Released the same year as De Sade, Cy Endfield’s flawed yet fascinating attempt to penetrate the headspace of the Marquis de Sade, Jess Franco’s 1969 film Justine marks the first full-fledged adaptation of Sade’s literary works within Franco’s canon, even though Sadean themes can be traced back as far as 1962’s The Sadistic Baron von Klaus.
Nor was it to be the last: Franco would go on to direct more than a handful of films that adapted or were inspired by Sade’s work. And even though it takes certain liberties with the source material, Justine is by far the most literal-minded of these films, not to mention the biggest budgeted. At bottom, it’s a lavishly appointed costume drama leavened with lashings of kinky sex, tantamount to Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones with full frontal nudity.
Justine opens with the Marquis de Sade (Klaus Kinski) entering the Bastille in a caged conveyance before being transferred to a dark, dank cell. Then ensues a strange sort of psychedelic overture, with Sade seated at a writing desk, surrounded by female characters from the novel he’s working on, the chamber spattered with red and green gel lighting (which will recur throughout). In a taste of things to come, Sade undresses his characters, then has them submit to some light S&M. This scene exhibits one of Franco’s most distinctive aesthetic flourishes, such as a meandering zoom shot that often goes out of focus for seconds at a time.
Like Tom Jones, Franco’s film is essentially a picaresque tale. Here we follow the (mis)fortunes of sisters Justine (Romina Power) and Juliette (Maria Rohm), who are night-and-day different in both looks and temperament. Brunette Justine ever seeks the path of virtue throughout her many tribulations, while flaxen-haired Juliette remains steadfastly committed to a career of evil. Introduced as newly minted orphans in the convent where they’ve been hitherto educated, the girls are both given a tidy little sum of gold and sent on their way. Before you know it, Justine loses hers at the hands of unscrupulous hosteler du Harpin (Akin Tamiroff), who frames her for theft and has her promptly incarcerated. Meanwhile, Juliette compounds her holdings by robbing and murdering the madame of a bordello (Carmen de Lirio).
According to Sade’s philosophical outlook, Justine continues to suffer the depredations of the criminal and the unscrupulous because she fails to conform to the wicked ways of the world. In this, Sade is the anti-Rousseau, for whom humanity is born innocent and only later corrupted by society. By contrast, Sade believes that humanity is by nature cruel and appetitive, while society only encourages these base instincts, albeit often behind the false front of humility. Virtue therefore repeatedly falls upon the thorns of life and bleeds.
This tendency toward abject misery reaches its apotheosis when Justine falls in with a community of monkish recluses led by Brother Antonin (Jack Palance in overacting overdrive). Their sole object is the study of pleasure, and Justine soon learns that her passive endurance of all manner of pain and suffering can be converted into the ultimate turn-on, but only if she allows Antonin and his brethren to sacrifice her on the altar of pleasure.
The script, written by producer Harry Alan Towers under his Peter Welbeck pseudonym, makes certain concessions toward commercial viability. One of the biggest differences between Sade’s novel and Franco’s film concerns the character of Raymond (Harald Leipnitz). In the novel, he’s a sanctimonious child abuser, but here he’s portrayed as a true artist with an even truer heart who rescues Justine from harm’s way on several occasions. Instead of the lightning bolt that reduces her to cinders at the end of the novel, Justine and Raymond experience that hoariest of happy endings, walking off hand in hand into their shared future. Ironically, the final shot of the film shows Sade scratching out the last line of his manuscript, as if to efface the complacency of that false fade-out. Very likely this elision reflects Franco’s own opinion.
The following year Franco made Philosophy in the Boudoir, also known by the juicier title of Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion. Unlike Justine, this film boasts a contemporary setting, all the better to both indulge and skewer the decadence of the indolent jet set. The script, also by Towers, is pretty minimalist, basically a setup for a series of sexual shenanigans: Debauched aristo Marianne Saint Ange (Maria Rohm) uses her carnal charms on Mistival (Paul Muller) so that he’ll allow his innocent young daughter, Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl), to spend the weekend at her isolated island retreat, where she and her alleged stepbrother, Mirvel (Jack Taylor), hope to initiate her into their libidinous lifestyle.
The film opens on Marianne perusing one of Sade’s works before the scene switches over to an enactment of what she’s reading: a Sadean ritual of human sacrifice presided over by velvet-jacketed Dolmance (Christopher Lee), who delivers an encomium charmingly dedicated to lewd women and fellow voluptuaries. (Jess Franco cameos here as a sort of participant observer.)
The entire scene is filmed through a heavy red filter—so thick, in fact, that it tends to obliterate some of the finer details. What’s more, this incarnadine impasto will return to demarcate other kink-heavy sequences. This opening scene serves to underscore the profound influence that Sade’s books exert on these characters. It’s interesting to note that—having been banned for over a century, and only rediscovered by surrealist writers in the 1920s—many of these works weren’t widely available until only a few years before this film came out.
Eugenie plays like a parody of the bildungsroman, a work that tracks the development of a central character’s senses and sensibilities. According to Marianne and Mirvel’s plan for Eugenie, education and initiation run hand in hand, with drugs and wild music (courtesy of Bruno Nicolai’s crazed sitar and fuzz-guitar score) used to set the properly seductive mood. In a bizarre aside, Eugenie claims at one point that she can actually hear the score playing somewhere nearby, establishing it as existing diegetically within the film.
Adding to the film’s druggily oneiric mood, Marianne convinces Eugenie that her participation in a heady threesome with Mirvel was just a dream. Still, it’s one that Eugenie says she’s had before, meaning that, unconsciously at least, she’s willing to meet her seducers halfway. Fear and desire blend ineluctably within the dreamlike spaces of Franco’s Scope frame. So it’s no surprise when Dolmance and company finally turn up in frilly 18th-century attire, as it works both as their own obsessive homage to Sade and a playful nod to Franco’s earlier film.
In the final act, the plot hastily executes a series of double- and triple-crosses that deliver some viciously poetic justice to the would-be corrupters. Then, just when all seems lost for poor Eugenie, the film pulls a Dead of Night by looping back around to its beginning, reprising an early phone call that sets the stage for further developments. Is history about to repeat itself in a kind of Nietzschean eternal return? Whatever the case, it’s certain that Franco would soon return to the writings of Sade, finding in them fresh fodder for his own personal preoccupations.
Jess Franco’s Justine and Eugenie are now available on Blu-ray from Blue Underground.
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