Women In Peril: JE BRULE DE PARTOUT

Happy Birthday to Brigitte Lahaie! I was lucky enough to score one of now OOP LE Blu-rays of Jess Franco's rarely seen crime drama, Je Brule de Partout ((1978). It sold out in record time from PULSE VIDEO, in partnership with Vinegar Syndrome. Queen of Euro-erotica Brigitte Lahaie emerges from a sea of welcome vintage grain in the opening disco scene. A welcome indicator in this 2k scan from 35mm elements. The plot in rudimentary: An agent investigates the abduction of Jenny Goldstone (Susan Hemingway) after she left a disco club. The daughter of an American diplomat in Lisbon, is then sold by the kidnappers to a group who run an exclusive seaside brothel . After swimming in the cultural cesspool of this film's depressing SexWorld, the agent comes up with results that punish the guilty and rescues the young woman.

This downmarket production exists on the edge of hardcore cinema without ever quite taking the plunge. It's a jazz filled, downbeat immersion into the director's familiar criminal netherworld of drugs, kidnapping, extortion, white slavery, sex, international intrigue and violence. There's also a dark current of father-daughter incest which provides a queasy conclusion, as it did in Franco's other 1978 Robert de Nesle production, COCKTAIL SPECIAL, a full hardcore adventure made on the same Portuguese locations. These two films would be the last productions of the prolific producer, who passed away the same year.

The rescuer of Hemingway turns out to be a repeated Jess Franco protagonist, the stealthy P.I., Al Periera. He also enforces rough justice on Hemingway's corrupt father for his sexual transgressions, giving the film an oddly (for Franco) moral conclusion.

Ms.Lahaie appears as a human trafficker who trolls the nightclubs of Europe for fresh meat. Hemingway's character becomes her victim here. She was also a villain as the murderous nurse, loyal to a criminal plastic surgeon, played by Helmut Berger in Franco's FACELESS (1988). She plays a more positive character in Franco's 1987 crime epic, DARK MISSION, starring Christopher Mitchum as an agent who breaks up a drug ring run by a crime lord played by Christopher Lee. I tend to prefer her as the victim of a nuclear radiation leak in Jean Rollin's LA NUIT DE TRAQUEES and as a violent avenger in his elegant female vampire fantasia, FASCINATION (1979). The Bluray also contains an interview with Ms Lahaie about her work with Franco, Jean Rollin and on other films. She also reveals that JE BRULE DE PARTOUT was shot in a week with a few days left over to make a hardcore film, presumably COCKTAIL SPECIAL, which Franco asked Ms. Lahaie to take part in. She quickly refused. (C) Robert Monell, 2023