Playing With Fire

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alain Robbe-Grillet

1975 / 112min / DCP

Inspired in part by the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, Robbe-Grillet’s brain-twister concerns banker Philippe Noiret as a wealthy banker whose daughter is threatened with abduction; Jean-Louis Trintignant as a seedy detective in the banker’s hire; and Anicée Alvina as the imperiled heiress who’s stashed away for her protection in an opulent brothel/SM dungeon—which is where Kristel, in a small-but-memorable role, gets in on the action. “Playfully anarchic and deliciously surreal, Playing with Fire finds Robbe-Grillet at his most gleefully combative. It is a gloriously chaotic film that is probably the most purely entertaining work Robbe-Grillet ever made, and one of the most subversive.”—Jeremy Richey, Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol