Marie-poupée (1976)
Directed by Joël Séria

Film Review

It was the phenomenal success of Les Galettes de Pont-Aven (1975), an off-the-wall sex comedy, that allowed director Joël Séria to realise his most personal and, arguably, finest film, Marie-poupée.  Even for its day (it was released two years after the first of the Emmanuelle films), this was a daring film, one that explores with surprising candour one of the last taboos of eroticism: fetishism.  Critics and audiences were not prepared for such an explicit dive into perversion and the film proved to be a massive flop, pretty well scuppering Séria's hopes to be recognised as a serious filmmaker.  His auteur credentials burned to a frazzle, Séria ended up directing third-rate comedies such as San-Antonio ne pense qu'à ça (1981) and Les Deux crocodiles (1987), before partly redeeming himself with his recent sentimental drama Mumu (2010).

Séria's decision to cast his wife Jeanne Goupil in the lead role, that of the doll-like Marie (a Judy Garland look-a-like), was brave and it is tempting to read an autobiographical confession into the film.  The relationship between any artist and his muse has a degree of fetishism about it and the fact that Goupil appeared in the director's previous films suggests that she may have been as much a doll to Séria as the character she plays in this film.  Marie-poupée is an unsettlingly weird film, as much because of its unconventional subject matter as because of Séria's unflinchingly matter-of-fact treatment of it.   It is the film's lack of sensationalism that makes it so disturbing.

Séria's unfussy direction brings out the best in his perceptive screenplay. The protagonists are startlingly true to life, played with total conviction by a talented pool of actors.  Complementing Goupil's remarkable central performance there is a superbly ambiguous André Dussollier (he starts out his usual charming self but ends up turning our blood to ice) and a frighteningly mercurial Bernard Fresson.  Andréa Ferréol make her presence felt in a substantial supporting role, and Fanny Ardant makes her screen debut, some years before François Truffaut adopted her as his muse.

Marie-poupée is a compelling and intimate drama that doesn't downplay the uglier side of fetishism.  The most shocking thing about the film is not its lurid subject matter but the way it strays innocently from banal, everyday incident into much darker avenues of human experience.  Having surprised us with a wedding night sequence in which Marie's husband first reveals his fetishism (taking his bride's clothes off, bathing her and putting her to bed like a doll, all done with exquisite tenderness), Séria later chills us to the core by replaying the first part of the scene with Marie substituted for a little girl.

Marie-poupée's shockingly overt depiction of fetishism doesn't disguise its wider purpose, which is to condemn all kinds of objectification of women by men.  Marie's husband isn't the only person to regard her as an object.  His farmer, ostensibly a more humane character, also takes a shine to the doll-like young woman, one that is far more carnal.  One man treats Marie as though she were a toy, the other attempts to rape her.   In each case, it is the woman who ends up being a victim in a male fantasy, her fairytale delusions ripped apart by bestial impulses that thrust her into the most degrading of nightmares.  Alas, Joël Séria's pro-female protestations went virtually unnoticed.  He faded into obscurity whilst others surged forward to grab a place on the Emmanuelle bandwagon.  Séria's was a lone voice in a cultural and moral wilderness.

Film Synopsis

Marie is a naive 17-year-old orphan who lives with her grandparents.  One day, she enters a dolls shop and immediately attracts the attention of its owner, a charming young man named Claude.  It isn't long before they are married and comfortably installed in Claude's grand country residence.  But theirs is far from being a normal marriage.  Claude regards his wife as just another doll in his collection.  They sleep in separate rooms and the only time Marie sees her husband is when he wants to indulges his strange fetish, to play with her as if she were a doll...