Let’s not waste time pretending this is just another French arthouse flick with a little nudity and a few whispered monologues. No—Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a violent, voyeuristic fever dream. It’s less a film and more a slow hypnosis that wraps its fingers around your brain and squeezes. And the most dangerous part? You like it.
From the moment the film begins, it’s not asking you to follow a story—it’s seducing you into surrendering to sensation. The plot, if we can call it that, centers on a young woman (played with eerie sensuality by Anicée Alvina) who finds herself incarcerated in a convent-prison hybrid after the death of her lover, Nora. But the film has no interest in clarifying whether she’s guilty, innocent, delusional, or simply playing the system. What it is interested in is your discomfort. Your arousal. Your confusion.
A Locked Room with No Exit—Inside Her Mind
The prison cell is where most of the film takes place. But it’s not a conventional prison. It’s white, sterile, almost sacred. A cell that could pass for a chapel—or a padded room in a mental ward. And here, our nameless heroine spends her time unraveling and reinventing the narrative of her crime. Or her pleasure. Or both.
This isn’t a mystery in the conventional sense. There’s no trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Instead, there are feet. Bare feet. Tied hands. Close-ups of lips. S.e.xualized violence. Surreal rituals. And a voiceover that sounds like a confession whispered directly into your ear.
Robbe-Grillet doesn’t want you to trust anything. What you see may not have happened. What you hear may be a lie. What feels real—may only be a fantasy she’s constructing on the fly.
And isn’t that the most dangerous kind of storytelling?
Anicée Alvina: Not Just a Girl, but a Symbol
At the center of this hall of mirrors is Anicée Alvina, barely 20 when the film was made, and already a master of the seductive blank stare. She’s not just playing a character—she is the film. Her nudity is constant, but never passive. She stares at priests, judges, nuns, and cops with the same unreadable eyes, turning their questions into games, their morality into jokes.
Her performance is hypnotic precisely because it’s so unreadable. Is she a victim of trauma? A psychotic killer? A playful manipulator? Or just a girl trapped inside the contradictory laws of men, religion, and state?
You won’t find an answer in her gaze—but you’ll drown in it anyway.
Fetishism, Control, and the Danger of Desire
The film doesn’t shy away from taboo. It runs toward it like a child chasing fire. Robbe-Grillet, the man behind the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad, here turns his fascination with ambiguity and eroticism up to eleven. Objects become fetishes. A hairbrush. A pair of scissors. A red ribbon. Nothing is innocent.
Every interaction in the film drips with unspoken tension. The nuns are either dominatrices or voyeurs. The priests are sweaty and disturbed. The legal system is a pantomime of control, delivered through wooden dialogue and blank stares. It’s not a stretch to say that this is a world where repression and desire aren’t just connected—they’re the same thing.
You’re not just watching a film. You’re witnessing a game where power is s.e.xual, and pleasure is criminal.
Surrealism with a Knife in Its Hand
Stylistically, Successive Slidings of Pleasure is a slow, deliberate descent into madness. The visuals are minimalistic but charged. The editing fractures time and space—looping scenes, switching perspectives, dissolving one reality into another. Blood appears like paint. S.e.x morphs into violence and back again.
There are moments where you’re not sure if what you’re watching is real—or if you’re inside the protagonist’s mind. And Robbe-Grillet likes it that way. He wants you off-balance. He wants you asking: Did that really happen? Was that a dream? Am I supposed to be turned on right now—or horrified?
Good luck finding solid ground.
Not for the Faint of Heart—or the Morally Rigid
Let’s be very clear: this is not a film for everyone. If you’re uncomfortable with explicit imagery, moral ambiguity, or prolonged close-ups of bondage scenes, turn back now. This is not your safe space.
But for those willing to risk a little psychic disorientation, Successive Slidings of Pleasure offers something few films dare to touch: the collapse of reality into fantasy, and the terrifying thrill of not knowing the difference.
It’s provocative. It’s disturbing. It’s sometimes pretentious. And yet, it works—precisely because it refuses to behave. Like its protagonist, it dares to look you in the eye and ask: What do you want?
And when you can’t answer… the film smiles.
Final Thoughts
Robbe-Grillet’s film is a cinematic provocation—a challenge not just to narrative structure but to the very boundaries of desire. Successive Slidings of Pleasure is not here to comfort or to resolve. It’s here to whisper in your ear, wrap a red ribbon around your wrist, and drag you slowly into a space where pleasure and punishment are indistinguishable.
It will mess with your head. It might even make you question your own reactions.
And long after it ends, it lingers—not like a memory, but like a dangerous idea.
A word of advice? Don’t watch it alone.
