’re slow-paced, but you’d overtake them riding a glacier. The first 90 minutes is basically Jeannete (Prudhomme when young, Voisin when older) standing around sand-dunes, looking after her sheep, with the occasional religious debate or vision. Three years pass here, in the blink of a caption.

Yet, here we are, since there are still topics to discuss. For example, I forgot to mention: it’s a musical. Yep, full-on songs and everything. Though not exactly contemporary to the 15th century. There’s rap. There’s rock. There’s a head-banging pair of nuns, who often speak their lines together, like a clerical version of the Mothra Twins. Now, I guess this kind of thing can work. Hamilton was very popular, though let the record show, I couldn’t sit through it. This is… Well, I can’t say it wasn’t interesting to watch. Though the overlap between “interesting to watch” and “never want to see again” has rarely been so resoundingly demonstrated. It’s apparently an adaptation of a play, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, written in 1910. No clue if that had songs or not.

I’m really not sure what the intent here was. From what I’ve read, it seems to have been trying to recapture the spirit of naivety found in medieval passion plays, using non-professional actors. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t: the scenes featuring rapper Durand Lassois as Jeanne’s uncle are excruciating. Yet there are moments where, Voisin in particular, captures the serious intensity necessary. Do they justify the endeavour as a whole? I’m far less certain. Though matters were not helped by the distribution company going with white, unaliased subtitles that are often entirely illegible, given the variety of white backgrounds: sand, nuns’ habits, sheep, etc. Perhaps that simply was intended to add to the mystery of it all.

Even as an eight-year-old, this Jeanne seems deeply concerned about the Hundred Years’ War against England, which has been going on for far longer than she has been alive. But when three saints (at least somewhat restrained in their dance moves) show up, she doesn’t exactly leap into action. That’s when we get the three year caption mentioned above, and even further visions have her reluctant to leave her family. In the end, she bids them farewell, makes arrangements for her sheep, and hops on a horse to head off with her uncle in the direction of Orleans, and the second movie. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back. Though I didn’t exactly have other plans…

Dir: Bruno Dumont
Star: Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Jeanne Voisin

The Real Joan of Arc

  By

★★★
“Live to fight another day?”

Pun mot intended, but the reality is, we know very little for sure about Joan of Arc. Not even what she looked like in detail, for there are no surviving portraits of her, dating from when she was alive. The facts about her life are equally as uncertain, because everything about Joan was subject to spin, depending on who was talking, when they were saying it, and what agenda they sought to achieve. Because everybody involved had an agenda of one kind or another: either elevating Joan up to the level of literal sainthood (finally achieved in 1920, almost half a millennium after her death), or tearing her down, as a tool of the Devil. Even basic facts – was Joan a shepherd when she was young? – are uncertain, with contradictory testimony. 

It’s really in that light you need to view all this documentary shows. Indeed it largely opens by admitting to the above. This opens the door to questioning the standard narrative, in which Joan is a humble farm-girl, who heard divine voices and was inspired to lead France to fight back against the English invaders. However, I was also left with as much doubt about the alternative suggestions the film provides, because the evidence for them is little if any less sketchy. These theories are certainly interesting – and from a secular viewpoint, elements are perhaps no less plausible than the “voices of God” explanation. On other hand, it feels as if they raise as many questions as they answer. 

The first is the suggestion that Joan was actually of noble birth, perhaps an illegitimate child. This could explain things like her reported ability to ride and wield a lance, and speak “proper” French, rather than the coarse dialect of her village. She was, in effect, created for the specific purpose of becoming a figurehead. It’s an intriguing idea – though given events unfolded over a period of several years after she came to public attention, whoever was responsible clearly had to be playing a remarkably long game. It is, though, small beer beside the theory which occupies the second half: Joan was not burned at the stake, but survived, resurfacing a few years later as Jeanne des Armoises, getting married and living a whole second life.

