Review of Successive Slidings of Pleasure

Before the opening credits were over, I could tell that this was going to be an impenetrable piece of pretentious arthouse garbage. I don't usually like to use the word pretentious - it's a lazy epithet - but in this case, it has never been more apt: the whole film is up itself.

I watched it on the mistaken belief that it was a horror film; it's not. Exactly what it is is anyone's guess - the surreal story is so abstract and the treatment so avant-garde that it's hard to work out what director Alain Robbe-Grillet's intention was.

If the film wasn't French and from the '70s, I would have guessed that the whole thing was a parody of French '70s arthouse cinema, but it isn't: this is the real deal. Perhaps if the film was condensed to twenty minutes of the weirdest moments (whilst retaining the gratuitous nudity, of course), I wouldn't hate it quite as much as I do, but at a whopping 105 minutes, it is an excruciatingly, dull watch.

Due to a technical hitch, I had to view the last twenty minutes or so without subtitles, but it didn't make a whole lot of difference: I had long given up trying to make sense of it all.

1/10. One of the worst films I have ever seen.