Continuing our series of video pieces examining the more esoteric items of physical media out there for you to enjoy, this week your Desperate Living editor takes a look at a pair of Jess Franco movies from 1968-1970 adapted from the novels of the Marquis De Sade.
Both Justine and Philosophy in the Boudoir (better known as Eugenie – The Story of Her Journey into Perversion) have been tarted up and given new UHD 4K releases by Blue Underground in the US, and both are well worth picking up. While Justine is less salacious than you might expect – or, indeed, want – it still holds up as an erotic period piece while Eugenie is a wild ride of late Sixties excess with Christopher Lee trying to pretend that none of it is happening – or if it is, that he knows nothing about it, a claim that he maintained throughout his life.
As we’ve discussed before, Franco’s work had an inherent Sadean quality to it – a libertine approach to sexuality, a disregard for convention and a kinky streak a mile long. No wonder that he was so attracted to the Divine Marquis’ work.
With De Sade finally having a cultural reassessment – last year’s Barcelona exhibition, while certainly flawed, went a long way to giving De Sade’s work an overdue place in the artistic canon – these two releases feel timely. Both De Sade and Franco are among history’s most misunderstood artists, both mavericks who refused to follow the rules and so were dismissed and marginalised as a result. The Jess Franco films are probably the best versions of De Sade that we’ll get – OK, Pasolini’s Salo is up there too, but he was another outsider filmmaker. ironically, these two films are amongst Franco’s most accessible work and if you are looking to get a feel for his movies without being thrown in at the deep end, they are as good a place as any to begin.
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