The Citizen Kane of this particular genre was 1974's Emmanuelle, which I guess makes 1975's Story of O its approximate equivalent to The Magnificent Ambersons: the director's follow-up, based on a literary classic, even more ambitious and complex than his enthusiastically-received debut, but ultimately compromised and hobbled in ways that leave it somewhat dissatisfying in comparison. The difference is that Orson Welles's first two features both belong in any sensible conversation about the greatest films of all time, and Just Jaeckin's films don't. Not in a sensible conversation, anyway.
But anyway, Story of O. It is an adaptation of the 1954 novel by Pauline Réage (a pen name of Anne Desclos) that served as ground zero for BDSM culture in the latter half of the 20th Century, and arguably the watershed moment in the artistic treatment of explicit sex. As the new representational freedoms started to roll around at the dawn of the '70s, it was a no-brainer pick for adaptation, and Jaeckin was, all things considered, pretty much a no-brainer as well (though he wasn't the first director to sniff around the project). For Jaeckin, he got to solidify his position as the leading light in the Tony Erotica genre that showed no signs of how incredibly short-lived it would turn out to be; for the producers, they got to have the assurance of a filmmaker who had already worked with disreputable fare right in line with Story of O - Emmanuelle ends with something very like a summary of the original novel - without making something in the least ways disreputable.
Sure enough, Story of O is pretty damn classy; about the classiest version of the material that could possibly be summed up. The simple version of things is that a woman identified only as O (Corinne Cléry) has been taken by her lover, René (Udo Kier), to Château Roissy. Unless, as a perplexing alternate opening puts it, a shadowy second man is behind it all. How O finds herself at Roissy is less important than what happens there: it turns out to be a veritable school for sadomasochism, in which gorgeous women are taught obedience and submissiveness to every whim of the males in their lives, the more violent the better. After she's been properly tamed, O meets René's dear friend, almost a brother, Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel), with the apparent intention that René is in fact pawning her off, to make room in his own life for the bisexual blonde model Jacqueline (Li Sellgren). But in order to get at Jacqueline, René must ask O to serve as a honeypot.
That's not much plot, and if your assumption is that Story of O fills up the bulk of its running time with scenes of O's training and subsequently her use as sex slave to René and Stephen, congratulations on being well aware of what kind of experience this intended to be. It is quite a sexed-up movie, much more than Emmanuelle, which found Jaeckin at least as interested in lingering on notions of white Europeans in the third world as on perfectly-formed breasts. The Story of O script, adapted by Sébastien Japrisot, simply doesn't have an interest in any such external topics; it starts with considered interest in how BDSM works, and it stops there as well.
Notionally, the idea of a movie whose entire purpose is to uncritically depict a process by which women are whipped and chained into absolute submission for men's pleasure ought to seem inordinately offensive, but such is not the case with Story of O. It's not because it does a fine job of exploring what O herself gets out of the whole deal, as I gather is true of the novel. In fact, the psychological element of the film is almost totally lacking, thanks to perfectly flat performances by virtually everyone in it - Steel alone seems to have put any effort into expressing what his character feels through his expressions, and Kier manages to be the most wooden, dis-invested of all, which is a bizarre thing to say of an Udo Kier performance - and thanks to a boring screenplay that tells far more than it shows, and even what it tells isn't that useful. The film is addicted to voice-over narration, drily recapping what's going on in the characters' minds without pausing to see if it appears to be matched by their faces.
The result is the absolute worst-case scenario: a film about the effect that being turned into a willing sex slave has on the woman so turned. By all appearances, O is perfectly satisfied with the state of things - the ending in particular emphasises that - but Story of O never manages to dig into why; it blandly rolls through sexual activity without bothering to make things sexy, or making it clear that O, at least, is erotically stimulated by all of this. It's a clinical treatment of its subject, which makes for a boring, repetitive film, one in which the trace of a real plot doesn't show up until almost halfway through. You can only show so many staged scenes of whipping and burning, all shot in mostly the same angles, with mostly the same performances, before they start to blend into each other, no matter how jaw-dropping the physical perfection of the naked women in question (which, to be fair, is a lot of perfection).
Not helping matters is how utterly bland the filmmaking is, dominated by arch-'70s brown and beige and white interiors, and hobbled by an insipid Pierre Bachelet score (he was the only major behind-the-scenes talent other than Jaeckin who logged time on Emmanuelle). While Jaeckin's previous movie boasted some genuinely lovely shots of rooms and lawns, which provided a painterly backdrop for its sexual shenanigans, Story of O has an unyieldingly generic, suburban look, which makes its insufficiently vital sex scenes feel even more rote. Which feels like a tremendous failure for one of the very first films to depict BDSM with such unblinking interest and so little snickering.
In effect it's art-porn that tries so hard to be art that it loses sight of what it means to be porn, while simultaneously lacking the strong writing or well-crafted visuals to succeed at being art. It neither makes its sex seem exciting, nor does it investigate what that sex means to its characters. Basically, it's just a drab failure all around, and a bit of a chore to watch. How that could be true of a film that opens at a dreamlike, Eyes Wide Shut-style sex château is beyond me, but there you have it.
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