If you’ve ever wanted to see Klaus Kinski’s hairy anus, Fruits of Passion (Les fruits de la passion) is the movie for you. A sequel of sorts to the infamous/scandalous Story of O, it’s a “life inside the brothel” tale about the sentimental education of an impressionable young beauty at the hands – and other body parts – of a ripe old western roué.
Directed and co-adapted from the Anne Declos novel Retour à Roissy by the multi-hyphenate Shūji Terayama, it is both orientalist and a critique of the same, with Kinski the absolute embodiment of the lordly patron. Dressed in white throughout, shock of blond hair, eyeliner, cadaverous as usual, he is absolutely on the money as Sir Stephen, the decadent western aristocrat getting his kicks from the humiliation of his latest disciple, O (Isabelle Illiers), his own new wife. There, to prove her love for him, she has agreed to being exported from France to 1920s China, where she takes her place alongside women who have already been broken in.
While Sir Stephen whiles away his days having sex with O, she attempts to forge alliances inside the brothel, with co-workers Byakuran (Hitomi Takahashi) and her rival Nathalie (Arielle Dombasle). Meanwhile, outside, a poor young man, billed as “the young man”, has taken a fancy to O. But he can’t afford the high price a white woman commands and so turns in his humiliation to the rebel upstarts planning a “coolie” uprising. In a very direct way the personal becomes the political.
This is a deliberately provocative movie. The sex looks like it’s done for real and both Illiers and Dombasle have since stated they suggested that it was and that they regretted the whole escapade. Though, objectifying hat on for a second, both women look pretty good. If that sounds frivolous, so is the film, now and again. And porny, now and again. But there is the political strand to keep an earnest lid on things – a fig leaf, if you like. And Terayama has a tendency to undermine himself when he’s being titillating, suddenly introducing a mad fantasy element, some comedy or a touch of the surreal. And in the late introduction of a plot strand about the shooting of a film in the neighbourhood, things even get faintly meta-textual.
Even so, if you are a bit of a delicate flower, the sex – fellatio, bondage, voyeurism, machines, whips, leather, chains, acres of female flesh – will probably bring on an attack of the vapours.
Bertrand Bonello’s L’Apollonide (it goes by many titles in English, House of Tolerance most often) owes this film a debt, with Bonello also capturing what Terayama has laid out so well, the exquisite boredom of just hanging around waiting for some man to show up (who will then expect total engagement as he’s beaten or otherwise cajoled to orgasm).
This is in many ways a rough and ready film, with crashing edits, but Terayama has an eye for a pretty colour and his film has energy and flow and ideas – the big one being colonialism, dealt with in a way that’s direct and unusually explicit. And the casting of a man, Pîta, as the brothel madame, gives things a charge in the 21st century that they wouldn’t have had in the 20th.
“Kinski shows hole,” is the totality of one review one Letterboxd. It made me laugh, but it’s fair enough. The film does not feature on Rottentomatoes, which obviously considers it to be porn, and when it is reviewed elsewhere tends to get a slightly nervous reception, as if the writer is a bit worried readers are going to think they’ve enjoyed the sex too much. I’m not convinced you are meant to enjoy it. The women look fine but the sex doesn’t look particularly like fun. Often it looks downright ridiculous or disturbing. Isn’t that partly what Terayama is trying to say? Discuss.
Fruits of Passion – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
