Le bijou d’amour (1978) follows Adrien Gomm (Jacques Manteil), a radio personality, as he investigates accounts of a succubi for his program that focuses on supernatural beings and occurrences. On his way to conduct an interview with Mr. Hugo de Baal (Carmelo Petix) he meets a strange woman (Muriel Vatel) and buys the cursed ring of Casanova from her. Now whenever Adrien touches someone with his ringed finger they are transported to a mystical cave for an erotic encounter (usually a sexy dance).
Le bijou d’amour is a film of two minds. Half of the film’s eighty-four minute runtime plays like a situational comedy about a man trying to navigate erotic encounters over which he has little control while the other half of the film, set in the magic cave, attempts a dreamy, surrealist erotica. The affected stylistic gestures of the cave sequences fall flat and completely disrupt whatever momentum the situational comedy had been building towards. Even when Adrien becomes a pawn in de Baal’s macabre sex games, Le bijou d’amour is without clear narrative focus.
The scenes in the cave are predicated on two assumptions. The first is that sex is a kind of ritual rite and the second is that sex is the life that precedes the darkness of death. The theatrical blocking and lighting of these scenes which evoke the aforementioned concepts fail because the camera is not incorporated into the ritual of intercourse. Director Patrice Rhomm keeps the camera at a distance, merely recording the proceedings. Rhomm’s visual style becomes a barrier between the spectator and the spectacle that reveals the inherent artifice of the erotic sequences. It’s unclear if Rhomm is attempting to suggest the plasticity of fantasy or if his stylistic choices are determined by economy that doesn’t allow for these scenes to be executed in a more engaging fashion.
In the end, the sex scenes in Le bijou d’amour are never as erotic as the far fetched scenarios from which they have spawned. Adrien’s slow descent to a fate worse than death has more dramatic weight outside of these fantasias because they are suggestive rather than explicit. The audience can invent in collaboration with the film up until that moment that Adrien is transported back into the cave of the succubi. When the two collide in those scenes at the hospital it registers as a parody of the fantasy cave scenes, as if to suggest that reality can never live up to fantasy yet it is superior because it is attainable.
The fact that the narrative structure of Le bijou d’amour is cyclical supports this reading of the film. The dichotomies of fantasy and reality must inevitably intersect catastrophically as they do for Adrien. That is the terrible power of the succubi de Baal has unleashed. An allegory for the production and consumption of pornography in Western culture.
