The Punishment

 

True Britt

The Punishment
aka La punition
France/Italy 1973 
Directed by Pierre-Alain Jolivet
Lira Films
Mondo Macabro Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Some big spoilers.

Before going into The Punishment, a podcast had said that it’s very strong and brutal stuff in terms of its S&M content so, I was a little trepidatious at first. However, while the mental brutality of the film is at least paying a little lip service to the edginess which could be found in some of the scenarios, I’d have to conclude the film is pretty tame and not, in any way, a study of sexuality which has anything to say, or even understands, the mental state of those who embrace elements of the BDSM scene (as it is called today) in their own persona. And, of course, like most scenarios crafted around this strand of sexuality... even the most positive ones... it generally looks at the content with a bias of non-consensuality. 

So what we have in The Punishment is a film which is more about a manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome than anything else. 

The film stars Karin Schubert as Britt, a woman who comes from a small village and is taken under the wing by a ‘couple’ (Amidou as Raymond  and Claudie Lange as François) who work for a wealthy man who will pimp her out as a prostitute in his sex club. The film starts off with Britt and Raymond fleeing one of his wild parties after the owner has been murdered there. They go on the run and the story is told mostly in flashbacks, cross cutting between the experiences of Britt under control of this rich man and Britt and Raymond on the run from one of his killers (although, it turns out, neither of them committed the murder themselves).

So after Britt ‘behaves badly’ when a client rapes her at a party, she is imprisoned in a kind of hotel brothel in Lyon, where she is locked in a room which is pretty much a dungeon room, to be the submissive for a series of clients who want to indulge their sadistic tendencies with her. Next door to her is another woman who seems to be in a much worse condition (she can hear her screams coming through the wall)... and by the end, Raymond feels sorry for her and frees both girls... but not before she has almost developed a taste for her treatment at the hands of the customers.

And it’s not the most interesting or graphically told story, although the problematic and stunning Karen Schubert does spend most of the film either naked or in fetishistic and revealing costumes. I say problematic because, due to problems with her son who later died on her, she turned to making hardcore pornography in the 1980s to help raise funds for him and, after his death, her mid-90s second attempt at suicide succeeded. But, aside from her tragic arc in real life, she was at the heyday of her career here and she gives a really good, somewhat icy but no less impressive performance as Britt. 

And the film is helped by some wonderful shot compositions which involve lots of verticals in the various rooms and some nice placement of mirrors to focus on people in shots and bring two characters together in an interesting way, so they can both be in different places in a room but you can still see both sides of the conversations in some places. And there is... I almost don’t want to say it because it’s become such a cliché in my reviews but, it’s still the best comparison I can think of... a nice colour palette which is Bavaesque in its execution, where characters are bathed in red, for example... and then pitched against another colour like green in the next shot. 

There are some nice ideas too... such as a pinball machine in an art gallery/amusement arcade/bar having a sculpture of woman’s legs coming up and out of the machine where the flippers are, so a person playing the table gives a simulation of sex with a pair of legs seemingly wrapped around the player. 

It also has some interesting moments of violence which are hard hitting and not connected to the violence perpetrated on Britt in the hotel brothel. Such as a girl pushing a bottle into somebody’s face and, without ruining the ending, a close up of a persons head with a blood squib going off in close up as they are shot... both make for somewhat shock moments in their placement in the movie, not being juxtaposed with the tame version of the sexual violence on show elsewhere in the film. 

Ultimately, I kinda liked the movie in spite of myself and was bowled over by both Schubert and the wonderful mise-en-scène of the piece, which even has one of those opening credits sequences often found in spaghetti westerns and the occasional giallo, where quick scenes from the film are posterised into two colours and put up as a kind of psychedelic accompaniment to the cast and crew typography. 

If I had one big criticism of The Punishment, though, it’s that the trauma inflicted on Britt doesn’t seem enough to make her accepting of the treatment she suffers. One or three isolated incidents do not really represent the slow, psychological degradation we see in her performance... or at least, not credibly, I thought. Slowly and surely would have won that particular race a little more believably, I would have thought.

So yeah, that’s me done with The Punishment, I think. I didn’t like it as much as similar films using this kind of theme such as Femina Ridens (reviewed here) or Scacco Alla Regina (reviewed here) or even The Image (reviewed here) but it was at least nice to see an attempt made to craft a film which was trying to tackle the subject matter in a head on direction, even if I don’t feel it was trying to look at that content in a sympathetic light. Not one I’d recommend to too many people but, again, for cinephiles it’s nice to look at.