Woman in Chains

Josée is the wife of a gallery man. Stan, who owns the contemporary art gallery where her husband works, has a private habit: he photographs women in postures of submission. Josée is curious first, then consenting, then inside the relationship. The film is about how she chooses that bond. The subject is not perversion but the power between the one who looks and the one who is looked at. An analogy runs continuously between the kinetic artworks in the gallery and Stan's photographs: in both, someone arranges and something else becomes the arranged object. The form is open to the visual experiments of its moment. A long passage near the end is almost entirely abstract: coloured light, accelerating transitions, repeating images. Behind the production is an unfinished film. Henri-Georges Clouzot was working on optical experiments while shooting L'Enfer in 1964; the production stopped when he had a heart attack and the film was never completed. The trace of those experiments is in the abstract sequences here. This was his last film and his only one in colour. Laurent Terzieff plays Stan and Elisabeth Wiener plays Josée, with Bernard Fresson as her husband. Who it is for: viewers who know Clouzot and are curious about sixties formal experiment. Who it is not for: anyone the subject will trouble; the film declines to judge the relationship, and that choice is contested.