Here’s a quite wildly cheesy film that’s so full of early late sixties stylistic ticks and traits that you can’t help but wonder if the whole thing was actually made by people who had a somewhat shaky connection with reality. In fact, it actually feels like it could have been released a few years earlier, when LSD was the drug of choice and before the tendency towards pessimistic realism crept in with the seventies.
Four ‘chicks’ who share an apartment – Bernadette (Bernadette Lafont), Frederique (Elisabeth Wiener), Christine (Jane Birkin) and Martine (Emma Cohen) – spend their days dancing, having fun and gabbling at each other. Their life becomes a little more complicated when a new neighbour moves in next door, Dominini (Carlo Giuffrè), a mysterious Italian. After spying on him through a telescope, they become convinced that he’s a wanted bank robber and, what’s more, that he has a huge bundle of cash – the loot from one of his raids – stashed in his vulnerable looking safe. Being a little low on the readies themselves, they come to the conclusion that the solution to their financial problems would be to steal it, in turn, for themselves.
Despite carrying out some ‘intensive training’ (i.e. doing karate moves at the camera) and calling on the help of Bernadette’s dodgy dad (Henri Virlojeux), a convicted thief, they soon find out that this robbery malarkey is nothing like as easy as it looks. Not least when, after making off with the supposed stash, they discover that poor Dominini wasn’t the wanted bank robber after all; or, at any rate, that’s what the police think…
To start by throwing something of a curveball, Seduction Squad is not unlike a eurotrash equivalent to Sex and the City: it’s a comedy focusing on four young women, their sexual entanglements and the humorous situations they get into. And, like Sex and the City, it’s not nearly as funny as it would like to think it is. In fact, it’s not that hard to imagine this being remade today, albeit with an ironic, post-feminist twist (i.e. by including a couple of male characters who are so obviously imbecilic it makes the ditzy female protagonists look as though they are actually in possession of a functioning brain (and that’s a functioning brain each, not between them)). Personally, though, I’d find Sex and the City a lot more entertaining if, like this, it had frequent speeded up sequences, car chases, nudity and a cameo appearance from Victor Israel.
But, given the fact that it’s an entertaining product of its time, it’s not actually a particularly good film. The plot, of course, is complete cheesecake, and could have been made by writing a page of random words on a sheet of paper, tearing it up, throwing it in the air and reassembling it according to the way in which the assorted fragments fall to the floor. There’s almost nothing in the way of characterisation beyond making one of the girls a ‘good’ one, one a ‘sassy’ one, one a ‘hippie’ and one so lacking in any kind of individual features that you forget she’s actually a separate character to the others (Elisabeth Wiener is the unfortunate actress). Furthermore, the relentless zaniness becomes a little grating, and as there’s no real sense of pacing, tension or, quite frankly, purpose, this particular viewer’s attention was beginning to waver by the halfway mark.
There were some curious people behind this mess. Quite apart from the high profile cast, it was co-written by Michel Martens, who also wrote the demented sounding Hallucinations sadiques, and there’s a (pretty awful) soundtrack from Serge Gainsbourg. Director Franco Balducci had an odd career, specialising in low grade comedies, but also making a not-at-all-bad spaghetti western, In the Dust of the Sun. Despite my reservations, I can actually imagine a lot of people enjoying this: if it had been made for five dollars, featured a bunch of non-actors and a bit of softcore porn, it could easily pass for a Jess Franco movie.