I have often expressed the desire to see Kinski in a graphic sex film, but of course I meant NASTASSIA Kinski, not Klaus. But I got the "monkey's paw" version of my wish here with this sequel to "The Story of O" based on a novel by the same pseudononymous author ("Pauline Reage"). In this film "O" (Isabella Illiers, replacing Corinne Clery) has been taken to Asia and put in a brothel by her much older lover/master Sir Stephen (Klaus Kinski). He comes back from time to time to have sex with her, or to spy on her with "clients", or to tie her up and force her to watch as he has wild sex with his other young mistress (Arielle Dombasle). A local teenager spies her through the barred windows of the brothel, and when Stephen sees her making love to the boy (perhaps the most questionable scene as the actor really does look to only be about 14--but I'm sure he got over it), he realizes that he is beginning to lose control over her.
This film has less S and M and bondage than the original "Story of O", but the sex scenes are much more graphic. There is one obviously unsimulated oral sex scene and another "missionary" scene with Kinski and Illiers that looks pretty unsimulated as well. If you consider this a hardcore porn film, it is a veritable masterpiece. The cinematography is excellent and the musical score is good. There are a lot of poetic images--for instance, a long shot of a dead bird floating in the bay outside the convent, and later a surreal Jean Rollinesque image of a drowned woman floating on a grand piano (?!) in this same bay. Most hardcore porn films wouldn't bother with such arty digressions. As an art film though, which this is also obviously trying to be, it is less successful, mostly because all the characters are pretty thinly drawn.
Illiers (who was never really to be seen again in films) is OK. She's not a great actress (she's not even a mole on Corrine Clery's beauteous backside), but she can at least look convincingly forlorn (something I can't imagine any American porn actress doing). Arielle Dombasle is perhaps most recognizable from Eric Rohmer's "Pauline at the Beach" where she played the title character's incredibly sexy but slow-witted and slutty older cousin. In "Pauline" her young character falls madly in love with a balding, middle-aged cad for some reason. Here she has apparently moved on to the elderly. It is actually pretty damn hard to buy either of these tres gorgeous jeun French filles (pardon my Franglish) being in love with Klaus Kinski who looks pretty much like grim death here. Kinski is pretty good I guess, but he seems rather bored and contemptuous of his role--but then he was ALWAYS like that (except perhaps in his films with Herzog where he, sometimes literally, had a gun to his head). I'd still rather see his daughter have graphic sex with Illiers and Dombasle of course, but he--and this whole film--aren't too bad overall I guess.