Yeah, big if true. The evidence for this begins with alleged oddities around her death. Joan’s head being covered on her way to the stake; an unusually high pyre; hundreds of English soldiers keeping the locals at bay. Yet there were a lot of people who were present, and subsequently provided, albeit years later, sworn testimony as to her fate. It would have been a remarkable cover-up, to put it mildly. I’m more convinced by the second element: someone, representing herself as Joan, did resurface a few years later, even getting as far as the royal court and meeting Charles VII of France. However, most accounts agree that de Armoises ended up admitting to the fraud, being unable to tell the King information Joan would have known.

I still enjoyed watching this, and the intellectual exercise it provided. It’s always good to keep an open mind about history, and contemplate alternative scenarios, whether they pan out or not. Though some of the recreations leave a little to be desired, this is a decent, well-assembled piece, with good “talking heads”. It did give me pause for thought, and no documentary which does so can be considered a failure. 

Dir: Martin Meissonnier
Star: Marcel Gay, Francoise Michaud Frejaville, Colette Beaune, Philippe Contanime
a.k.a. Vraie Jeanne, fausse Jeanne 

Joan the Maid, Part 2: The Prisons

  By

★★★
“Eventually. Again.”

Just as part 1, The Battles, meandered its way towards anything approximating conflict at a pace charitably described as leisurely, so anyone expecting hot Joan of Arc saint-in-prison action will probably want to get a cup of coffee. It’s around an hour and fifty minutes into this before Joan is even captured. Though as the whole thing does run for 176 minutes, there’s still plenty of time for subsequent events. But when the title says “prisons,” it means exactly that. Joan of Arc’s trial, an event that is typically depicted at length in most versions, is here discarded with a single intertitle. One moment, she’s standing on a ship being sent to the English, then there’s a caption “after four months of trial,” and the next scene sees her being sentenced.

This seems like Rivette, through and through. He doesn’t care what anyone else is interested in. He’s going to show the elements of the story which he wants to depict. I can understand where this approach comes from, simply because the trial of Joan is such a fixture of the story. If you can’t find anything new to say about it, why say anything at all? On the other hand, I’m not sure we needed to see, in its place, extended coverage of the coronation of Charles VII of France, apparently unfolding in real time. With Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral just a couple of weeks prior to viewing this, I had already reached my quota of royal pomp and circumstance for the month.

This does mark a turning point in the movie though. Thereafter, it becomes increasingly clear that Joan is losing her influence, being ignored or sidelined. After you have made a king, what more do you have to offer? She is fobbed off on to trivial, inconsequential missions, and Joan is ill-suited to survive the intrigue of court life. Her lack of value in a post-coronation world is driven home by Charles’s failure to ransom Joan after her capture; a price the English are happy to pay. “After four months of trial,” Joan is clearly broken, but they still aren’t done with her yet, intent on forcing her to become a relapsed heretic, with all the stake-related consequences.

Bonnaire is, as in the preceding entry, the main reason to watch this. The heroic confidence exhibited on her way up, is now replaced by a tragic sense of impending doom, which even Joan seems intuitively to sense. It’s all very naturalistic in approach, with Rivette keeping things simple to the point of sparseness. This does lead to the result feeling quite “dry”, and for a movie approaching three hours, there’s not a lot of emotional impact. Indeed, given the lack of spectacle, the movie puts almost all its weight on the shoulders of Bonnaire, and it’s fortunate her performance is up to the task. If it hadn’t been, this pair of films would have made for a very, very long six-hour double feature. 

Dir: Jacques Rivette
Star: Sandrine Bonnaire, André Marcon, Jean-Louis Richard, Marcel Bozonnet

Joan the Maid, Part 1: The Battles

  By

★★★
“Eventually…”

The above refers to the title, and in particular “The Battles”. It is a solid two hours before anything more than handfuls of English and French troops lobbing rocks at each other show up. So if you are here for large-scale spectacle, keep on walking. You will be disappointed. I had a certain idea of what to expect, having seen Rivette’s immediately preceding film La Belle Noiseuse. Admittedly, I saw it largely because I had the hots for Emmanuelle Beart at the time. Otherwise, a four-hour movie, containing lengthy sequences of real-time painting would probably not have been on my radar. But I kinda liked its languid pace (the copious Beart nudity didn’t hurt, let’s be honest!), and so was prepared for things in this to unfold at a similarly leisurely pace.

