Monday 14 November 2016

Premiers Désirs (1983)



Google Image Search failed to turn up a single "suitable for all audiences" DVD cover for this film, so today you get a image of the title from the film itself.

Given the above paragraph and the title of the film (which translates to "First Desires"), you probably won't be surprised to learn that this movie contains a considerable amount of nudity.  Heck, even the end credits manage to feature a whole bunch of topless shots of the two women who do most of the disrobing during the film itself.

Premiers Désirs popped up on my recommendations at the main site I use for purchasing DVDs.  Why, I don't know.  My initial thought was that it looked like soft core erotica, but it was cheap and I have poor self control and I figured maybe fishpond.com.au knew something I didn't.

As it turns out, no they don't.

Three young women try to row out to a romantic island, but get caught in a storm.  Two of them are washed overboard but the third, Caroline, struggles on long enough to wash ashore alone.  A young man rescues her but is absent when she awakes.  She finds the friends she thought had drowned - the film never explains how they survived or the coincidence that they are the first people she sees - and the three of them look for assistance.  The first house they try is home to a beautiful pianist and her handsome husband.  Caroline, despite any real supporting evidence, decides that this must be the man who saved her.  She will continue to believe this even after he denies it.

Now you might be expecting the film to now follow a pattern where Caroline pursues the married man, but eventually learns who really saved her and ends up with the real 'hero' (though frankly since was already on the beach by the time he found her, he didn't actually do all that much).

Alas, your assumption makes far more sense (and is considerably less icky) than what actually occurs in the film.  You're also assuming that the film is capable of a great deal more narrative clarity than it actually has.  Characters appear and disappear from the so-called "narrative" here without much rhyme or reason.

There's only one reason to watch this film, and frankly in this day and age you can get it from media with much better acting and writing.

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