99 Women (Jess Franco, 1969)

Whether they know it or not, 99 Women is certainly what Tarantino and Rodriguez were trying to emulate with Grindhouse. Certainly my favorite women-in-prison flick I've ever seen, 99 Women centers on a remote Spanish island prison, where all the inmates have been wronged or were simply revenging themselves. Marie (Maria Rohm) is the newest, titular inmate, who gets punished and pushed around and eventually decides she can't take it anymore. Throw into the mix some truly gorgeous fellow inmates (especially Rosalba Neri as Zoe, a former stripper who killed her jealous boss in self defense), a corrupt superintendant and governor of the island, and a new, idealistic superintendant sent in by the goverment after too many deaths at the jail, and you've got an exploitation classic. But the thing I like best about Jess Franco is that he truly is an auteur -- he can take the most commonplace women-in-prison plot and make an underground classic out of it. Some of the shot composition is as good as you'd see in any "serious" foreign film of the time. The sex scenes are erotic, but never sleazy in a bad way. In an interview on the DVD, Franco talks about how this movie was financed and written on the fly, which makes it even more impressive that it's anything more than campy. But Franco sometimes pulls genius out of his ass. Check out this trailer and tell me you really don't want to see this movie (and that it just as easily could have played in between the Grindhouse movies). 8/10

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Porcile (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Porcile is a criminally overlooked Pasolini triumph, the kind of bourgeoisie-smashing experiment that preceded Salo in both theme and style. Salo is the more famous and notorious of the two, but Porcile is equally damning of the dominant social structure. In the parallel stories, Jean-Pierre Leaud plays the son of a Nazi industrialist who has a big, big secret; and Pierre Clementi plays a young man in medieval times who kills and eats several people and finds his end at the hands of the church. Leaud is wonderful in the role of Julian, a man who doesn't care about life, doesn't care about his girlfriend (Anne Wiazemsky, who was Mrs. Godard for a while in the 70s), and eventually falls into a coma-like state because of his ennui. He wakes up just in time for Ida to leave him, but he has a secret love that speaks volumes for Pasolini's feelings toward the upper-classes, especially those who profited during the second World War. Leaud's performance is quiet and disturbing, and while I couldn't stop thinking of him as Antoine Doinel (that's what happens when you take on a character so fully, I suppose), he plays Julian with the desperate emptiness the character embodies. Julian's father, who is the focus of the present-day story while Julian is in a coma, was a Nazi collaborator who now joins forces with another German industrialist in order to hide their collective pasts. The second story, about the young cannibal, is less compelling, but simply because there are less dialogue and empathetic characters. The story is almost psychedelic at times, and when the religious elements come to punish the main characters, it reaches a fever pitch of imagery and meaning. Pasolini's direction is, as always, stupendous and beautiful, even though the DVD has a rather terrible transfer, subtitles that are in the middle of the screen, and possible dubbing (Leaud doesn't sound like himself, but the dubbing itself isn't bad). If ever there was a movie in need of a total restoration, this is it. Come on, Criterion Collection! 8/10

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More (Barbet Schroder, 1969)

More, Barbet Schroder's directorial debut, is the kind of film that screams out to be remade, and one that I would definitely do were I a filmmakeer (oh, one day!). It is the story of the sixties fading into the seventies, psychedelics into hard drugs, innocence into jaded hipness, complete with an original Pink Floyd score. It is the story of Stefan, a naive German student, hitchhiking through Europe, who meets Estelle, a New York art student who takes him to Ibiza. They smoke a lot of pot, and, eventually, Estelle's heroin habit resurfaces, and they both become addicts in this idyllic fantasyland. Stefan arrives in Paris, where he hitches a ride with Charlie, with whom he becomes fast friends. Charlie takes Stefan to a party, where he meets Estelle. Charlie tries to warn him against Estelle, saying that she has ruined men before, and that Stefan would be wise to stay away from her, but he doesn't listen and falls for her immediately. They meet up a few days later, in a ridiculous scene where Stefan smokes pot for the first time, and decide to go to Ibiza together, being young, beautiful people with nothing better to do. When there, they stay for a while with Dr. Wolf, a friend of Estelle's father who is also probably her lover (it's left ambiguous in the film), but decide to run away to the countryside when Stefan gets jealous of Wolf. In the process, Estelle steals 200 doses of heroin from Wolf, along with some money, and Wolf pursues and eventually finds them. By that time, they are both heroin addicts, living this spaced out life in paradise, and my favorite scene in the film is when Stefan (formerly a righteous anti-drug person, now a heroin addict) and Estelle attack a windmill, a la Don Quixote. It's a beautiful, quasi-romantic version of drug abuse, but, like in Neil Armfield's Candy (that owes a debt to More), things go terribly wrong, as their relationship sours and Estelle eventually does lead to Stefan's downfall, as Charlie predicted. The dialogue is, at times embarrassingly, typical of the time, with the philosophies and wonders of drugs espoused by these young people, who came of age in the time of the hippies, but are looking for something more. It is an ageless tale, one that resonates with me even now; looking for a better life through illegal substances, and thinking you can change the world with them. This is a film that should be more widely seen, despite some definite ties to the time, as the story is timeless, and the characters believably tragic. It's a film I would remake, most definitely. 7/10 RIYL: Rohmer's Six Moral Tales (of which Schroeder was a producer)

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Camille 2000 (Radley Metzger, 1969)

Before taking a turn into hardcore as Henry Paris, Radley Metzger made hyper-stylish, Euro softcore porn (made by an American!). Camille 2000 is my first Metzger film, and while I can't call it a great film, I thorougly enjoyed the voyeuristic trip into the swinging 1960s. Marguerite (also known as Camille, though I didn't really catch why) meets Armand, suave American bachelor in Rome, and they fall in love and have a lot of sex. There's the basic plot right there, although there is more to it than that, as the movie is based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas. The veneer is all happening sex and drugs, but there is a darker thread of self-destruction and death underneath all the sparkle. The sex is filmed in that perfect, soft-lensed focus of 1970s exploitation films, and although it isn't patricularly arousing or revealing (I've never seen sex by two people laying perfectly still on a bed, but whatever), it is very timely piece. The acting isn't bad, in fact, I rather liked Marguerite and how she was handled as a woman who takes care of herself by any means necessary, yet is soft and incredibly vulnerable on the inside. But if you only need one reason to see Camille 2000, there is a prison-themed party, complete with a sex jail. Seriously. This movie is nothing if not a suggestion of the end of the swinging 60s (just check out the ending for proof of that); still, it made me want to be a loose, rich, drug-addicted celebutante in Europe. Well, maybe not. 7/10

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