Synopsis
A banker hires a seedy detective to find his daughter and keep her safe from kidnappers.
Playing with Fire
Cast
Jean-Louis Trintignant Philippe Noiret Anicée Alvina Sylvia Kristel Agostina Belli Serge Marquand Charles Millot Vernon Dobtcheff Jacques Seiler Michel Berto Christine Boisson Marc Mazza Jacques Doniol-Valcroze Nathalie Zeiger Joëlle Cœur Robert Favart Antoine Fontaine Ingrid Caven Martine Jouot Marauha Sylvie Olivier Jacques Poirson Gérard Melki Mario Santini Elisabeth Strauss Maurice Vallier Jean-Louis Tristan Pierre-André Boutang Francis Girod Show All…
Director
Producer
Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Assistant Directors
Executive Producers
Production Design
Sound
Costume Design
Makeup
Studios
Countries
Language
Alternative Titles
불 장난, Das Spiel mit dem Feuer, Giochi di fuoco, Игра с огнем, 玩火, Brincando com o Fogo, Žaidimas su ugnimi, 危険な戯れ, 플레잉 위드 파이어, ცეცხლთან თამაში
Releases by Date
Theatrical
-
France16
03 Mar 1975
-
USA
Releases by Country
France
19 Feb 1975
- Theatrical16
USA
03 Mar 1975
- Theatrical
Popular reviews
More-
Playing With Fire. 1975. Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, the writer behind Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1999) directed and wrote Playing With Fire (1975). Playing With Fire is a complex web of a film. I would say that it definitely influenced David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and many other sophisticated art house auteurs who have proved themselves singular in their filmmaking. Alain Robbe-Grillet took the approach of surrealism, doppelgängers, and actors who portrayed multiple characters to make a film that has the pace of The French Dispatch (2021) while more reminiscent of Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) by Jacques Rivette.
Playing with fire is also very Buñelian and plays…
-
In Successive Slidings of Pleasure, my first Alain Robbe-Grillet film, I had the impression of an irritating self-seriousness that dominated everything — apart, that is, from the single scene in which Jean-Louis Trintignant appeared. He's gleefully, intentionally strange, successfully contentedly shattering any intent his director might have had to compel us to take either Trintignant or his absurd cop character seriously.
Playing with Fire, made just a year later, features Trintignant in a similar — but, happily, far larger — role and, this time, the whole movie is as irreverent as he is, building magnificently into a flawless third act, and what is surely one of the grandest farces in exploitation cinema. It's a film in which: there is no…
-
Whimsically perverse erotica drenched in dreamy surrealism and a cloud of artsy incoherence aka my kinda sleazy absurd cinema! Just look at that poster art! What kind of sexy nude fantasy lair awaits???
How to not have your daughter kidnapped? Send her to a "safe house" that's actually a lavish sexual mansion of debauchery! That'll keep her safe for sure! An abstract sleazy drama that feels like a bizarre and self aware parody our brains are Playing with Fire! We are taken on a majestic yet vicious trip through escalating sexual deviance and kinky depravity.
A sophisticated and elegant cinematic experience Playing with Fire is just as stylish as it is polished. It can feel rather dense at times yet…
-
"Strange things happen in this house."
Sylvia [Kristel] admitted that Playing With Fire could be the title of her life story…
— Jeremy Richey, From Emmanuelle to ChabrolRobbe-Grillet’s bondage and submission Patty Hearst inspired kidnapping farce.
Recommended if you like: Jean-Louis Trintignant acting like a little shit (“all men wear false mustaches”). The Story of O, but wished it was more ironic (“have you already participated in sadistic games?”). Fourth wall breaking winks at the camera (“ah ha, untranslatable wordplay”). Kidnapped women in wicker baskets (“LIVE ANIMAL”). Sylvia Kristel bent over in erotic supplication. Plots that resemble Rube Goldberg machines. French “puzzle box” mysteries.
“I didn’t understand the script at all. But I think that’s what it was.”
-
For a surreal sado-masochistic drama, Alain Robbe-Grillet's Playing With Fire is quite the romp. Jarring and zany, yet never losing that sophisticated edge. An odyssey through the most sinister sleaze, rendered abstract and whimsical like some cataclysm of Russ Meyer and Jean-Luc Godard. Prepare for some illegal levels of head-scratching calamity to ensue.
What starts out as some preposterous kidnapping of a young woman by a group of trench-coated slimeballs soon unravels into slapstick and poetry. Her father is informed of the ransom and then sprayed with a mist that drugs him and infiltrates his mind with the images of what might happen to his daughter - but then she turns up at his house and they await this soon-to-be…
-
At the end of the film, a character, or better said, the actor that plays him, remarks: "I didn't understand the script at all." Likewise, the film itself is successful at being confusing on purpose but disastrous at retaining interest, as it is more preoccupied with deciding how much sense it should (or shouldn't) make than anything else. Alain Robbe-Grillet being a trickster once again and playing his audience like a broken fiddle. Playing with Fire is yet another tongue-in-cheek and self-aware but flat and inaccessible exercise in the director's strange oeuvre, a picture that makes use of too many storytelling and camera tricks to confound and explores sexual perversions with slightly too much attentiveness. It is tiresome, and insistently…
-
This feels as if Robbe-Grillet just felt tired of causality, the fourth wall, and narrative convention, but that's only the start of what I liked about it. The title seems to have significance, suggesting not just that this is about risky behavior but also that Robbe-Grillet is having some fun going overboard with this. The ending is icing (maybe that's a hot/cold fire/ice pun theme going on here, maybe not) on the cake as it steps away from the film's reality and into ours, clearly a moment to have a good laugh for all involved (I liked it).
Most strikingly, the film focuses in on scenes of fetishistic/perverse extravagance, mixing simpler sexual tableaus with transgressive taboos, all of which are…
-
All men's mustaches are fake.
My fourth film from the director, and yet again it involves a woman prisoner or being chained or tied up. One might think from hearing that description that all of these are misogynistic or something, but that is far from the case. It's more a metaphor than anything, and each film handles the meaning of prison and prisoner differently. In Playing with Fire, kidnapping (and being held prisoner) is all a game, in a strangely non-surreal way. Although strange, the story is straightforward. It plays like a rich secret society who likes to have a little fun by kidnapping women and then turning it into some kind of game that vaguely resembles the orgy parties…
-
in an alternate universe, Marquis de Sade made this and it was called Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.
-
"The gate isn't locked?"
"Of course not, why would it be?"
"As a precaution, I've been told."
"To only one who's a caution, occurs a precaution. Untranslatable wordplay."Alain Robbe-Grillet's Playing with Fire is a film like no other I've seen. It reminded me occasionally of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom at times, but only because of its extremely dark sense of humor about being forced to do certain things against one's will. It features no end of fourth wall-breaking as most of the characters will look directly into the camera at times to confirm that, yes, that's what just happened or was said and occasionally they speak directly to us. It's not a comedy at all, but at times is wickedly funny and in the end, it's up to you to decide what actually happened or didn't.
-
-
