The idea of making a narrative film of de Sade's philosophical dialogue Philosophy in the Bedroom is an attractive one, and certainly any adaptation would have to (if it were to have any dramatic life at all) take liberties with the original text. Jess Franco's 1970 adaptation Eugenie
the Story of her Journey into Perversion takes the basic situation and the characters and transforms them into a quite different Sadeian tale. For my money, the original offers more interesting aspects, with the complete seduction of the young heroine into Dolmance's libertine lifestyle and the murderous abjection of the mother at the end.
Franco's film has Eugenie, a young middle-class girl invited by swinging Madame de St. Ange and her pervy step-brother (a dilution of Sade's incestuous siblings) and falling prey to an elaborate plan of Madame's to set the girl up as a sacrificial victim as a punishment for taking the step-brother's love. Dolmance becomes a side-figure, appearing to help with Madame's scheme but turning it on her in the end, getting his twisted pleasure out of seeing everyone come to ruin. The most intriguing feature of this is the tacked-on revelation that the action has all been Madame's dream, a fantasy in which she is tricked out of her life – that a woman should have such fantasies is certainly provocative.
The anti-Christian, republican and homosexual aspects of Sade's book are jettisoned. What we get in their place is a lot of softcore nudity and brittle upper-class decadence. The film is certainly creepy, although the creepiness is second hand, the idea of dreams which turn out to be real a direct lift from Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Franco certainly knows how to direct the camera, although it is hard to tell whether the often out-of-focus camera-work was deliberate or not (a case could be made that it is, and behoves the dream that the film's action is). The pace is very slow.
This is not a bad film about decadence, Sadism and being driven mad by sex, but there's surely a better narrative to be extrapolated from Sade's extraordinary book.
Franco's film has Eugenie, a young middle-class girl invited by swinging Madame de St. Ange and her pervy step-brother (a dilution of Sade's incestuous siblings) and falling prey to an elaborate plan of Madame's to set the girl up as a sacrificial victim as a punishment for taking the step-brother's love. Dolmance becomes a side-figure, appearing to help with Madame's scheme but turning it on her in the end, getting his twisted pleasure out of seeing everyone come to ruin. The most intriguing feature of this is the tacked-on revelation that the action has all been Madame's dream, a fantasy in which she is tricked out of her life – that a woman should have such fantasies is certainly provocative.
The anti-Christian, republican and homosexual aspects of Sade's book are jettisoned. What we get in their place is a lot of softcore nudity and brittle upper-class decadence. The film is certainly creepy, although the creepiness is second hand, the idea of dreams which turn out to be real a direct lift from Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Franco certainly knows how to direct the camera, although it is hard to tell whether the often out-of-focus camera-work was deliberate or not (a case could be made that it is, and behoves the dream that the film's action is). The pace is very slow.
This is not a bad film about decadence, Sadism and being driven mad by sex, but there's surely a better narrative to be extrapolated from Sade's extraordinary book.