The weird thing about Traitement de Choc, usually shown in English-speaking areas as Shock Treatment, is that it went by the title Doctor in the Nude in the UK when it was released in the early 1970s. Nothing to do with the comic novel Doctor in the Nude by Richard Gordon, the latest in his larky series about young doctors, and more to do with the fact that for one very brief moment you got to see star Alain Delon’s penis.
So that’s how it got sold to British audiences, with the vaguely saucy title as some sort of come-on, because selling it any other way would have been, in the distributors’ eyes at least, a waste of time.
Needless to say it completely mis-sells the film, which is a paranoid thriller of the sort Michael Crichton used to serve up in early films like The Andromeda Strain, The Cary Treatment and Coma, before Westworld and Jurassic Park shifted his focus.
Alain Delon is the big name but the star is really Annie Girardot, who plays a fairly rich and pretty bored woman cusping middle age who signs on for revolutionary treatment at a chintzy clinic run by the mysterious Doctor Devilers (Delon). Nominative determinism fans, go to work on that.
Hélène (Girardot) is just coming out of a nasty break-up. Her guy left her for a younger model and so she’s after a bit of what all the other rich, idle patients at this clinic want – rejuvenation. The treatments take place at night, an obvious red flag. But after her first one she feels absolutely fantastic and so heads down to the beach for some naked romping in the surf with her fellow patients… a scene director Alain Jessua came up with on the hoof and fait accompli’d Delon into going along with. In his Doctor in the Nude moment, he looks like he’s enjoying it.
What is the treatment though? Is it really an injection of sheep hormones, as advertised? After Hélène’s gay best friend Gérôme (Robert Hirsch) suddenly winds up dead, she sets off on a one-woman quest to sleuth out the truth. Dressed, it must be said, in one unflattering outfit after another, though the mutton/lamb equation is at least partly what the film is about.
Soylent Green came out the same year as Shock Treatment and there are story parallels. If that sounds too spoilerish, you’ll have worked out long, long before the end what’s really going on in this movie, and what exactly is in the revolutionary injections that make everyone so perky.
Satires on modern life lose force as their target recedes into the past, but Shock Treatment still has some bite, because there are still rich people in the world afraid of ageing, who are prepared to spend large amounts of money “curing” it and aren’t too concerned about who they exploit in the process. Weirdly, in the 21st century they’re probably all still imbibing celery and carrot juice and trenchering down platefuls of seaweed, as the hopeful candidates for life extension are doing in this movie when they’re not being razzed up with a hypodermic.
Hélène’s investigation is low key but it does at least showcase the sets – modernist exteriors of glass and chrome, plus pristine white tiles – and a lot of styling. Hair, clothes, cars, furniture, there’s an almost cartoonish, Gerry Anderson (of Thunderbirds) look to everything, and Delon plays up to that idea, a Bond villain who’s charming but patently up to something shady long before it’s been revealed.
It is all a bit thin, and though Girardot gives it her all, there’s a lack of thrillerish oomph. But this is a good-looking film at its best in its presentation of the very rich as a self-regarding cult that behaves almost like a coven.
Traitement de Choc aka Shock Treatment – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
