Submission, also known as Scandalo, is a 1976 Italian drama film, set in WWII-era France on the eve of Germany’s invasion. Wartime stress builds up within a household until the breaking point.
It’s centered around the pharmacy run by pharmacist Eliane Michaud, who employs Juliette and Armand. Her house is upstairs, inhabited by her kind but distant intellectual husband, Henri, and her beautiful teenage daughter, Justine. (“Justine” and “Juliette” are likely references to two of the Marquis de Sade’s novels.)
Working-class Armand, who needs this menial job so he won’t be sent to the front, makes a pass at Eliane, mistaking her for Juliette. Eliane makes no reprisal for this incident, nor Armand’s later advances on her, which he interprets as she likes it.
Armand leaves an anonymous love letter for Eliane. Henri doesn’t take it seriously. When Eliane attempts to confront Armand, he forces her to fellate him. Eliane fears the social disruption too much to reveal this assault, even to her husband. This is established by Henri’s literary discussion group talking about a similar situation in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Yet the film also implies that Eliane’s masochism and exhibitionism drive her into Armand’s games, her way of using obsessive hedonism to distract herself from the war she hears about on the radio.
Meanwhile, Eliane, Henri and their bourgeois friends carry on with dinner parties and literary salons like everything’s normal, despite air raids and artillery fire.
Armand’s demands on Eliane escalate until one night, he pushes her, naked, out of the pharmacy and into the street, then closes the door behind her. He tells her to walk around the empty square like a streetwalker. The only person who sees her is an elderly drunk, and nobody believes him. It’s hard to say whether Eliane is enjoying this masochistically or having some kind of breakdown.
Eliane finally draws the line when Armand says he wants her daughter. Nonetheless, she doesn’t fire him, and Armand moves into the pharmacy’s storage area and continues to pressure her.
Eliane confesses her infidelity to Henri, whom she thinks is sleeping, but he’s actually awake. This so upsets Henri that, later, when Justine accidentally breaks a vase, he slaps her face, leaving her traumatized.
Eliane spends her time sniffing ether with Armand in the pharmacy’s store room, and projecting her own shame onto her daughter.
As the Germans close in and the townspeople evacuate, Henri locks himself in his room with the music turned up, and Eliane sends Justine down to apologize to Armand, knowing full well what he will do to her.
Finally, the bombs fall, destroying everything.
Submission could be loosely considered a Nazi-sploitation film, as it uses sexual, and specifically sadomasochistic, dynamics as a metaphor for political dynamics. (It also feels like a cousin of In the Realm of the Senses.) Armand is the aggressor, but Elaine’s masochism, and the stress of wartime, is the weakness that he exploits, pushing her until she hands over her teenage daughter to be raped by him. It represents the capitulation of France to Germany, and to French fascists, in WWII (though it also reflects Italy’s own legacy of fascism).
The story depends on some old-fashioned ideas about female masochism in married women, that Eliane, being unable or unwilling to stop Armand, comes to enjoy her mistreatment. We see this in films as old as Belle de Jour and as recent as Babygirl. In the latter, the basic problem was, why didn’t Romy put a stop to this? The only plausible answer was that she didn’t want to. In Submission, Eliane is in a similar position, but in a more repressive and sexist society. Even if you consider the social cost of Eliane speaking up, at some point she would have to draw the line. The fact that France is being overrun by German forces day by day goes some way to justifying this plot, but not quite enough.
