you an ideal patsy. Her movies can be a bit silly and a bit stilted by
overplotting, but her satire is sharp and personal. To say that there’s
nothing there is to be one of Kaplan’s hapless marks, unable to see
that the woman right in front of you knows better.
Kaplan’s lack of regard for the psychodrama of the male con-
dition provides endless comic fodder for her riff on Vertigo, The
Pleasure of Love (1991). Hired to travel to a remote tropical island
to tutor a young student named Flo, the strapping, if slightly long-
in-the-tooth, Willy (Pierre Arditi) finds instead three generations of
unusually accomplished, beautiful women inhabiting a paradisiacal
compound. The women—Do (Françoise Fabian), Clo (Dominique
Blanc), and Jo (Cécile San de Alba)—each seduce a tragically
overconfident Willy as they wait for their ever delayed Flo to return.
Willy, bless his heart, begins to fancy himself the man of the house.
Stunned by the lack of influence he holds over his matriarchal triad
of lovers, he becomes obsessed by Flo’s absence. The women
ghostwrite increasingly absurd letters from the erstwhile Flo, but
as the stories become more outlandish, Willy’s idealization only
grows. Tales of shit-smeared priest chaperones on the Camino de
Santiago and an arranged marriage with the pope’s nephew are
easier to believe than the simple fact that he’s been had.
Like the bric-a-brac personal spaces in A Very Curious Girland
Néa, the women’s compound in The Pleasure of Loveoffers a space
where women can re-create society to their own liking. Even poor
Cookie of Papa, the Lil’ Boats colonizes her prison room by room. By
the last act she’s scarfing down her captors’ celebratory champagne
and lobster feast in front of them while they unwittingly do her
bidding. And in Ve l v e t P a w s (1987), Jacinthe (Lafont) and Iris
(Caroline Silhol) enslave their bigamist husband—the evocatively
named Poltergeist (Arditi)—in a walled villa. We first see Poltergeist
full of campy brio, calling to Jacinthe with a Tarzan howl and
prancing through the garden with a Pan flute, unaware that his wives
have teamed up to exact revenge. Throwing parties and taking lovers,
the women turn the villa into their pleasure garden, to the pain of
Poltergeist and the horror of their male lodger Quid (Bouquet).
The villa in Ve l v e t P a w s is burned in a Pyrrhic victory, and like
so many other Kaplan heroines, Jacinthe and Iris find themselves
laughing down the road, dismaying the maimed and blinded
Poltergeist and Quid one last time with their joyful destitution.
In A Very Curious Girl, Marie torches her lair and skips town
as a broadcast of her recorded secrets blares from the church
loudspeaker, leaving her tormentors to torment each other.
Maybe the matriarchy saves the women in The Pleasure of Love.
It’s the rare case in Kaplan’s work where women are allowed to
remain in their provisional utopia, and they promptly send a
telegram for a new tutor to shake things up.
Kaplan’s only film to provide a measure of hope for hetero-
sexual relations, Charles and Lucie(1979), primarily concerns
itself with what happens after paradise is lost. The film begins
with a married couple at each other’s throats, Lucie guarding the
mementos that enliven their apartment from Charlie’s scheming.
News of an inheritance leads them to sell all their belongings and
head south to their promised château. Their unbelievable good
fortune immediately unravels. They’ve been conned and are
soon on the run. As they are stripped of everything, they become
loving partners. Eventually they wake up naked under a roadside
apple tree: Eden has come to them.
With the possible exception of Charles and Lucie, Kaplan’s is
a bracingly individualistic vision of female empowerment, in
which men are inept and a woman’s path to independence is funda-
mentally anarchic. Kaplan had a complicated relationship to
feminism and the women’s critical and programming circles
that (sometimes) embraced her work. In an era of communal
consciousness, she was never a joiner: “the feminists are Kaplanian. It
is not I who is a feminist.” Of course, the goal of feminism is equality
for all women, not just the ones that remind you of yourself. Kaplan’s
worldview is relentlessly nihilistic: the only way to survive is to not
be another sucker in a world full of chumps. It’s a fundamentally
pessimistic view, but there is hope in the spaces Kaplan’s women
carve out for themselves. The world may always be a brutal place,
and every good thing might eventually be corrupted. All you can
do is try to build a utopia, burn it down, and start again. July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 57A Very Curious Girl