Nana (1983)

whose moral backbone melts the moment she turns her attention on him. She humiliates him, makes him crawl and fetch like a dog, and encourages him to mortgage his future for the privilege. His impressionable son Hector is equally smitten, despite being engaged to the unfortunate Rennée. Meanwhile, Nana drifts into the company of Satin and her sharply dressed female circle, stages a voyeuristic woodland “hunt” for her guests, and keeps testing just how far the men around her will go. The plot darkens when prizefighter Bijou enters the picture and Nana persuades Muffat to finance him, giving Steiner an opportunity to rig matters for his own advantage. Debts, jealousies and adulterous schemes begin tangling together as Nana turns the Muffat household against itself and toys with Hector’s approaching wedding. It is less faithful Zola than a smutty Cannon Films cartoon about sex and class: lively and visually attractive in bursts, sluggish between spectacles, and psychologically thin where it ought to bite. Still, its central joke lands—these powerful men are not conquered by genius or witchcraft, but by their own vanity, lust and astonishing willingness to behave like complete idiots.

The setting is Paris in the 1880s, when respectable society maintained a polished public face while conducting its appetites behind brocade curtains. The film was shot in Rome, and its imagined France is built from ornate interiors, period costumes, candlelit chambers, theatrical stages, carriages and leafy country estates rather than documentary realism. Armando Nannuzzi gives it the glossy look of early-1980s European softcore, while Ennio Morricone’s score supplies more elegance than the screenplay can consistently manage. The vibe sits somewhere between Moulin Rouge, Emmanuelle and a cut-price Barry Lyndon: part costume drama, part bedroom farce and part late-night cable erotica. Expect frivolity rather than tragedy, with historical exploitation and ugly racial caricatures mixed into the bawdy spectacle—elements that have aged considerably worse than the corsets.

Katya Berger plays Nana with a cool, sleepy detachment that can look either calculating or simply under-directed; she has striking features and enough aloof presence to make the men’s obsession plausible, even when the character’s transformation from ingenue to destroyer feels abrupt. The supporting women—including Shirin Taylor, Mandy Rice-Davies, Annie Belle and Debra Berger—bring considerably more seasoned mischief to the boudoirs and parties. In explicitness, this is unapologetic softcore: frequent full-frontal nudity, simulated sex, voyeurism, baths, transparent gowns and a sapphic interlude. Berger was under eighteen during production, however, which makes the camera’s fixation on her nudity troubling rather than something to cheer on; viewed today, that fact casts an unavoidable shadow over the film’s would-be erotic pleasures.

In Zola’s Paris, an ingenue arrives at a tony bordello: she’s Nana, guileless, but quickly learning to use her erotic innocence to get what she wants. She’s an actress for a soft-core filmmaker and soon is the most popular courtesan in Paris, parlaying this into a house, bought for her by a wealthy banker. She tosses him and takes up with her neighbor, a count of impeccable rectitude, and with the count’s impressionable son. The count is soon fetching sticks like a dog and mortgaging his lands to satisfy her whims.