One of the pleasures of life as a Jess Franco fan is that, just when you think you’ve finally got the drop on where the great man was coming from at any given point in his sprawling and tempestuous career, he can still turn around and surprise you.
Never was this more true than during the early 1980s, a period which saw Franco cranking out a frankly bewildering quantity and variety of celluloid, most of it delivered directly to the door of his sometime paymasters at Barcelona-based Golden Film International - a firm whose naive husband and wife proprietors can easily be pictured weeping uncontrollably as yet more couriers arrive at their office door bearing new film cans to add to the ever-growing mountain of unreleased / unreleasable product piling up around them… all courtesy of the tireless Senor Franco.
As more of Franco’s Golden-era films become readily available to viewers who were denied the opportunity to obsessively haunt back-street Spanish sex cinemas in the early 1980s (largely thanks to the noble efforts of Severin Films, Stephen Thrower and Francophile underworld of the fan-sub/trading circuit), his work during this creatively fertile era is increasingly revealed as a series of sharp left-hand turns, with his output during 1982 alone ranging from lackadaisical sex comedies to sado-erotic treasure hunts, neo-noir / new wave youth movies, gothic horrors and inexplicable, family-oriented kung-fu fantasies. In the midst of which, we find the little number we’re looking at today - one of the most sombre, disturbing and formally experimental works of his entire career.
Sketchily distributed around porno theatres for a few months in 1983, with promotional material consisting solely of a generic photo-collage poster featuring a man who doesn’t even appear in the movie thrusting his Y-fronts in the direction of Lina Romay’s face, ‘Gemidos de Placer’ [‘Cries of Pleasure’] is, like many of Franco’s best erotic films, a work that only a stone-cold psychopath could emerge from feeling frisky.
Yet another descent into the soul-withering, sex-horror netherworld previously explored in the likes of Lorna the Exorcist and Doriana Grey, ‘Gemidos..’ takes place, perversely, in just about the most beautiful location imaginable – a luxurious villa situated high on the cliffs above the director’s spiritual home, the Valencian coastal town of Calpe. (1)
Beginning with a stunning vista of the Calpe’s unmistakable Peñón de Ifach, the film’s opening shot slowly pans across the bay to reveal the figure of Franco’s regular camera tech/right hand man during this period, Juan Solar, here playing the mute, guitar-strumming servant who will go on to act as mute witness to the assorted atrocities committed within the villa.
After zooming in for a close-up on Solar’s fingers picking out a cyclical guitar melody as he leans precariously on the balcony’s guard-rail, the camera then pulls back as a heart-rending Daniel White piece for solo cello abruptly cuts in on the soundtrack, revealing the shimmering surface of a swimming pool. In what appears to be the director’s tribute to ‘Sunset Boulevard’, a naked male corpse (recognisable to fans as Franco’s ubiquitous ‘80s leading man Antonio Mayans) floats face down in the water.
Sadly we don’t get a narrating voiceover from Mayans’ corpse in this case, but Solar’s character instead does the honours (dubbed with Franco’s own voice, weirdly), and it is within his warped, potentially unreliable, memories we will presumably be spending the next eighty-something minutes.
Already in this this extended opening shot, we have a Leone-esque sense of grandeur and clammy, melancholy feel which immediately sets ‘Gemidos..’ apart from the fly-by-night sex comedies and exploitation flicks which surround it in Franco’s ’82 filmography, but as we slide back, noir-style, into the past, the minimalist plot which begins to unfold nonetheless feels very much like a mish-mash of familiar bits and pieces, reheated from the director’s numerous earlier tales of Sadean libertines getting up to no good in Mediterranean beauty spots.
Antonio (Mayans), apparently an idle playboy of some kind, arrives home at his villa, bringing his latest squeeze Julia (Romay) to “meet his servants,” numbering both Fenul (Solar’s character) and Marta (Elisa Vella), who soon reveals to Julia that she is actually both Antonio’s long-term lover and kind-of adopted daughter.
(This bit of plotting is patently ridiculous, by the way - Marta claims that Antonio and his wife plucked her out of poverty on the Barbary Coast when she was a young girl, and that she has lived with them ever since… despite the fact that Vella’s features are closer to being East Asian than African, and that she is clearly around the same age as the other cast members! Franco’s full spectrum disdain for realism will be further discussed below.) (2)
“He raped me when I was twelve, and I’ve loved him ever since,” Marta casually states, a troubling assertion which very much sets the tone for much of what is to follow. And yes, in addition to his new girlfriend and his live-in slave girl, turns out that that insatiable rascal Antonio also has a wife to deal with - Martina, played by Rocío Freixas. And as it happens, she is being released from the clinic today, so she’ll be home in time for dinner. Great! (3)
As you’d reasonably expect of an ‘80s Franco joint, casual nudity, languid seductions and fevered tongue-waggling are soon the order of the day, but right from the outset, the sex here is dark, with Antonio reaching his first climax with Julia as he whispers of his plan to murder Martina and steal her (apparently considerable) fortune.
Of course, Antonio is also simultaneously conspiring with Marta to do away with Julia, but… needless to say, it all becomes a bit of a blur before long, especially once Marta brings out another round of her “special cocktails” (“it’s an old recipe, from my ancestors”). They seem to have quite an effect. And, at the end of the day, does it really matter who’s doing what to whom anyway, so long as everybody cums and somebody dies?
“Twenty minutes of plot, sixty minutes of sex” may be a common complaint whenever quote-unquote ‘mainstream’ film criticism tries to get to grips with with erotica/porn, but here Franco proves that in the right hands (so to speak), the sex itself can be both aesthetically and narratively compelling, even as it progresses at the strung out, tidal pace at which he prefers to weave his weird spell. After the initial set up, the narrative progresses (in both linear and emotional terms) almost entirely through the compulsive, obsessional sexual (and occasionally homicidal) behaviour of the characters within the villa.
And, we haven’t yet mentioned the film’s primary technical innovation - namely, the fact that, uniquely within his filmography, Franco chose to shoot much of ‘Gemidos de Placer’ as a series of extended, real time single takes, in the manner of Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’.
Zooming and refocusing mid-shot in order to save time and minimise camera set-ups had of course been Franco’s standard MO for many years at this point, but even so, the amount of rehearsal and pre-planning needed to keep his cast engaged and on-point, and his compositions varied and imaginative, across ten or twelve minutes of uncut screen time must have been considerable.
Belying the semi-improvisational, “shoot first, ask questions later” methodology with which Franco is generally assumed to have assembled his films, ‘Gemidos..’ in fact stands as a testament to the kind of hard graft he was prepared to put into even the most marginal, sparsely distributed projects, when inspiration struck.
Restricted to a fixed camera position, acting as his won operator as per usual, the director’s trusty zoom lens is of course running hot throughout, as he delves once more into his hypnotic, all-consuming pursuit of sexual abstraction. Though perhaps not as psychedelic as some other Franco projects, ‘Gemidos..’ certainly has its moments.
Ranging far and wide from his voyeur’s vantage point in the centre of the room, the director/camera man shoots the languorous depravity being enacted at his behest through distorting glass screens, swinging bead curtains and even the gauze of a Japanese print screen, at times transforming the villa’s gaudily prosaic holiday home furnishings into his patented brand disorientating avant garde freakery. By and large however, this particular outing feels more narcotic than psychotropic; more an addict’s exhausted reverie than a cosmic trip into the depths of the upholstery.
Nonetheless, anyone who’d still write Franco off as a lazy or slap-dash filmmaker should consider the effort which must have gone into planning the single, extended shot which comprises Marta’s violation, murder and the disposal of her body. From his fixed position at the top of the villa’s staircase, Franco covers all of the necessary action, scanning up and down to the stairs with perfect timing to catch characters as they move from room to room, zeroing in on faces and details as required - essentially using a technique first adopted as a cost-cutting exercise to mount a remarkable display of cinematic virtuosity.
It is one of the inherent ironies of the director’s eccentric approach to cinema however that appreciation of his technical achievement here will likely be lost on many first time viewers, as they instead try to deal with the unconvincing-bordering-on-non-existent ‘special effects’ through which Marta’s death is conveyed. Franco always of course favoured, shall we say, ‘emblematic’ make-up effects over any attempt at realism, but the practical difficulties of applying stage-blood to Elisa Vella’s body whilst a shot was actually in progress seems to have pretty much flummoxed him here.
The results prove so half-hearted that they fail to really serve their intended narrative purpose, leaving us temporarily uncertain what has actually occurred. Have they just cut her a bit? Is this part of some kinky game? Has she passed out or gone to sleep? Oh, no, wait -- here comes poor old Fenul to drag the body away. That’s… pretty dark.
