Lewd and voyeuristic: this dirty story is only 50 minutes long, but it will blow your mind!

The Dirty Story hit theaters on November 9, 1977, directed by iconoclastic filmmaker Jean Eustace, author of La Maman et la Putain. At one time the work was presented on his posters as “A movie that women don’t like“, a provocative expression if ever there was one.

The story features a man telling a story to a congregation of mostly women. This person found a hole in the bottom of a women’s toilet door in the basement of a Paris cafe.

He began to descend regularly, placing his head on the floor of these dirty toilets to see the sex of the women. The hole became an obsession: he wanted to see it directly through sex, rather than going through the stages.

Amazing device

This film, which was released on June 7th in a restored 4K version, is very special. It lasts 50 minutes and is divided into two parts. The first one is narrated by Jean-Noel Pic in the form of a document. He tells the story in front of a group of friends consisting of four women and Jean Eustace himself.

The second part is a monologue in the form of fiction, narrated by actor Michael Lonsdale. For this, he was invited by film director and film critic Jean Duche. Then the tandem is joined by three women and a man, who will become the hero’s audience.

This device created by Jean Eustace, almost experimental, is quite disturbing to the public. If the text is almost identical, the way of filming is completely different. For example, a portion of a document is shot at 16mm for fiction at 35mm. The editing also varies between the two narrative forms, making Une sale Histoire a unique work.

“Eustache thus establishes this basic form of modern cinema, which will be the ‘film in two’! Clever and cunning, he develops the “fictional” segment to the “documentary” and makes it accessible to the virgin audience. The original of which will be the “dirty” version of Picq, the real And according to the dialectic of lies, where the cinema inevitably prevails over “real life”Analyzes in the columns of Jean-Gavril Sluka DVD Classic (August 2014).

Amoral and voyeuristic

On AlloCiné, viewers gave Jean Eustache an average rating of 3.7 out of 5. “Deeply immoral and voyeuristic, this film is quite interesting, even though the woman is de-sacralized and there is only sex on feet. Even if in this case it is a simple fact of ‘seeing’ and not ‘having’. Enough for the character. Michael Lonsdale’s performance is excellent, very authentic.”– says Abarai.

This is somewhat disconcerting, especially if you don’t know the director’s style, but especially in relation to the story told by the narrator. It’s really pretty gross and that’s why you have to stick to the story, but it has to be said that Michael Lonsdale says it so well that we’re just drinking his words!Shawn777 believes.

On the other hand, Internet user Benoitparis describes the dirty story as “A very intelligent, very good, and subtly amoral artistic exercise. If one thinks voyeurism is at the heart of cinema, one must admit that a dirty story is an essential work. Art is never more powerful than when it shines a light on what it is. A priori scabrous or vile.”

With a dirty story, the director drew the ire of newspapers of the time, such as Le Figaro, writes Jean-Gavril Sluka. According to the author, the film director also aroused him “Shame on most of its usual defenders (Télérama & co).

However, the messy story allows him to reconnect with the notebook writing, which then leaves him comatose and prompts his Mao-era mea culpa. For several months its exploitation will not be empty, the work uses the controversial aura that Eustace requested.– says the author.

The Dirty Story is part of a program of re-releases of Jean Eustace films, restored in 4K. These feature films are hitting theaters from June 7.