Private Collections (1979)
Umbrella DVD (region 4)
d. Just Jaeckin, Shuji Terayama, Walerian Borowczyk; pr. Pierre Braunberger; scr. Rio Kishida, Shuji Terayama, Jean-Michel Ribes; ph. Tatsuo Suzuki, various; m. Pierre Bachelet, JA Seazer; cast. Laura Gemser, Roland Blanche, Marie Catherine Conti, Juzo Itami, Hiromi Kawai (103 mins)
As European erotic cinema boomed in the mid 1970s surrounding the hit Emmanuelle, it attracted increasing critical scrutiny. The visual sophistication of Emmanuelle, its luscious international sex symbol star (Sylvia Kristel) and jet setting sexual fantasy lifestyle made it resonate within film-making circles inclined to bring erotic cinema into the realm of the art-house.
Eros and cinema in Paris were again fresh and promising. Drawn to the invigorating potential of sex in art film, producer Pierre Braunberger (who had partnered with French New wave figure Francois Truffaut on Shoot the Piano Player) set out to make an anthology feature comprising three short erotic films by three internationally renowned directors. The directors were Just Jaeckin (famed for Emmanuelle), Japanese eroticist Shinju Temamura and the controversial Walerian Borowczyk. Each in their way were influential figures within erotic film art and the anthology featuring their work, Private Collections, is an intriguing showcase for the artistic pretensions of erotic fantasy in the sexploitation era.
The first film in this anthology, Island of the Sirens is a charming anthropological sex fantasy of a modern man cast away on an island with a tribe of topless women with whom he frolics nude in streams and woods, indulging his carnal desires with each of them in turn, believing he is in paradise until he sees them conspire and arm themselves.
An exhilarating opening and director Just Jaeckin’s usual soft-focus, dreamily Impressionistic style combine with a tense musical score for a fantasy in which the exotic sex symbol Laura Gemser plays a stranded man’s dream woman, a potential new Eve to his castaway Adam. Jaeckin directs Gemser so as to evoke a primal, feline sensuality which in the end is horrifyingly predatory in a manner which unexpectedly (and perhaps unintentionally) relates to Gemser’s brushes with horror for director Aristide Massacessi in some of their marvellous Black Emanuelle films.
The second film, The Grass Labyrinth is a trippy story set within a remote Japanese fishing village.
A young man is seduced by a painted temptress who ravishes him for her carnal ecstasy to a musical score that turns traditional Japanese instrumentation into an almost heavy metal guitar-driven intensity. The woman is in charge in this scene: it’s her passion director Shuji Terayama adores, her sexuality reminiscent of the cannibalistic animalism of Laura Gemser in the finale of Island of the Sirens and more interesting in the differing cultural connotations therein. The ravished man’s fate becomes Terayama’s subject and fluid shifts in character focus here demand strict viewer attention. Oddly engaging in moments but overall slow to the point of tedium, this is evocative of a range of moods and emotions but fails to engage beyond its startling ravishment scene and an uneasy blend of sex and nightmare as it progresses. However, the bizarre Japanese hard rock sexual fantasy of the conclusion is both intensely stylized and perplexing in a surreal manner which must be seen to be appreciated.
In the third film, The Cupboard, a Parisian gentleman visits a Can-Can theatre and wanders backstage, following one of the girls to her residence for sex.
He then questions her about her background, believing that to know a woman he must hear about her first love. In its observation of disreputable society it evokes a de-glamorized Moulin Rouge world though with far less detailed texture in set design and cinematography. Director Walerian Borowczyk is interested in immoral sexuality and its attendant humanity from an erotic and behaviourist perspective and his sex scenes have a sense of natural beauty, ironic in the licentious context. The Cupboard is an engaging film, but unfortunately turns out to be the shortest of the three comprising this anthology and seems a delicate vignette over too quickly in comparison to the drawn out surreal drawl of The Grass Labyrinth. The erotic appeal of The Cupboard is an almost gracious sense of the female nude, contrasting the colourful Can-Can dance to the intimacies of the bedroom.
Private Collections is released by Umbrella DVD in a sterling widescreen transfer though without special features beyond a trailer. If you are interested in the type of material here, then you should also consider Umbrella’s concurrent DVD releases of Emanuelle in Bangkok and Emanuelle Around the World, both of which star Laura Gemser.
Indeed, of the women in this film it is again the radiant Gemser who makes the biggest impression: and fans who may know her exclusively from the Emanuelle films will delight in her work here – she is sexy, seductive and dangerous!
