FILM REVIEW – THE MARQUIS DE SADE’S JUSTINE (1968)
Bizarre
and rather dull soft as soft can get soft-core porn film version of De Sade’s
notorious excellent if horrible novel, with some very eccentric casting. Directed by Jesus Franco, the film stars
Romina Power, daughter to Tyrone Power, whom’s production team insisted that
her story was made less harrowing than in the original and that her character’s
ill treatment be dumbed down?
The
director himself despised her sleepwalking performance, claiming that she
seemed to think she was making “Bambi Two” for him.
This
rather defeats the whole object of the story, which in De Sade’s original
retains its nastiness to a final shocking moment. The film settles for cute
happy ending in which Justine is taken in and cared for by her now powerful
sister, Juliet. That happens in the
book, but then with viscous irony, Justine is struck dead by a lightning bolt,
which targets her vagina. That brutal sense that even God is going to deny her
any moment of true happiness is left out of the film. The whole point is that
Justine lives in times when virtue gets you nowhere while depravity is a
passport to power. The only clue to her tragic fate is the closing image of De
Sade, writing the story as he languishes in prison, crossing out the last few
lines and reflecting what to write next as the film ends.
De
Sade is played by a decidedly under-used Klaus Kinski, who is seen merely
struggling with writer’s block in his cell, and never speaks. The part was
originally written for Orson Welles who wisely turned it down.
The
plot is simplicity itself. Justine, and her sister, Juliet, is driven from the
convent where they have been brought up, due to a lack of funding when their
parental sponsors die. Juliet immediately heads for a brothel, and begins to
use her sexual charms to raise herself an income. She is prepared to steal and
kill too, and as the story progresses; she goes from strength to strength and
literally from rags to riches and immense power. De Sade has Juliet appear in occasional meetings with her doomed
sister in the book, but Juliet also has a companion volume of her own, entitled
appropriately, Juliet. Here on film, as in the books, the paths of the sisters
occasionally cross.
Justine
decides on a life of virtue, turns down the invitation to take to life in the
brothel, and tries naively to be good and noble and virginal. She is thus an
easy target for theft, slavery, bondage and rape, mostly at the hands of
priests, soldiers and noblemen, but sometimes by other women. Virtually
everyone she meets abuses her. She
finds herself falsely accused of murder when she is actually trying to save the
victim, and sentenced to die, but in prison, she becomes a pawn in a jailbreak
which involves starting a fire as a diversion for the guards. The fire, set by
a woman who accompanies Juliet to freedom, kills everyone in the prison,
(guards and prisoners alike) except the two escapees.
Justine
has more encounters with increasingly unpleasant individuals, culminating in a
meeting with a deranged priest, played in drunken demented mode by Jack
Palance, in one of the most eccentric cameo performances ever filmed. The scene
of him being pushed around on a trolley cart may have been filmed that way because
he was too inebriated to stand and walk unassisted.
The
DVD boasts that the film includes up to 30 minutes of extra footage censored
from the original, but what is included is so tame that I wondered what could
ever have been cut in the first place. The film dilutes away so much have the
sado-masochism, and moral essence of De Sade’s novel that virtually nothing
remains.
Possibly
the worst erotic film ever made.
Arthur Chappell
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