Le jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire)(1975): The Celluloid Dungeon

Le jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire) is a 1975 French comedy-drama, directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

A group of men are kidnapping young women all over Paris and holding them for ransom. They send a ransom note to a wealthy man, “the banker”, before before they kidnap his daughter, Carolina, which persuades the banker to hire a private detective to protect her. This detective is secretly one of the kidnappers, so he talks the banker into letting him take his daughter into hiding in a specialized clinic, which is actually a brothel. So, they’ve managed to kidnap a woman without her or her father knowing she’s been kidnapped. That’s just the beginning of the plot twists.

A major portion of Le jeu is crime-drama-as-absurdist-farce. Men kidnap young women in broad daylight and in front of multiple witnesses. Characters constantly change costumes, identities and loyalties. Two men meet on top of the Arc de Triomphe to negotiate the ransom for a woman they both know (or think they know) hasn’t been kidnapped. The criminals complain about the difficulty of holding people for ransom in a depressed economy. Not to mention breaking the fourth wall.

Another major portion is European softcore, of the “woman in captivity” variety. Carolina can freely wander around the brothel and look in to various rooms, containing kinky vignettes; Carolina observes but does not participate. This includes even a brief scene of bestiality with a girl and a dog.

After various plot machinations, there’s an elaborate car chase, and it turns out Carolina and the kidnapper were in on the scam from the beginning, and they live happily ever after.

The problem with Le Jeu is that the male characters know this is a comedy, but the women look like they aren’t in on the joke. In the aftermath of the Jeffrey Epstein and Gisèle Pelicot affairs, I can’t quite laugh off women being kidnapped, gaslit and drugged to be sexually abused by men. I would have liked this a lot more if it was played entirely as a farce and nobody really got hurt.

Alain Robbe-Grillet was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet, a dominatrix and erotica writer. Actress Anicée Alvina (Carolina) starred in Robbe-Grillet’s previous film Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), along with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant. Sylvia Kristel is best known as the star of the original Emmanuelle and many other European softcore movies.