THE STORY OF O (1975)

Cast

Plot

Gorgeous, sexy O is taken by her husband to an S&M parlour (there's a lot of soft core material on show here) in a chateau near Paris, where she is passed on to his elder step-brother, Sir Stephen, who brands her arse with his own initials. She suddenly seems freer, but not in a wild child way, more like a raging bourgeois housewife, a role she's been prepared for from childhood. Having lived the life, complete with her own apartment and Vogue photoshoots, O gravitates towards a house with servants and lacy tablecloths and realises her taste for them. Thus, when she finally turns the tables on Sir Stephen, it's like she's discovered what it means to be adult. 'The Story of O' disturbs precisely because it takes us through the dumb mask to the unpredictable human beneath. A hugely successful soft porn movie from the director of Emmanuelle, adapted from the best-selling S&M novel by Pauline Reage aka Anne Desclos, banned by the prudish Brits for years and now available for all you voyeurs and fantasists out there.