La belle captive (1983)

Alain Robbe-Grillet's La belle captive almost plays like a parody of European art house cinema that Robbe-Grillet himself helped to create. We have gratuitous nudity, a fractured plot, beautiful visuals, surrealism, bourgeois decadence, and so on and so on. In this film a man named Walter catches the eye of a beautiful woman at a night club, but is called away on a mission by his boss, the leather-clad biker Sara Zeitgeist. But on his way, in the dead of night, he finds the woman injured on the road. They go to a villa where sinister looking men in tuxedos imply she is some sort of prisoner and they are locked in a room for the night by a "doctor" and have sex (or do they?). And then Walter wakes up, and everyone is gone. It is and it is not easy to guess what follows. Characters appear and re-appear, there are police investigations, mental breakdowns, random cuts, even vampires. This movie is so blatantly pretentious that I could not help but think of it as some sort of parody. The ending only confirmed this for me. What is this movie up to? The description calls it Lynchian, but that is an adjective used for any movie that is moderately surreal. And it is also a somewhat theatrical looking film. I liked this, but I did not love it. It is so saturated in Euro-art house tropes that I had a hard time taking it seriously.