Eugenie De Sade - Jess Franco

Seen for the first time in January 2013.

"Eugenie de Sade" is Jess Franco at his sleazy, salacious best. This film stands out among Franco's oeuvre as one of the few made with seeming love and care, with scintillating eroticism and surreal villainy. At its most dramatic moments one wants to bust out laughing. It plays like a parody of drama, most reminiscent of certain moments from David Lynch's television show "Twin Peaks", particularly the fake soap opera "Invitation to Love".

But the thing about any Jess Franco film is that you're never quite sure how much you're laughing at it, and how much you're laughing with it. Whether Jess Franco is brilliant or if he's an incompetent hack. Probably he's been both in his career. "Eugenie De Sade" is no exception, but it's definitely among the films a person would cite to argue the man is in fact a brilliant artist. It's an engaging mix of the surreal and silly, dramatic and sleazy, and shows what Franco is capable of when inspired and in full use of his talents and effort.

Not that the movie isn't slow in parts. It's typical 70's exploitation in a lot of ways. The plot is ridiculously bad. The characters are grotesquely thin, and seemingly the whole thing is a weak pretext for making what is basically what would seem like little more than an obscene and creepy little movie in more routine hands. But in Franco's hands, it's a kind of masterpiece. Not a masterpiece for respectable audiences, maybe, but a masterpiece for the rare breed of grimy connoisseur, who looks for and finds art in the unlikely places, including the disreputable ones. Grade A.