So Sweet…So Perverse (Così dolce… così perversa) was the second of the series of gialli made by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker. It was released in 1969.
Jean Reynaud (Jean-Louis Trintignant) lives in a swank Paris apartment with his wife Danielle (Erika Blanc). Their marriage could best be described as an armed truce. They don’t sleep together. Jean has affairs. At the moment he’s having an affair with a married woman, Helene Valmont (Helga Liné).
Jean is chronically bored. He is always searching for something, anything, to relieve his boredom.
The apartment on the top floor, just above theirs, has just been rented by an American woman. We will soon find out that this is Nicole Perrier (Carroll Baker). Jean notices her immediately. He always notices beautiful women.
Then he hears sounds from Nicole’s apartment. It sounds like a violent argument between a man and a woman and the woman sounds frightened. Jean races upstairs but Nicole’s apartment is locked and no-one will answer the door.
Then Jean remembers that he has a key to that upstairs apartment. It had been given to him when the apartment was untenanted and he had forgotten to return it. He heads upstairs again and lets himself in. He finds Nicole in an agitated state, but she refuses his offers of help.
Jean doesn’t think too much more about the incident but the following day he spots Nicole in the street. He follows her, to a photographic studio. He hears another violent argument. Nicole bursts out of the door, again very agitated, and asks Jean to take her away from there.
When he finally persuades her to talk she tells him about Klaus and about how much she hates him, but she can’t break away from him. Klaus is cruel and brutal and twisted and sadistic. But Nicole keeps going back to him. He excites her.
This should have been a red flag for Jean, but Jean thinks of himself as a sophisticated man of the world and as a man who can handle any situation. He doesn’t want to admit that he might be getting out of his depth with Nicole.
He will soon discover just how far out of his depth he already is.
He has fallen hard for Nicole. They begin an affair. Danielle is jealous and upset. Jean did not expect that. It is possible that Jean is one of those men who doesn’t understand women anywhere near as well as he thinks he does.
Jean and Danielle set off for a romantic getaway but the bad news is that Klaus has tracked them down.
Then the plot twists start to come thick and fast and they’re delightfully twisted and nasty. You can’t take anybody in this movie at face value.
This movie belongs to an incredibly interesting period in the history of the giallo. Mario Bava had made a full-blown giallo in 1964, Blood and Black Lace, but it failed to start a trend. Then, right at the tail end of the 60s, came a number of movies in which you can see the giallo beginning to emerge as a distinct genre but with a slightly different feel to the movies that followed in the wake of Dario Argento’s 1970 Bird with the Crystal Plumage. These late 60s movies were all about sex, decadence, betrayal and murder among the rich and glamorous (what was known at the time as the Jet Set). These movies included Romolo Guerrieri’s The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968) and Lucio Fulci’s One on Top of the Other (1969) as well as the first couple of Umberto Lenzi-Carroll Baker gialli.
So Sweet…So Perverse taps into the same vein of decadence, betrayal and murder.
The screenplay was mostly the work of Ernesto Gastaldi and that’s a major plus. His screenwriting credits include such gems as the excellent gothic horror The Long Hair of Death and important gialli including The Sweet Body of Deborah, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, All the Colors of the Dark and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key as well as the fascinating Secrets of a Call Girl (AKA Anna, The Pleasure, The Torment, 1973).
Carroll Baker is of course fabulous. But Jean-Louis Trintignant and Erika Blanc are just as good and their characters are just as important. Helga Liné is good also and Horst Frank is wonderfully sinister. This really is a great cast.
Severin’s Blu-Ray release looks fabulous and includes a fine audio commentary by Kat Ellinger.
So Sweet…So Perverse is highly recommended.