We never know the woman at the center of Story of O (1975) as anything other than the eponymous letter by which her sexual partners call her. Sure it could refer to something innocently multisyllabic — say, Olivia or Ophelia — but since this is a movie narratively dominated by a particularly fecund period in her young sex life, we know it couldn’t possibly.
Sexy, stylish Story of O was made in the middle of a decade where pornography became mainstream, a status guided by the commercial successes of breaking-through blue movies like Deep Throat and Beyond the Green Door, both released in 1972. They accordingly kindled an atmosphere more hospitable to films that, though not themselves hardcore, centered sex. Among the filmmakers today most associated with the ‘70s erotic drama is France’s Just Jaeckin, whose Emmanuelle (1974) both spawned a long-running franchise (whose sequels he did not direct) and a short career made up of movies remembered for little else besides the carnality they represented.
Also directed by Jaeckin, Story of O came out about a year after Emmanuelle, which became a scandalous success after originally being blocked by French censors. I prefer it. It’s an adaptation of Anne Desclos’ landmark 1954 erotic novel — a sort of protracted sexual fantasy where its title character is brought early on to a Roissy château where she is essentially trained to be a sexual dynamo — and is much less torpid than its spiritual predecessor, maybe because Corinne Cléry, as O, is a more dynamic actress than Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel, or because its storyline, though not a lot more energetic, has an easier time pulling you into its sensual lull. (This is particularly true once it moves out from the confines of the practically surreal château and into the real world, where O works as a fashion photographer.)
Corinne Cléry in Story of O.
Story of O is a testament to how gifted Jaecklin, himself once a fashion photographer, was at phoning it in; he later lamented his pigeonholing into erotic cinema on account of Emmanuelle’s success, an albatross that ensured no one took him seriously unless he was making the sort of exhibitionistic movie with which he had rose to prominence.
Beautiful-to-look-at Story of O has a bloomy, glazed-fruit look that effectively suggests this all as a glorified fantasy. It’s grounded in the experience of a woman who, for a little less than two hours, will find great pleasure in consensual sexual submission in a sadomasochistic setting. (The film gets a lift when things start to shift — where O comes to have the upper hand.) The movie is not immune from striking us as silly; there’s an imbalance that comes from the film unfurling from O’s experience but still largely catering presentationally to the tastes of the straight men in the audience. It doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, is almost comically skewed in a feminine direction where conversations of equal-opportunity nudity could go, and surprisingly mostly eschews depictions of the many daring sex acts O will try out in the course of the movie.
But Jaeckin is so good at cultivating a sexy aesthetic, things so glinty and dewy that even the light refracting off a stainless steel teapot twinkles like a diamond, that you’re put under a kind of spell that I’m sure (I haven’t read it) is far more overpowering on the page, where O’s experiences are freer to be more comprehensively dwelled in. (The film’s version of this is interjecting voiceover narration that feels less natural than a last-ditch effort from producers to add a sense of clarity in a movie more expressionistic than very direct.) A less-successful follow-up came out about a decade later; the key, it seems, was Jaeckin, who, though not much of a storyteller, was right about how stories like it should look and feel.
Peterson Reviews 