Plaisir d'amour (1991) User Reviews

Better than her more recent efforts but ...

[John_Mclaren · 5/10 · 23 November 2005]

I am very uncertain about Nelly Kaplan films. Probably because I don't find them as funny as the French (who does?). Doubtless it is my own lack of sophistication that prevents me from identifying why some people rave about them.

Anyway I liked this one more than many of her other efforts. Guillaume de Burlador is a private tutor who hits a low point sufficiently severe for him to contemplate a somewhat theatrical suicide. Instead he is taken off by flying boat to a mad French colonial possession bedecked by mad servants and crazy decor. Three rather gorgeous women live there,and old Guillaume is a randy old stoat.

Should have been a riot. Whilst it is periodically sensuous, the problem with Kaplan is that she doesn't really do erotic. She did the totally flat "Nea" (Young Emanuelle)and simply doesn't deliver here either. Very minimal nudity takes the edge off what might have been a truly live wire effort. In the end it rates little more than a pleasant "OK".

Island of love

[hof-4 · 6/10 · 17 March 2021]

The protagonist Guillaume de Burlador is the last descendant of Don Juan, the epitome of seduction (in his original Spanish version Don Juan is called El Burlador de Sevilla, the Trickster of Seville). In the first scene Burlador, universally hated by husbands, parents and brothers harbors suicidal thoughts and has a confrontation with the supernatural (like Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera) but this time he is not cast into Hell. Again as in the opera, he keeps a catalog of his conquests (at the time, 1003).

In the next scene we see Burlador exiting a rickety seaplane in front of a remote island. He has been hired by the owners of a plantation as the tutor of a 13 year old girl. The owners are three women, the daughter (Flo's sister), the mother and the grandmother. There are no hints of husbands or love interests. The three women are the only people in the plantation (except for two quirky servants and a real estate agent that pops in an out). Flo is supposedly having a vacation abroad. She is expected to arrive in one of the seaplane's flights, but she never does; her letters are a clue to her adventures. There is only a faded photo of her in the house.

Doing honor to his lineage, Burlador seduces (or is seduced by) the three women and adds them to his list. However, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the absent Flo. Finally, suspicions arise that Flo doesn't exist; she may have been conjured out of thin air as a pretext to attract "tutors" to the island. Burlador the trickster has been tricked and he may not be the only dupe.

I rather liked this film. Perhaps the tale is too thin for a long movie and some material is not as funny as it should be but the final balance is positive. The French title, Plaisir d'Amour is that of a classical song known to everybody in France and popularized in this country by Joan Baez an other singers.

An enjoyable variation on a self-gratifying male fantasy

[philosopherjack · 23 July 2021]

Nelly Kaplan's last feature film, Plaisir d'amour, works an enjoyable if not ultimately too surprising variation on a self-gratifying male fantasy. Guillaume (Pierre Arditi), a practiced seducer (1,003 past conquests, we're informed), chances into a position as tutor to a teenage girl on a tropical island; the girl is absent when he arrives, but while waiting for her arrival he separately beds, with little difficulty, her grandmother, mother and sister, all of whom share an elegantly dilapidated colonial mansion, with no male authority figure in sight. He figures he'll step into the driver's seat, but his attempts to impose greater order and efficiency get nowhere, and he becomes obsessed with the perpetually delayed girl (whose letters home and readily accessible diary indicates a psyche of a sexual rapaciousness that outdoes his own). The film suggests greater moral stakes through glimpses of fighting between the island's army and its rebel faction, and through its late 1930's setting, with WW2 percolating in the distance; and steadily muddies the sexual waters (both the women's eccentric servant (Heinz Bennent) and their talking parrot appear to regard Guillaume as an object of desire); frequent references to Albert Einstein and a fanciful opening sequence throw in some scientific and mystical resonances as well. In the closing stretch, it becomes clear how little power and agency Guillaume has had throughout - he tips over into quasi-madness, and becomes a simple nuisance, his utility spent. It's in no way a major film (not the equal of Kaplan's La fiancée du pirate, which is much more zestily provocative on its own terms, and more broadly resonant as a social critique), but it's an elegant one, even if a lot of it plays very conventionally and decoratively (there's seldom a moment when any of the women seem to be behaving entirely naturally, albeit that this fits in with the artificially heightened nature of things).