Robbe-Grillet: Gradiva (2006)

Based as much on Freud’s analysis of Jensen’s novel as on the novel itself, Gradiva revolves around a young art historian who travels to Morocco to retrace Eugene Delacroix’s footsteps in the late nineteenth-century. Entranced with North African culture, Delacroix was renowned for having got closer than any other European artist to a Harem, the epicentre of the Orientalist imagination, especially in his iconic painting of Women of Algiers in their Apartment, which percolates across the film’s compositions. However, the Harem remained a fantasy even for Delacroix, a site of almost unimaginable sensual pleasures and practices – and it’s those practices that Alain Robbe-Grillet’s art historian finds himself initiated into when he’s coerced into a present-day Harem, where he’s held captive and subjected to an array of humiliating, sado-masochistic sexual tableaux. In other words, torture porn becomes the degree zero of orientalism, as if to evoke an era in which the Middle East has become more exotic than ever before, hallucinated to a millenial torture-harem that often seems to exceed the imagination of even the most sensational media. To Robbe-Grillet’s credit, though, his film’s not sensational, even or especially when it’s most shocking or violent. In part, that’s because his style is so writerly – like most of his films, it feels as if it would offer much the same experience as a script, or even as a cine-novel – but also because there’s quite an odd disconnect between sound and image. Shocking spectacles are often entirely silent, while empty spaces are often set to agonising cries, such that Robbe-Grillet dissociates orientalism as much as he demystifies it, breaking it down into a series of component ingredients that feel oddly familiar but don’t quite cohere into a recognisably hysterical whole. Watching it, then, is like performing dream-work, or tracing the distinctive lines of one of Delacroix’s preliminary sketches – all the co-ordinates are there, but they haven’t quite come together yet, as if putting the onus on us to fill out the fantasy in a different manner, while testing us with its most lavish, lascivious, seductive ingredients.