Therese and Isabelle: Sexploitation but Artistic

Therese and Isabelle (1968) is a film about a forbidden love. A middle-aged woman, Therese, after a few years returns to her old college to relive her past. She walks through the empty school’s building and pictures her time with her old love. All memories come floating back. She reminisces and remembers all the dramatic and important images from her old love, who was her classmate, a blond girl, Isabelle. Therese walks in the empty school again and in each specific place she stops and flashes back to the old happenings. Filmmaker Radley Metzger’s style incorporates these memories to create a film that is both artistic and sexploitation.

The film navigates through time. Voices and figures return to haunt Therese. She seems still shocked by the powerful emotions each memory evokes in her. She enters the school’s yard and is reminded of her first school day when her mother and her stepfather left her in the school. She is hopeless because she was left alone by her mother, who was the only person that she had. She feels abandoned and Isabelle is her first and only companion at school. Isabelle is a beautiful smart girl who is rebellious and unpredictable. She never talks about herself, about her family and even rejects Therese’s questions about her past and her love life. After a while, they become attracted to each other and start flirting. When Isabelle is on a summer trip with her family, Therese experiences her first sexual encounter with a college guy who likes her, but she is not attracted to him. When Isabelle returns to school, their relationship becomes more serious. They make love everywhere; in their dorm rooms, in a restroom, in the school’s chapel, and in the woods. They are in love until Isabelle leaves abruptly. They never meet each other again.

Despite the fact that Therese and Isabelle is in the category of exploitation film, the style of the narrative puts it in the category of artistic movies. Richard Corliss in his article “Therese and Isabelle by Radley Metzger” in FilmQuart magazine states that some important elements separate Metzger’s film from all other sexploitation movies: “Therese and Isabelle is the first sexploitation film that is almost too good to be a sexploitation film. It is serious, even sober; it has a meticulously schemed mis-en-scene and one fine performance; and in a dangerously ethereal way, it is dirty” (Corliss 63). The film was made by Radley Metzger, an American filmmaker who was known for adult erotic films. Metzger made a revolution in the exploitation film industry. Richard Natale believes Metzger led the wave of sexploitation movies in a direction that was more artistic and similar to European artistic movies during the 1960s and 70s. Metzger was:

Among the filmmakers who rode the wave of changing sexual movies in the 60s and 70s Whose stylish erotic ramps (usually set in Europe) stand beside and pushes independent filmmakers toward breaking new boundaries in the on-screen depiction of sex and nudity.

Metzger films cover the full range of adult sexuality and woman has a significant role in his movies and is allowed for full erotic expression.

Metzger was like a leader of a new style in American erotic movies during the 1960s and 70s. Most of the sexploitation film and distribution companies preferred to make erotic pictures with a minimum budget and attract people to theatres just by showing stereotyped sexual images. Subsequently, the projects did not have stars or professional casts, so the results were low quality films. Metzger was the founder of Audubon Distribution Company, “The one great exception to the sexploitation standard was Metzger’s Audubon films. Metzger first as a distributor and then, concurrently, as a director did for sex films in the sixties what Playboy had done for sex magazines in [the] fifties”(Corliss 19). Audubon was known as an artistic sexploitation film company.

Metzger’s movies are not just about homeless prostitutes or folk erotic stories. Corliss describes woman characters in Metzger’s movies: “Metzger movies were classier, more literate, better made, and blessed with women who looked as if they could communicate desire without carrying disease” (Corliss 19). Instead of portraying overtly complex people, Metzger chooses everyday characters, with specific attitudes, who have a powerful story to tell. It is like making an erotic melodrama. Therese and Isabelle is a lesbian melodrama that revolves around a sexual conflict. The story happens in a usual environment (the college), and the main characters are two girls from the wealthy stratum of society. Consequently, the story’s climax shapes when these two characters are experiencing a conflict, because they reveal their true love toward each other when they are in crisis.