In a sense though, perhaps it’s just as well that the presentation of this murder is so botched - the sheer callous cruelty of seeing a remorseless couple casually kill their devoted daughter/slave in a drugged up haze midway through a sex act would be so horrible as to be almost unwatchable, were it presented in a more realistic manner. Even by the twisted standards of a Jess Franco sex-drama, the extent to which Marta is treated as human garbage by the people she claims to love her feels truly vile. (The Marquis de Sade, who is generously assigned a story credit here, would no doubt have approved.)
Nymphomania may be a ubiquitous concept in erotica, but Franco is one of few filmmakers I’m aware of who manages to portray this much ballyhooed affliction, not as a mere fantasy of female promiscuity, but as something closer to what it would presumably boil down to in reality; as a kind of all-consuming sickness, an unscratchable itch, prompting an agony of ever more remote, unsatisfactory physical debasement and mental dysfunction.
Seeing Lina Romay writhing alone on a sofa in a darkened room, contorting her body in a truly alarming (even by her standards) auto-erotic fit, whilst a plaintive guitar melody is accompanied by Franco’s own eerie, wordless vocals on the soundtrack, is a weird and dissonant experience indeed. Rivalling the aforementioned ‘Lorna..’ and ‘Doriana..’ as one of Lina’s most extreme performances, her body language in ‘Gemidos..’ becomes increasingly monstrous and unnatural as the film progresses, further complicating its ostensible function as common-or-garden erotica.
Likewise, whilst it is obligatory for any remotely kinky erotic movie to have somebody banging on about the intertwined nature of pleasure and pain at some point, Franco here dares here to remind us that this relationship is a two-way street. Pain may become pleasurable, sure, whatever, but physical pleasure can also blur all too easily into pain, and by the final stretch of this film’s debauchery, the two states have become effectively indistinguishable, as the characters’ ever-more desperate coupling begins to seem less like personal gratification and more like some kind of compulsive self-mutilation.
For a while there in fact, it seems as if poor old Antonio is actually going to be fucked to death, as, exhausted after innumerable bouts of sexual congress, he painstakingly tries to rouse himself for one more go-round, as Lina, equally pale and far-gone, dutifully mounts him. Essentially presenting sex as self-destruction, it’s an expression of mania worthy of a Zulawski movie.
Though ‘Gemidos de Placer’ lacks the pulpy / fantastical accoutrements of Franco’s earlier tales of Sadean evil-doers – no red-tinted black masses, basements full of frozen lovers or cannibal feasts for these libertines – a more prosaic, more unsettling evil is revealed in Fenul’s mumbled voiceovers, which serve to drag the film firmly into the realm of horror.
Introducing a terrible flipside to Antonio and Martina’s strutting, elitist exhibitionism, he implies that one of his main roles within the villa is to dispose of the bodies, recalling an occasion on which his master and mistress apparently killed a young boy and pleasured themselves whilst smearing their with his blood (“..he was so little - they sliced his throat like a pig”).
“I don't like it when they become soggy and begin to dissolve… covered in flies..,” he muses at the film’s conclusion, implying a recurring pattern of sexually-motivated murder which these characters have been indulging in for…. who knows how long?
In view of this knowledge of course, Martina’s closing declaration that “unlimited debauchery awaits” following Antonio’s death sounds none too promising, either for the two surviving women, or for anyone else for that matter. How long will either of them last, and who else will suffer at their hands in the process, we’re forced to ask as they painfully maneuverer themselves once again into sixty-nine position for a desultory, exhausting final sex scene which - like so much in this uniquely grim inversion of softcore smut - feels more funereal than erotic.
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(1) If you missed it the first time around, please do check out the first (and thus far only, sadly) instalment of my Great Jess Franco Location Tour - primarily covering Calpe - here.
(2) Elisa Vella’s only other credits on IMDB comprise three other Franco films from the early/mid ‘80s, the best known being ‘Mansion of the Living Dead’ (also 1982).
(3) In addition to appearing in a number of Franco projects during 1982-3, Rocío Freixas appears to have been a regular fixture in lower tier Spanish exploitation and sex cinema between ’76 and the early ‘80s, capping off her career with an appearance in Jose A. Rodriguez’s no doubt uproarious El Erótico y Loco Túnel del Tiempo [‘The Wacky and Erotic Tunnel of Time’] in 1983.
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