They do. If you’re more interested in Joan’s character and personality, rather than her deeds and actions, this will rank higher than the above score. Its main strength is Bonnaire, whose depiction is probably the most competent portrayal of Joan that I’ve seen. She may not know how to read or write (there’s a nice scene where she learns how to “draw” her signature), but she is not stupid. Despite the religious visions, she is thoroughly down to earth, and does not take any guff from anyone. For instance, she slaps the hell (literally) out of her brother after he takes the Lord’s name in vain. It’s a Joan who is easy to like.

Indeed, from a secular point of view, it may be the best depiction of why she could lead an army. Some other versions lean heavily on the “God told her to”, almost as their sole justification. But here, even the non-religious should get an idea of why The Maid was able to inspire loyalty in those around her. Yet, she isn’t an emotionless automaton either, getting upset when the British yell taunts at her. To be honest, however, those scenes could not avoid reminding me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I suspect Rivette may not have seen it, though who knows? Maybe it’s the deadest of deadpan tributes to John Cleese.

If this film gets the heroine almost exactly right, the same sadly can’t be said for some of the other elements. There’s a clunky framing structure, almost documentary like, with people recounting events as if they had previously happened. It took me out of the movie every time it happened. When we eventually do get to those promised battles… Yeah, they probably shouldn’t have bothered. It’s clear Rivette’s heart isn’t in them. For instance, the French break down a section of wall, only for the soldiers scaling next to it, to ignore the gap completely. There’s not even much sense of either climax or resolution, since we know there is another entire movie, waiting in the wings. Bonnaire makes this worth a look, yet I was left wishing for a combo of this with The Messenger.

Dir: Jacques Rivette
Star: Sandrine Bonnaire, Tatiana Moukhine, Baptiste Roussillon, André Marcon

La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc

  By

★★★★
“Merveilleuse is the word for it.”

I generally make it a rule not to review foreign movies without subtitles, simply because it’s difficult to judge them reasonably if you can’t understand them. I made an exception for this 1929 French film for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s silent, so comprehension is limited only to the intertitles: I can read the language better than I can understand it spoken. Also, it was approximately the eleven millionth version of the Joan of Arc story I’d seen in the past month:  I think I had a pretty good handle on the plot by this point. Boy, am I glad I did, because it’s the best silent film I’ve seen, albeit in my quite limited experience of them.

History has largely forgotten this version, in favour of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Both movies were produced concurrently, interest in the topic apparently having been spurred by the canonization of Joan at the start of the twenties, and the approaching 500th anniversary of the events in her life. However, delays during filming meant this adaptation was beaten to the cinema by Dreyer’s. It perhaps was also impacted commercially by the arrival of the new-fangled “talkies”, leaving silent movies like this looking old-fashioned. Half a century later, the film was eventually restored, and can be found on YouTube as well as the Internet Archive.

At over two hours long, it’s certainly epic, yet is almost constantly engrossing. Its main strength is Genevois in the role of Joan, who has an incredibly impressive face, which more than counters the lack of dialogue. She was only 15 when the film went into production, but already had a decade of experience in making films, including another silent epic, Abel Gance’s Napoleon. It was quite a stressful production, with the actress enduring heavy costumery. She said, “They made me a very light suit of armour, but I ended up with real armour. At the Battle of Orleans I had to wear a 22-kilo suit of chain mail. As soon as I finished a scene, they would lay me down and I would sleep on the ground because I couldn’t take the weight.”

Those battle scenes are extraordinary, especially for the time, overcoming the constraints of the 4:3 aspect ratio. The siege at Tourelles is a phenomenal set piece, involving 8,000 extras, largely recruited from the French army. There’s additional poignancy to the spectacle, Joan realizing the horrors of the battlefield, which have been unleashed as a result of her actions. While I’ve yet to see the Dreyer version (by most accounts, it seems rather talky for a silent!), it’s hard to imagine anyone improving on Genevois’s performance. Inevitably, things do become a bit of a slog during the trial; the dialogue heavy nature of those scenes are always going to be tough. Yet even here, there are moments of exquisite beauty; Joan sat, her head bowed, as her accusers file out past her.

