Verführung: die grausame Frau

A very stylish German film about a Hamburg art gallery owner and S&M domina who is giving "performances" with her slaves and maids in front of a selling audience. Unfortunately her favorite slave is falling in love with her. This movie, directed by two women, is an interesting and inspiring study about fatal love, sex, dependence, seduction and sensibility.

There are not many dialogues and much action involved, but many silent sequences and erotic moments that are standing on their own. The colors, settings and photography are lush and stimulating and sometimes appear like an MTV video clip setting of a 1980's Duran Duran, George Michael or Madonna pop song. There are also many literature influences involved. Based on the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch drama "Venus in Furs", there are also scenes or names taken from Marquis de Sade's "Justine" and "The 120 days of Sodom" and Octave Mirbeau's "The garden of delight".

As the directors try to give different view points from the domina, her maid and two slaves, the story is a bit difficult to follow sometimes, and in some moments because of the lack of any tempo simply boring. But at least this movie could have been an important influence on Adrian Lyne's box selling hit "9 1/2 weeks" which was produced one year later.

For the movie buffs amongst you: the dialogue coach of this production was Sandra Nettelbeck, later becoming a movie director ("Drei Sterne"). The stylish settings were produced by Xenia Katzenstein who was playing "Frau Sommer" in a well-know German TV coffee advert series in the seventies ("Jacobs Kroenung") - a rather conservative role model. Unbelievable but true.