Just Jaeckin
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Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
influenced by The Story of O (1975)
Themes
Despite citing Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris as a tonal touchstone, and nodding cheekily to American Gigolo/Psycho, the result smacks more of Adrian Lyne’s blandly naff 9½ Weeks, the S&M frankness of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse usurped by the archaic softcore of Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O.
It’s all worlds away from the darker rooms of bondage classicism: the ritual torments of The Story of O and the troubling compulsions of Nine and a Half Weeks.
Dornan could have answered, “Have you seen The Story of O.?” Anyone who’s old enough to remember the old fear and hysteria caused by S&M movies like Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour and Tim Blake Nelson’s O and Adrian Lyne’s Nine 1/2 Weeks; or anyone who’s seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and the trashily vicious Color of Night; or anyone who’s watched Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader in the imperfectly exciting Secretary, or watched Girls’s audacious second season or any year of Sex and the City is likely to leave Fifty Shades of Grey perplexed by its uncontroversial mildness.
The entire enterprise has a whiff of homage to the Golden Age of Arty Porn, the ’70s, when pretentious life narrations interrupted the assorted exotic sexual encounters of “Emmanuelle” or “The Story of O.” It’s “The Story of Joe.”
Pitched somewhere between the metaphysical porno of Gerard Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones and the softcore breast-beating of Just Jaeckin's The Story of O , Von Trier's still unspooling magnum opus is an exhausting orgy of heady ideas and groiny spectacle that veers wildly between the profound, the comic and the ridiculous – not always intentionally (a dopey shaggy-dog punchline almost proves its undoing).
Their shared gal pal is O (Blake Lively), short for Ophelia, but the feeble Shakespearean allusion matters less than the homage to Pauline Réage's 1954 female-bondage novel, "The Story of O."
Too much voice-over exposition from Blake Lively ’s center-of-attraction character “O” — she was named after Ofelia, not the subject of “The Story of O ” — mars the flow of action.
While it shares effective camera composition with Just Jaeckins former and his Emmanuelle, however, it lacks the dark humor of the latter two, in the case of the Buñuel not only in sex per se but also in that Spaniards pervasive sexual and dinner-party irony.
How many versions of Lady Chatterley have we encountered since D.H. Lawrence gave birth to her in his famously scandalous 1928 novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”?
The movie's first hour or so is largely given over to lesbian situations, but then Emmanuelle comes under the influence of the wise old Mario (played by Alain Cuny , the French actor immortalized as Steiner, the intellectual who committed suicide in Federico Fellini's " La Dolce Vita ").
He allows himself to be picked up by a prostitute; improbable coincidence leads him to an unlikely orgy that’s a cross between The Story of O and an old Bela Lugosi horror film; through it all, Cruise, surprisingly docile, never even makes us wonder whether his Bill is contemplating doing anything other than watch.
What follows is the film's dramatic-erotic centerpiece, a deeply unholy rite of excess that looks like The Story of O staged by a cult of Benedictine monks.