Submission (1976)

her desire will carry her. What follows is less a conventional affair than an escalating campaign of sexual control: secret encounters become commands, commands become humiliation, and Eliane’s resistance starts melting into a compulsive need to surrender. Armand is not a charming seducer; Franco Nero plays him as cold, vindictive and frighteningly alert to every weakness. Eliane knows he despises her, and that knowledge perversely tightens his grip. As their arrangement spills beyond the pharmacy’s shadows, her reputation, marriage and family are placed in genuine danger, while Henri retreats further into his books and their increasingly uneasy daughter senses that something rotten is happening under the respectable household surface. Samperi occasionally repeats the same provocative note, but the suffocating build works: private obsession and national collapse begin reflecting one another, with Eliane surrendering territory room by room while France does much the same outside. Vittorio Storaro’s murky, amber-lit photography and Riz Ortolani’s mournful score turn the film into a fever dream—sensual to look at, ugly in implication and heading somewhere you can feel will not be pretty.

Although made in the mid-1970s, the story inhabits France in 1940, when mobilisation, fear and the approaching German occupation have cracked the polite surface of provincial life. Men march away, old social certainties wobble, and Armand’s resentment gains force from a world suddenly prepared to reward brutality. The film was produced around Rome and Lazio, including studio work at Incir De Paolis, and its French town has a deliberately enclosed, faintly artificial appearance. The central square, pharmacy, back rooms and bourgeois home feel less like open scenery than pieces of a sealed theatrical trap. Even the exteriors offer little fresh air; everything appears dusky, boxed-in and watched. The vibe is therefore not sunny Italian erotica, cheeky bedroom farce or romantic surrender. It is claustrophobic, decadent and anxious—a sadomasochistic chamber drama in which sex becomes another front in the war, complete with occupation, collaboration and the dangerous thrill of giving up.

Lisa Gastoni owns the picture as Eliane, moving from immaculate middle-class poise to flushed, trembling abandon without turning the woman into a mere pin-up. She is mature, striking and voluptuous, with the sort of proud, controlled beauty that makes each stage of Eliane’s exposure feel more intimate and alarming. Gastoni gives herself fully to the role, emotionally and physically, including frank full nudity and strongly charged scenes of domination, submission and sexual humiliation. It is explicit by respectable 1976 standards, though not hardcore, and the eroticism is deliberately tangled with menace rather than offered as harmless titillation. Andréa Ferréol supplies a warmer, more openly earthy sexuality as Juliette, but Gastoni is the dangerous main course: gorgeous, fearless and increasingly naked in every possible sense.

In wartime France, Pharmacist Eliane begins a torrid affair with her shop assistant Armand, being pulled into it by her deep seated and suppressed submissive desires, soon he starts dominating & tormenting her, subjecting her to public humiliations and ultimately demanding that she give him her young teenage daughter.

Lisa Gastoni’s top-notch acting will keep you hooked from start to finish. She is Simply Brilliant in portraying the inner conflicts and helpless submission of a woman who doesn’t look at all like how she feels.