Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974)

Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974). 1h 45m | Not Rated

“Before the opening credits were over, I could tell that this was going to be an impenetrable piece of pretentious arthouse garbage. I donu0026#39;t usually like to use the word pretentious – itu0026#39;s a lazy epithet – but in this case, it has never been more apt: the whole film is up itself.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI watched it on the mistaken belief that it was a horror film; itu0026#39;s not. Exactly what it is is anyoneu0026#39;s guess – the surreal story is so abstract and the treatment so avant-garde that itu0026#39;s hard to work out what director Alain Robbe-Grilletu0026#39;s intention was.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIf the film wasnu0026#39;t French and from the u0026#39;70s, I would have guessed that the whole thing was a parody of French u0026#39;70s arthouse cinema, but it isnu0026#39;t: this is the real deal. Perhaps if the film was condensed to twenty minutes of the weirdest moments (whilst retaining the gratuitous nudity, of course), I wouldnu0026#39;t hate it quite as much as I do, but at a whopping 105 minutes, it is an excruciatingly, dull watch.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eDue to a technical hitch, I had to view the last twenty minutes or so without subtitles, but it didnu0026#39;t make a whole lot of difference: I had long given up trying to make sense of it all.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003e1/10. One of the worst films I have ever seen.”