This may or may not be Chabrol's best, but it must be his bravest. For what else can "The Pleasure Party" (1976) be but an open protest of patriarchy and battery. Think Ibsen's "A Doll House," and you cannot be far off. I think it's the final scenes that erase any minute doubt about the film's intent. First there is the belated rescue attempt of four men and a woman: the adult men's physical prowess seems suspended as if, as men, their hands are tied, while the woman casts a blinding black veil over Philip's head, halting the action, and condemning the actor. And then the prison scene in which Elsie (his new llama or lamb) tells her father that she is unable to learn under the harassment of a male student, to which his non-response includes the same transcendent jargon he used in the cemetery prior to his vicious assault. Chabrol and the Leguaffs have indeed taken their stand with this shattering portrait of male terror--one that explodes out of a convincingly two-faced man, and is thus all the more effective. <br /><br />Yes this is a movie about male power. It is not about sexual impotence, philosophies, or a mid-life crisis , but about Philip's hard-wired connection to masculine identity. If he feels inadequate and helpless in the face of what he can only understand as female weakness, it is because he has bought into women's difference--from men. In other words, Esther is so other to him that anything other than ownership is threatening. The turning point of the film is when he advises Esther --"you should do it."--to sleep with other men. This moment must be as pointedly misogynist as his later acts of violence; for here he equates his lover with sex, temptation, and whoredom --ostensibly to test his purity and his ideas of freedom, but, in effect, he is using her to provoke her own demise. It's very instructive that although he manages the first test--even offering his satiated wife breakfast in bed the next morning, it is sex in bed--with him (to reclaim ownership) must come first. And during a party scene, he argues for the comparison of Gandhi and Hitler--unaware that Gandhi similarly used women to test his own purity, and that the latter's sadistic, eruptive violence would soon adhere to him. <br /><br />What Philip becomes is a full fledged Magus: "the man who tells you everything and what to do" as he explains to Elsie, in his characterizing Habib. Toward Esther, he grows increasingly resentful, suspicious, tense, judgmental, menacing--and possessive. He shows the brawn to break down doors, and a mentality which can accept and enact cruelty. He becomes more withdrawn and, as Esther points out, racist. In the bathroom mirror scene his face, viewed through her tears, is as perverse as the Landru he introduced to his daughter in his House of Wax. The "freedom" he has granted his wife has boomeranged on him. He hates it and everyone and everything connected to it. "Liberty makes me sh_t," he says. When Sylvia simply asks "Why do you yell at Esther?" he answers that she talks too much of freedom and hangs out with guitar players. And his "profound" need for his ex-wife doesn't occur till Sylvia displays her independence in the fishing scene--here he longs for Esther's dependency symbolized for him in her fear of crabs. <br /><br />Esther grasps the picture, but does not have the social power to act sufficiently on it, so finds herself ultimately trapped. However, her defiance is quiet, lucid, and courageous. Her "you, you, it's all about you" refrain, and lines like: "You make the decisions, I only say amen" and "I was great as your reflection" are equal to Ibsen's Nora. But she is more psychologically isolated than Nora, and must suffer from far more abuse, verbal, and, of course, physical. Esther is a battered woman and must endure that syndrome--she cannot fully grasp what Philip says to his buddies: "her weak point move me," and how many times is she willing to forego the depth of her own words: "since when do you care what I say." She can never finally disbelieve her husband--even the forced foot-licking is not proof-- and so, in the end turns to him in a moment of personal crisis because "she is too scared" to visit alone the tomb of the dear deceased aunt, the woman who raised her. The irony here is as devastating as her words are convincing. And her final "NO, NO" has come too late and is heard too late. <br /><br />I understand that the Phillip role was turned down by several leading French actors. If one can relive some of his lines just previous to the assault, one can understand why? But his words serve to finally and totally expose the man behind the mask. His self-assurance, disarming directness, and engaging and almost defenseless smile belong now to a slave-holder, rather than a man who in his words, was "born to be joyful." When he say to Esther that all his sufferings (since their breakup--ha, ha, ha) "must be compensation for what I've been through," the viewer can only say bring on the executioner. It's so extremely tragic that he is the executioner.