Directed by Shūji Terayama
Written by Rio Kishida and Shūji Terayama
Starring:
- Klaus Kinski as Sir Stephen
- Isabelle Illiers as O
- Arielle Dombasle as Nathalie
- Peter (credited as Pîtâ) as Madame
Rating: (NO RATING)
No sane actor would dare sign onto a film that parades some of the most jaw-droppingly deranged sex scenes ever committed to celluloid. But kooky kinky Klaus Kinski was never sane, and that’s exactly why he’s the exception. As Sir Stephens, a casino owner in 1920s Shanghai, he’s in his element: a slick creep who gleefully delivers his muse (or maybe daughter — it’s never clear, and that’s the point) into the plush nightmare of a brothel to be remolded for his pervy appetites. For Kinski, whose filmography is basically a zoo of lunatics, this role is less “different” than “more.” Here adds yet another grotesque effigy to that pantheon. Watching him grind through the aggressive, unsimulated sex scenes, you realize: this is Klaus Kinski at his most Klaus Kinski.
Shūji Terayama’s Fruits of Passion looks like nothing so much as a highbrow excuse to let Klaus Kinski work out his kinks in an experimental porno masquerade. Maybe Terayama actually wanted to make a wistful arthouse riff on Story of O, maybe not, but let’s be honest — the movie plays like Kinski’s wet dream dressed up in avant-garde drag. It’s “based” on Retour à Roissy, but you’d never know it; the film is too busy being smug, erratic, and gorgeously incoherent to decide whether it’s an adaptation, an experiment, or just sleaze. Instead, it settles into an artistic purgatory where the only consistent throughline is the flesh. And Kinski? He’s having the time of his life, thrashing around in a hedonistic trance.
As O, Isabelle Illiers withers before our eyes: her body made into a vessel of misery, her face a mask of dread. What should conjure eroticism instead manifests as suffering, her every motion etched with Kadavergehorsam, the terrifying obedience unto death. Watching her, one feels complicit in something cruel. It is no wonder I refuse to rate the film; she looks too wretched, too exposed, especially when paired with Kinski, whose presence leaves her visibly aghast. Arielle Dombasle fares no better, though her sultry demeanor conceals the strain—her infamous sex scene with Kinski, staged while Illiers languishes naked, shackled before a mirror, projects playfulness on screen, but years later she confessed her remorse. She, too, recalled Kinski’s tyrannical volatility, his relish in asserting carnal domination. In truth, such confessions merely reinforce what was always known—Kinski’s terror did not end at the screen; he was the cinema’s living boogeyman.
While whips crack in the brothel, history stirs outside: a rebel faction plots to unseat the European order embedded in Chinese society. The subplot, spectral and undernourished, never rises beyond suggestion, yet it colors the decadence with a strange gravity. To this is added the flourish of a romance—contrived, yes, but essential in unleashing the ruin of Sir Stephens and the cursed bond with O. These threads never weave seamlessly into the fabric of the depraved narrative; they cling like fragments. What secures Fruits of Passion its place in the canon of world art cinema is not narrative coherence but its daring aesthetic: an abstract, chromatically unstable, experimentally aggressive canvas that renders, with uncanny precision, the perilous allure of authoritarian fantasy and the fetishization of power. At once tastelessly autobiographical and mythic in its reflection of Klaus Kinski, the film emerges as both a pornographic allegory of his depravity and an inadvertent tribute to his genius. It is, in short, a feverish summation of his contradictions—virtues entwined with vices, brilliance inseparable from sin.
