Watch a cult classic #4: Successive Slidings of Pleasure

French writer-director Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008).

Robbe-Grillet specialised in sexually charged, avant-garde headscratchers like Trans-Europ-Express (1966) and Eden and After (1970), though his claim to fame was writing the script to Last Year at Marienbad (1961) for Alain Resnais. As a novelist, Robbe-Grillet was a leading figure of the Nouveau Roman movement. However, in 2007, he told the Guardian, “Nowhere in all the world has anywhere been less interested in my work than in Great Britain.”

Ostensibly, it’s a murder-mystery, but don’t expect an Agatha Christie yarn. Alice (Anicée Alvina) ties up and undresses her girlfriend, Nora (Olga Georges-Picot); in the next scene, Nora’s been stabbed with scissors. A detective (Jean-Louis Trintignant), like the viewer, suspects Alice of murder, but then proposes that she’s a witch: why else does everyone, including a lawyer (also played by Georges-Picot), fall head over heels for Alice?

Not really. Robbe-Grillet, as usual, blurs a dream world with an even dreamier world. No scenes resemble reality in any way. In terms of the mystery, there are no clues, no other suspects, and no Scooby Doo “aha!” revelations. Flashbacks occur within flashbacks within flashbacks. Audio from one scene often plays over another. Sometimes the setting will switch mid-sentence to a perhaps imagined basement where prisoners (by coincidence, all young, attractive women) take turns to seduce compliant nuns.

In fact, another viewer might perceive the plot, if there is one, as something else entirely. After all, Robbe-Grillet re-edited footage from Eden and After into another movie, N. a pris les dés… (1971); you suspect Successive Slidings of Pleasure could be remixed and released with a brand-spanking new narrative.

Robbe-Grillet, for better or worse, follows his creative impulses wholeheartedly. Like a stream-of-conscious poem committed to screen, the film demands to absorbed like a piece of music, and its non-chronological, jigsaw-puzzle storytelling thus unlocks something in your brain – or leaves you completely unimpressed. Either way, it’s never dull: the provocative mise-en-scène combines S&M erotica with religious iconography; sequences are repeated from altered angles in a hypnotic, Cubist manner; and the fourth-wall breaking indicates a sense of humour on Robbe-Grillet’s part. At least, you hope some of it’s intended to be funny.

If you know Alvina from anything else, it’s probably the long-forgotten drama Friends (1971). More recognisable is Trintignant whose stern, stoic mannerisms earned him acclaim in The Conformist (1970), Three Colours: Red (1994) and Amour (2012), among many others. In Alice’s childhood flashback, look out for Isabelle Huppert delivering a single line of dialogue in one of her earliest movie roles.

Frankly, it depends on your taste and patience when it comes to the male gaze and the abundance of female-only nudity. You might also reconsider watching it with your parents – when Alice cracks an egg and pours a yolk into Nora’s groin, she does it slowly, then does it a few more times for good measure. That said, there’s nothing else like it, and the French director’s uncompromising artistic vision means that his name is now an affectionate punchline. In Sideways (2004), Paul Giamatti boasts that his impenetrable novel is a “ kind of Robbe-Grillet mystery”.

In confinement, Alice disrobes, drenches her body in red paint, then presses her naked flesh against the wall for a minute – she then deadpans to a nun that this is modern art. Alice demonstrating her anatomical answer to Jackson Pollock was the cover image of the BFI’s career-spanning Blu-ray box-set for Robbe-Grillet, and that single moment exemplifies the director’s weird, winking self-awareness.

Yorgos Lanthimos hasn’t publicly stated it but Alice and Nora’s erotic staging of corpses is a precursor to his debut feature, Kinetta (2006), as well as Nicole Kidman playing dead as foreplay in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). The amalgamation of a murder investigation and dream logic is also echoed by David Lynch in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. (2001).

Although directed by Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad established a blueprint that Robbe-Grillet’s entire filmography would follow. For other European filmmakers of that era who weren’t afraid to be slow, stylish and surreal, Jean Rollin and Jesús Franco tick all the boxes.