Descente aux enfers
Sophie Marceau is way too young to be married to some dude 30 years her senior. Way too young for this slightly less pornographic Emmanuelle.
The protagonist is a drunken writer, famous ma non troppo. His marriage doesn’t go very well, so they go on vacations to Haiti, maybe that will solve it. Perhaps marrying some guy 30 years older has something to do with her ennui?
The protagonist is an hardcore drunkard, and the hotel manager pushes the Uppercut cocktail hard. That guy is a classic colonial asshole, all smiles and all when the clients are within earshot, but a tyrant when the black servants do anything, from sitting in chairs, carrying tree branches, or even not avoiding his clumsy ass from making a fool out of himself.
He even treats her workers as “family”, they are “collaborators”. I see a left winger wrote this, but before intersectionality.
For some reason, the protagonist’s wife is all moody and depressed, staying cooped up in her room, but still sexually teases the husband which she hates, by strutting around naked, and being somewhat forward to some other dude in the hotel, someone her own age.
They actual go all the way into fornication, but she loses interest afterwards. It seems she is trying to seduce the viewer, primarily.
The husband is aware of her wife’s double dealing, and goes on a massive bender at some local bar. There are some American(?) soldiers socialising with courtesans and loose women. The flowing rum and idle hands lead to a barroom blitz, an outright brawl that wanted to be something like POTC 1, but lacking proper stuntman.
The protagonist flaunts a lot of dough, but eventually gets back to the hotel.
Some dude sipping soda smells cash, and follows him. He politely asks for l’argent, then forcefully, so they both struggle, and the protagonist slits the robber’s throat with a broken bottle.
He gets back to hotel, and the wife tries and fails to wash out the blood from his clothes. She takes those to some abandoned building and burns them. Can’t blame him without evidence.
But it seems the evidence exists, anyway. Some dude and his business partner approach them, accuse him of murder, saying they have the broken bottle, and demanding 50 grand. That is a preposterous amount of money for the time, even though now it’s not that much.
He begs for the money from his editor, but only a third is forthcoming. She talks with her rich stepfather, but he refuses her. She sells her jewellery and gets 30 grand, and is ready to give away the money to save someone she hates.
This finally leads to proper sex between the couple, both covered in sand like a wiener schnitzel, something incompatible with vigorous friction. Sophie Marceau comes out of the ocean like Dr. No, but without any clothes on.
The blackmailing “couple” is split, the woman takes the 30 grand and splits, leaving his business partner literally naked, moping around the house, yelping about punishing all woman with his cock out. The protagonist makes him confess to the cops he is the real killer, because he went there and they don’t believe him.
The blackmailer recovers from his depression and tries to garrote our protagonist, they brawl, and he ends up being stabbed in the neck, like the guy he himself killed.
Both guys survive, the cops are investigating now, but the wife thinks this saved their marriage (!!‽), so she sneaks into his room, and drops her dress one last time.
We finally know why was she moping: as a younger person (maybe as a literal children), she was chased by a creep in the Paris subway (Châtelet station), and was about to be raped at knife-point, but she stabbed the guy in the dick and ran away.
How does this whole think make any sense? It doesn’t, the whole point is having Sophie Marceau in her early twenties being fucked by a 50 years old French dude, with viewer-friendly clothes (or lack thereof). Emmanuelle with a bit more plot and blood.
She is just way too young, almost pre-pubescent? It’s extremely creepy, in a French way. Not very sexy at all.
What’s worse, four years before, the same people played father and daughter! This is all a sick joke, what the hell. La Boum, putain!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.