Depravación (1982)

Co-produced by José María Cunillés Nogué

Directed by I. Mark Lane [Isabel Mulá]

Written by J. Goldsmith [José María Cunillés Nogué]

Photographed by Juan Gelpí

Edited by Gilbert Kikoïne

Music from the CAM catalogue

Produced by Films Dara (Spain) and France Continental Films (France)

Genre: Erotic melodrama

Cast: Robert Gras [José Gras Palau] (Victor Kinski), Françoise Perrot (Miriam), Josephine Varney [Concha García Valero] (Lucía/ Luisa), Jimmy Bask [Jaime Bascu] (Humberto), Jack Battle [Jordi Batalla] (Francisco), Jean Paul Perrier (Visitor), Patrizia Cauzard (Eleonora), Dionisio Macías (uncredited; voice of Victor Kinski).

Without any preambles, not even as much as the production interests involved, the title Depravación, in suitable cod-Gothic font, simply appears on the screen to the sole accompaniment if woodland and car noises. During the brief cast listing -a mere seven actors, mostly pseudonymous - we see the film's protagonist Victor Kinski pull up his vehicle in the midst of a sylvan milieu of rushes, shrubs and other greenery, and emerge to reveal himself in the likeness of actor José Gras (of HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD and MAD FOXES). The credits are momentarily interrupted for music to make its first appearance (a dreamy piece, culled from the CAM catalogue) and for Victor's voice-over (provided by the veteran Dionisio Macías, as in the dialogue scenes) to wax reminiscent about the place "where we first met and first loved each other" being the same as two years before. A reverse shot reveals this locale to be a white, gabled farmhouse situated on the lower end of a valley. The remaining credits accompany Victor's descent to the location of his memories and, once they are over, he is enters the house, looks around for inhabitants and finds himself held at gunpoint from behind by only occupant around, a woman in a bathrobe who has mistaken him for a burglar. Turning around, Victor is immediately recognised by Miriam (French hardcore actress Françoise Perrot) after a long period of absence and throws himself into his arms, seemingly marking her as the lover of his initial reminiscences.

No such luck, for Victor's mind has really been occupied by his late wife, Lucía, who committed suicide on account of his dominant excesses, which threatened to bereave her of her identity, in much the same way her novelist husband manipulated the characters of his erotic novels. Miriam has held a place second to Lucía's and he duly makes her his new partner, starting a relationship with her similar to that he held with his dead wife: he plays rape games with her and is soon offering her up to a coarse stable worker (Jordi Batalla, at his goofiest) as he watches or participates. At night Victor has nightmares about Lucía (Concha Valero, billed as "Josephine Varney") coming back from the dead and flashbacks to his past life with her are inserted into the main body of the film without any transition or indication, as if signifying the man's increasingly tenuous grasp on reality, and we finally witness the event of her suicide. Somehow, Miriam will not do as a replacement for her (even if she favours a slightly similar haircut, presumably a deliberate detail): maybe she comes across as too earthy in comparison, or perhaps it's simply that she is another person. One day, as he is strolling by the woods, the novelist views a young man named Humberto (Jaime Bascu) playfully giving chase to his teasing girlfriend Luisa (again, Concha Valero). The latter is identical to Lucía and Victor, with the help of Miriam - who is now largely subservient to his will - draws a plan to bring Luisa into the farmhouse. Following a long process, Luisa finally enters the site, where she is to be subjected to actual recreations of Victor's games and to a chase by the woods of more seriousness of consequence than that of her boyfriend in the earlier scene. The film ends with a recreation of one of the flashbacks, but with a diametrically opposed resolution, revealing what Victor had really wanted throughout, whether he was aware of it or not. To the very end, he has remained a manipulator of others, and Luisa - indeed, like a fictional character created by somebody else - will presumably never know what her role has been in the foregoing drama.

Released in 1983, towards the end of Spain's softcore craze, this entry must certainly break records (outside Jess Franco territory, anyway) in terms of the sheer amount of pseudonyms used, except for Pasiones desenfrenadas (1981, credited to Zacarías Urbiola). As in the earlier film, the script of Depravación features a professional writer of erotica (male here, female in Pasiones desenfrenadas) who uses the people in his or her surroundings as so many fictional creatures at their disposal right up to the suitable comeuppance at the end, except that the punishment here is more ambiguous, with the villainous lead winning (sort of) at the end, and the film closing with a low-angled close-up of the anguished and uncomprehending Luisa, before the image goes out of focus and the word "End" appears (once again, no music: just her voice sobbing quietly and tremulously).

A further involuntary link with Pasiones desenfrenadas is provided by the mystery surrounding this production. The script and directing are credited under pseudonyms which the Ministry of Culture identifies with José María Cunillés and Isabel Mulá, the husband-and-wife team of producers whose production company Films Dara represents the Spanish element of Depravación. It has been suggested online that these attributions could well be fictitious and that the film's direction could well be the work of Ricard Reguant, now a successful man of the stage but initially a man a man of many beards (in addition to his real one) within the terrain of the Spanish sex film. The basis for this lies in the similarity of the film's cast and locations with those of what is indisputably the work of Reguant, the likewise Films Dara-produced Sueca bisexual necesita semental. If made back to back, it would have been the first to be made, to judge from Jordi Batalla's longer hair here. Its actual period of production, to judge from Concha Valero's appearance, was presumably right before (rather than right after) Ignacio F. Iquino's Secta siniestra, where the actress (in addition to using the same "Josephine Varney" moniker, which was presumably created for the present film, a co-production with France) looks much the same in appearance.

Anyway, if we accept the back-to-back thesis, the authorship possibilities are still many: the film was made by Reguant, or by somebody else (a Frenchman perhaps) or, perhaps, by Isabel Mulá herself as officially noted. I, for one, see no reason, why a veteran and prolific script supervisor such as Mulá should not be able to direct competently. There is a certain irony, in any case, in the fact that these, the most elusive of Spanish sex films regarding their authorship, should themselves be films about authorship.

Whatever this was in the case of Depravación, the film itself remains an elegantly artificial, atmospheric addition to a busy Spanish genre. The element of artifice (coherent in the story of a man who lives his life as one of his own novels) is present in the VERTIGO-like premise (with Françoise Perrot playing a similar function to the Barbara Bel Geddes character in Hitchcock's film), the very limited cast population (four leads, three supports, no extras) and in the way several scenes are slight variants on ones that have been shown before: the mock chase between Jaime Bascu and Concha Valero midway through the film becoming "real" in the film's climax; the camera movement along the bed during Gras's initial seduction of Perrot being echoed when Perrot herself seduces Bascu; a scene with Valero entering the house, in which she is given similar directions to those of José Gras at the very beginning when it was he who was entering somebody else's house; and, of course, the very ending, with Victor and the hapless Luisa-as-Lucía exchanging the roles played in a previous episode of the man's life, with the psychopathic protagonist expiating his guilt from that episode but at the same time emerging as an even greater bastard than he had been before. It is all much helped by Juan Gelpí's photography and the morosely quiet direction, though not perhaps by the choice of lead actor, whose limitations are emphasised by the surname given to the character he plays. If Concha Valero (seemingly the only cast member to supply her voice in the dubbing) looks more confident than in Iquino's Secta siniestra (where she wore the same tomboyish haircut) and Françoise Perrot supplies an impressively powerful presence, neither of them, let alone Perrot (an intense-looking woman in her thirties) look as if she would give in so easily to a man who hardly suggests the rich experience attributed to him by the script. Gras, to his credit, does work hard to give a better performance than lies within his reach, but as in MAD FOXES, the filmmakers make the mistake of permitting him another squash-faced crying scene.