Reviews (1)
In the roots of Blue Ecstasy, we can clearly trace the classic formula of infidelity, where the husband spends time at work and meeting his mistress, while trying to cover up the situation by maintaining a marital facade, while the wife devotedly waits for him to come home. But this time, director and screenwriter Claude Mulot shows the other side of this coin by focusing his pornographic relationship comedy on what the wife does. Through scenes from the first to fourth wedding anniversary of the central couple, the brilliantly constructed exposition sets up the dynamics of the relationship, which is soon turned upside down by subsequent events. When the husband is in London with his mistress, he is horrified that he has missed his fifth wedding anniversary and urgently has a bouquet of roses sent to his wife along with a haphazardly worded telegram telling her to treat herself to anything she needs to be happy that day. The husband then spends the following hours worrying about what expensive gift his wife will buy for herself based on his message, which leads him to frantically try to get home as soon as possible. The devoted but passionate wife interprets the message in her own way, but instead of buying trinkets, she takes the opportunity to fill in the gaps in her sexual experience, which she has been denying herself because of her marriage. While she smoothly checks off one item on her list of practices after another, her husband aggravates his dissatisfied mistress with his attempt to call the airport and his constant thoughts about what his wife might be buying. As is typical of Mulot’s work, the emancipatory narrative places emphasis on women’s sexual activity and creativity and conversely ridicules men, all of which is conceived with a refreshingly exaggerated yet creative approach. In addition to the regularly occurring formalistic jokes (often accompanied by slapstick sound effects), Mulot’s distinctive camera compositions are interesting in that they playfully exploit the natural elements of the shooting locations – for example, shooting sex scenes through mirrors and various reflective surfaces. Add to this a brilliantly constructed screenplay conceived as a sitcom with a great point and acting performances that lend the film a relaxed naturalness with which the plastic porn of the video era and the new millennium cannot compare, and the result is a brilliant comedy spiced up with stylish explicit scenes. ____ As is customary with the Alpha France distribution company, this film was edited during the restoration process so that it would fit on a single DVD with other titles. This time, it can exceptionally be said that the editing didn’t do the film much harm; on the contrary, it actually improved it in terms of interpretation. In fact, the DVD does not contain the passage in which the wife makes a list and the following shots of her checking off the items on it. Thanks to that, the events in the film do not come across as a series of isolated situations, but as an ordinary day in her life.
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