Dressage (1986)

begins turning Sophie against shame, obedience and paternal authority while teasing Leroy-Murville into compromising situations of his own. Eliane, meanwhile, presents herself as an unattainable sex object to the Colonel’s bookish son Robert, making him increasingly besotted, while pretending to be a helpless lightweight around his father. The joke darkens when Montvilliers trusts her enough to reveal a political conspiracy, giving her far more dangerous ammunition than the Baron expected. The women report their progress through letters as both households slide toward scandal, but Plessis is not merely an amused referee; he is another manipulator with games of his own. Pierre B. Reinhard aims for a softcore blend of Les Liaisons dangereuses, de Sade and knockabout bedroom farce, using voyeurism and female dominance more than conventional sex scenes. It is handsomely mounted but deliberately slow, sometimes funny and sometimes simply clunky. Still, its central pleasure is watching pompous men fall into traps built from their own lust, vanity and belief that wealth makes them untouchable.

Although made in the mid-1980s, the film belongs to a deliberately old-fashioned France of late-1920s or early-1930s aristocratic decadence: drawing rooms, summer tutoring, rigid family discipline and reactionary grandees preaching morality while behaving like randy goats behind closed doors. The exact château used for filming is not reliably identified in readily available credits, but Reinhard clearly exploits a real country estate, its furnished interiors and leafy grounds giving this modest production considerably more class than its dirty-minded story strictly requires. Denis Lenoir’s soft-focus photography lends the women a gauzy, dreamlike glow, though several interiors are so dimly lit that the debauchery seems to be taking place during a power cut. The vibe is less full-blooded pornography than a languid continental sex comedy from a decade earlier: elegant costumes, knowing dialogue, striptease, absurd kinky business and the occasional surreal gag, all served at a pace that may test viewers expecting constant action.

Véronique Catanzaro attacks Nathalie with icy purpose, playing her less as a giggling nymph than a seriously aggrieved sexual strategist; she is striking, poised and easily the strongest presence in the picture, even when the script mistakes solemnity for sophistication. Cornélia Wilms brings a warmer, more playful wickedness to Eliane, and together the two adult leads look splendid in period lingerie, corsets and very little else. The film contains plentiful nudity, teasing displays, voyeuristic set pieces and light bondage imagery, but surprisingly little explicit sex; its real kink is control—women posing, watching, commanding and making self-important men beg to be ruined. It promises filth, delivers softcore mischief, and occasionally finds a genuinely sexy image amid the farce.

At a gathering of would-be society debauchees, the Baron Plessis de Regard and the attractive young Nathalie hatch their individual plans to use sex to respectively ruin and punish their selected enemies. The Baron’s plan is to scupper the political ambitions of right-wing parliamentary candidate Colonel Montvilliers by setting him up with a female companion and publicly exposing his new-found vices. Nathalie’s quest is of a more personal nature, to destroy her estranged father Charles Leroy-Merville by corrupting his innocent 17-year-old daughter Sophie, a task she intends to achieve by securing employ as the girl’s summer tutor.