Trans-Europ-Express (1966)

Well now that I've ploughed through FrightFest, I can go back to reviews of my regular viewing and it's a pity in a way that I am starting with the above French film -- only because it is freshest in my mind, having seen it at the National Film Theatre last night.  They are doing a season of so-called lost masterpieces from earlier London Film Festivals -- movies that made a splash at the time but have been little seen since.  In the case of this one by director Alain Robbe-Grillet I can understand why.  In a word it was pretentious; in two words it was very pretentious (but should I expect otherwise from the director of "Last Year in Marienbad" -- a film whose appeal I have never understood).  We have the director himself playing a director on a train journey with some friends, throwing out possibilities for a potential film script on drug smuggling between Paris and Antwerp.  As each idea is refined, the story is acted out by Jean-Louis Trintignant playing the would-be smuggler and interacting in various scenarios with whore/spy Marie-France Pisier.  It's meant to appear ever so clever as the characters engage and disengage into some kind of Chinese box puzzle, but each variation of the film-maker's reality became less and less involving.  There was also a sub-theme of the protagonist being fixated with bondage which allowed for some purely gratuitous and largely unerotic semi-nude poses.  All something of a disappointment.