Vice and Virtue is a perfect example of how Roger Vadim applied the concept of “seduction” to aesthetics as well as story, providing an operatic exercise in the transgressive and kinky with a veneer of literary cachet. He’d already done this with his modernised Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1960), which is possibly the best of several films from that novel (Milos Forman’s Valmont is also excellent). In the resoundingly artificial and allegorical Vice and Virtue, the high concept is to update the Marquis de Sade’s Justine to Nazi-occupied France at the end of WWII.
The set-up: older sister Juliette (Annie Girardot) has used her body to survive in ruthless times, helping her family but getting no thanks for it. She’s currently the mistress of an older, corpulent German general (O.E. Hasse) who keeps her in luxury. We see unbelievably sleek abodes designed by Jean André and shot in gorgeous widescreen black and white shot by Marcel Grignon, with great self-conscious attention to reflections and unusual angles, including the upside-down. It’s an almost abstract, self-parodic vision of decadence.
Meanwhile, Justine (Catherine Deneuve) is the virtuous younger sister, whose boyfriend is arrested by the Germans in front of the church on her wedding day. She begs Juliette to use her influence, although the latter has no intention of doing so because she struggles to maintain an ideal of harsh loyalty to herself alone. Closeups on Girardot’s face during these struggles are the wounded soul of the movie, especially during a virtuoso sequence when she’s made to witness one of the most aestheticized offscreen tortures in film history, as Michel Magne’s lush Wagnerian score lathers on the voluptuous turmoil.
The film follows the sisters’ parallel fortunes until, ironically, they both happen to be in a castle used as a brothel for the pleasure of German officers. Luciana Paluzzi and Valeria Ciangottini are among the sex slaves in a perverse retreat where life is “almost pleasant”. Juliette’s lover is now a brutal SS commander, an intense presence lent by Robert Hossein; in the film’s most classically Sadean moment, he announces, “The spectacle of suffering inflames the nerves more powerfully than pleasure.” Philippe Lemaire, Paul Gégauff, Serge Marquand, Georges Poujouly, Michel de Ré and Henri Virlojeux play various sadistic Germans at the castle.
Another briefly seen German is played by Howard Vernon, who was often cast as Nazi officers and whose presence links this movie to the Sadean films of Jess Franco, beginning with the previous year’s The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus. Franco’s official film version of the same material, Marquis de Sade:Justine (1969), is closer in monotonous spirit to its source but finally alters the ending to a more traditional resolution, as does Vadim.
Vadim collaborated with respectable French novelist Roger Vailland, who’d also worked on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and with Claude Choublier, who worked on other Vadims at this time. Their story capitulates to middle-class morality in a way the Marquis wouldn’t have approved, and it’s just as well his name isn’t used in the credits or advertising. This change might be unavoidable in an update to WWII, since the audience already knows that the forces of vice are headed for downfall. Still, this didn’t prevent Pier Paolo Pasolini from presenting a more rigorous (and anti-bourgeois-escapism) update in Salo. Vadim’s film is sleeker and sexier, and it makes no sense to complain about it.
Kino’s blu-ray transfer looks gorgeous. The only extra included on the Blu-ray is the trailer.