Maîtresse (1973) review

While going door-to-door and selling art books, Gerard Depardieu meets and falls in love with a dominatrix who has her own den of pain in a downstairs apartment. It succeeds in not being too clinical or hostile towards those that find pleasure in pain and humiliation and actually plays out as a (very) black comedy about sexual addiction. It has a lot in common with two films that would come later - the documentary Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist and David Cronenberg's Crash (and those that recall the "Hammer of Love" scene from Sick will get to see the same penile-puncturing here - albeit with the camera farther away) - but at the core of it all, this really works as a strange love story, with Depardieu's jealousy and hostility towards his lover's profession causing a problem with their relationship.