1973, France
Original title: Le journal intime d’une nymphomane
Alternative title: Diary of a Nympho
Jess Franco’s film reconstructs the events that led to a young woman’s compulsive nymphomania and eventually, her own suicide.
Underlying this film’s colourful blend of sleaze and kitsch, however, is Franco’s characteristic commentary on alienation.
In the opening sequence, a prostitute named Linda picks up an older man at a bar, gets him wasted and leads him down the street to a hotel room.
After hasty sex, the older man lies passed out and spent, and she calls the police to report a murder.
She then slits her own throat, giving herself just enough time to put the knife in his hand before collapsing lifeless on top of him.
The police bust in and arrest the bewildered man for murder.
His wife, convinced of his innocence (at least in regard to the murder charges) starts her own investigation into the girl’s life, which leads to a barrage of garish, sex-filled flashbacks detailing the girl’s search for intimacy and her subsequent descent into debauchery – including posing for pornographic pictures and heavy drug use.
As related by her closest friend and first lover, Linda’s first sexual experience with a man was getting molested on a Ferris Wheel by the balding man that she later frames for murder.
Confused, she runs away from home and has a succession of affairs with both men and women, trying to turn her abandonment issues and fear of (real) intimacy into something she wrongly perceives as positive: indiscriminate sexual activity.
Another of Linda’s close friends (and another wanton exhibitionist) has possession of Linda’s diary, and reads part of it aloud to the wife, relating Linda’s bizarre interpretation of her actions as humanitarian: “I wanted to give my body, my feelings, my sex, to my sisters and brothers, those who have known only pain, only humiliation.”
In the diary, Linda continues to describe one of her greatest fantasies – that a man will be trying as hard as he can to pleasure a woman to no avail – and that Linda would be able to make the woman “come just by touching her. That’s my revenge on them for the humiliation and pain they caused me when they raped me.”
Interestingly, she refers to the man who raped her as plural, as though she holds all men responsible for what happened to her – and yet her self-esteem issues keep her seeking their approval through sexual gratification.
She uses sex as a thinly veiled escape tactic, but each escapade only feeds her depression, no matter how much she tries to reinforce through her diary entries that her sexual behaviour is positive and healthy.
She gets taken in by a mysterious doctor (Jess Franco staple Howard Vernon) who whisks her off to a rest home in the country, to reform her into “a healthy, clean young woman again”.
He makes her realize that everything reverts back to the incident on the Ferris Wheel, but his efforts are in vain; she runs away from the rest home because she can’t stop having sex compulsively: “My body was longing to be caressed, to be kissed, to be penetrated.”
She decides that her situation is hopeless: “When I’m buried, they can write on the stone: ‘One Who Wanted Too Much’”
The coincidence of her rapist coming in to the bar provided perfect closure for her, as she was feeling suicidal anyway, but the story is primarily driven by her depression and her staggering alienation rather than by her desire for revenge.
Unlike Dagmar Lassander’s character in The Frightened Woman, Linda has no control, no direction, and her aggressive attempts at intimacy only create further distance between herself and the rest of the world.
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