Therese and Isabelle is Metzger’s masterpiece, which is based on a novel by a French writer, Violette Leduce. The film is a unique example of an artistic erotic movie, and it talks about homosexuality in a charming and intellectual way but at the same time Metzger exploits nudity and erotic components to develop the plot. Boze Hadleigh, in his article “Lavender Screen: the Gay and lesbians films,” expresses how the content of Metzger’s film “purports to deal with loneliness and self-discovery, but it trades in female a nudity and lesbian love scenes performed by eventually heterosexual characters” (Hadleigh 38). The art form of the storytelling is professional, step by step, and in a slow pace.

The film’s narrative is improved by the smart style of the storytelling and quick and powerful flashbacks, which all prove the presence of the old Therese in the empty school. The most important element, which separates this film from other sexploitation movies, is the editing style. For instance overlapping the sounds and voices from the present time and past controls the audience and transfers their attention easily from the present to the past and vice versa. Sometimes Therese stands in a particular spot like her former dorm room and she is an observer of her memories, which are taking place in real figures of Isabelle and herself. She is her own witness. Therese is back and she walks through her lifetime but it seems she is trapped by all these memories; even the pattern of her clothes is like a prisoner.

Another significant factor in the film is the artistic style of the images. The spectacular compositions give particular meanings to the scenes. Moreover every mis-en-scene is symbolic and expresses a meaning. By way of example when Therese and Isabelle are sitting in front of each other in a café and Isabelle is talking about her past, she is placed in the right corner of the frame and the whole frame is covered by the Therese’s dark hair and Isabelle is fenced by darkness. This kind of composition gives a feeling of unreliability and fear. The film is shot in black and white because of the low budget (says Metzger). The cinematography is unique and engages you with the image’s mood. Richard Natale’s article in Los Angeles Times explains “the film is aided in its flourishing eroticism by its austere setting, long takes, tracking camera and Goerge Auric’s [the cinematographer] melancholy score” (Natale 20). The cinematography, frames, depth and compositions in Therese and Isabelle are not passive and enable the story to progress.

Metzger is so clever in how he portrays the sexual scenes and he attempts to show minimal nudity in the film. In Therese and Isabelle all the lesbian erotic scenes are summarized just in simple flirts and we can see the sex action in the reflection of an object on the wall. When Therese masturbates, the pleasure is iconic and appears on her face; everything is hid under her white sheet; her hand movements, her nude body and all these together make suspense and affect the audience more. Metzger usually does not like to demonstrate sexual scenes directly and in a natural and common way like other exploitation filmmakers. Actually he makes an effort to illustrate appealing valuable images with some aesthetics. Also Metzger uses narration specifically on sexual scenes in Therese and Isabelle to make the picture more dramatic than pure erotic. Metzger movies “are not necessarily just foreplay to heterosexual sex; often they occur solely for the satisfaction of the female characters” (Natale 20). Therese and Isabelle are not represented as guilty, although their love and their emotions are forbidden and even the spectator can easily sympathize with them.

It can be seen from the movie that Feminism is the vital core of the story. The entire film concentrates just on woman’s body and sexuality. Additionally the existence of man is limited and they seem like useless characters, which are just making distance between women, and women reject their roles. When Therese and Isabelle are walking in the park and they see a classic statue of a nude man, their reaction is laughing and passing the figure. Susie Bright in her article in A Virtual Sex World Reader magazine criticizes the male gaze on women’s bisexuality and says,

“Men who loves lesbians, we do not care of them too much” (Bright 95). Also, since the 1960s, feminists’ interpretation about bisexual pornography has affected the films about lesbians. They tried to eliminate the role of lesbians as an entertainment for men.

At its core, Therese and Isabelle is a fiction feature about loneliness and self-discovery and pushes the story forward by the women nudity and lesbian love elements. The film is not totally exploitation and not entirely artistic but satisfies both desires. In an article “The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger” on Uwire explains:

Delicately building a charged eroticism, Metzger’s direction fuses the classicism of his elegant black and white camera work and George Auric’s sweeping score with the modernism of the film’s time-shifting narrative, and while they may be just a shade too old to pass for adolescent schoolgirls, Therese and Isabelle share potent chemistry and sensuousness that makes the film genuinely intense.

The artistic style of Therese and Isabelle helps the story seem more realistic and believable than other sexploitation films and it is potentially like a story that could happen.

The original article can be found here.