Then there’s the burning at the stake, another scene which came uncomfortably close to historical accuracy for Genevois. “The moment the wood caught fire I yelled ‘It burns!’ [The director] Marco was so sure I was afraid, that he did nothing at all. All of a sudden the cameraman, Gaston Brun, shouted ‘She’s burning!’ and everyone ran towards me, because I was tied up and couldn’t budge. I was very frightened.” Even putting that aside, there’s no denying the emotional wallop it packs, particularly in the extended shot of Joan walking towards her death: Simone’s face, again, sells this in a way which left me genuinely distraught. This doesn’t happen often, and never before while watching any silent movie.

de Gastyme then simply stops the film. It’d seem an abrupt ending almost anywhere else; here, it acts as a force-multiplier for Joan’s death, letting it resonate in the silent darkness which follows. Finally, I have to give credit to the sadly unknown composer who provided the score accompanying the movie. It’s top-tier stuff, complementing and enhancing the on-screen action to great effect, whether rousing the blood during the battles, soaring to the heavens for her visions, or mourning the inevitable fate of the heroine. Over its 125 minutes, this hits all the expected moments with precision, and Genevois – who retired from movies at the ripe old age of 23! – deserves to be far better-known in ranks of actresses to have taken on the iconic role of Joan.

Dir: Marco de Gastyne
Star: Simone Genevois, Fernand Mailly, Georges Paulais, Jean Debucourt
a.k.a. Saint Joan the Maid

Helga, She-wolf of Stilberg

  By

★★
“Great poster. Shame about the film.”

I guess this shows that the concept of the “mockbuster” is not something invented by The Asylum. This came out in 1978, the year after the Ilsa franchise had come to an end with Tigress of Siberia. But France apparently decided it wanted to get into the act, and created its own knock-off Ilsa, in the shape of Helga (Longo, who has a cameo early on in Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon, and was also in War Goddess). What this does, is mostly act as proof of just how damn good Dyanne Thorne was in her role. She may have been unable to pronounce “Reich” consistently, but she went at the part with gusto, and had an amazing amount of presence, essential to the job. Longo simply doesn’t, and as a result, this is largely pedestrian and dull.

Opening with a sprightly and thoroughly inappropriate intro tune, we find ourselves in a cabinet meeting in an unnamed dictatorship. Names like “Helga”, as well as the angular uniform patches, suggest somewhere Fascist, but the bearded, cigar-smoking leader and his #2 called Gomez indicate a Cuban influence. Whatever. Helga is assigned to run the castle turned political prison in Stilberg, which appears to contain… Oh, maybe a dozen female inmates, tops, who are occasionally shipped out to a nearby farm. Though what they do there, apart from getting sexually harassed by the farmer – called “Doc” for no apparent reason – is unclear. The latest prisoner is Elisabeth Vogel (Gori), daughter of a rebel leader. Helga is intent ob breaking her, but Elisabeth has her own plans, assisted by a guard (Allan) who is secretly on her side.

Let’s be clear: Helga would be chewed up and spat out by Ilsa, in about five seconds. To start with, there’s her fashion sense: we first see her in a floral dress more befitting a PTA meeting. Ok, it’s a cabinet meeting, but would Ilsa have cared about that? While Helga does eventually slide into a pair of tight leather pants and a red shirt, if you’re going to embrace the S/M aesthetic, you need to do so wholeheartedly. But the most embarrassing scene sees Helga break down in tears on her bed, just because a prisoner has said some mean things to her. C’mon. What self-respecting villainess would ever do that?

There is an underwhelming lack of imagination in the sadism here too. No medical experiments or hanging them on blocks of ice here, just some light whipping. The nudity is copious, with forest in Amazonian quantities, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. But it, too, is almost as tedious as the over-frequent shots of truck convoys, going from castle to farm – or, for a bit of variety, farm to castle. I will say, the production values are decent, and the castle is a better location than Ilsa managed (recycled sets from Hogan’s Heroes!). But the pretty sheen cannot conceal the boredom and lack of invention at its heart.

Dir: Patrice Rhomm
Star: Malisa Longo, Patrizia Gori, Richard Allan, Dominique Aveline