Hot on the heels of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Emmanuelle 4, Cannon Films honcho Menahem Golan was casting about for another vehicle to showcase erotic cinema goddess Sylvia Kristel, who had made her name starring in the first Emmanuelle film back in 1974. It seemed only natural, then, that he would settle on the true story of Mata Hari, the notorious dancer, courtesan, and spy who was executed by French firing squad in 1917. More unanticipated, Cannon approached cult horror filmmaker Curtis Harrington to direct the project.
Harrington got his start making experimental shorts, including the Maya Deren-inspired Fragment of Seeking, before turning his hand to genre fare like the poetic Night Tide and the hagsploitation classic What’s the Matter with Helen? Taken at face value, this forerunner of the New Queer Cinema movement might have seemed an odd choice for Mata Hari. But being a lifelong cinephile and consummate professional, Harrington brought a studied eye, an informed sense of the medium, and a scrupulous attention to detail to the project. As a result, Mata Hari is what you might call handsomely mounted, if nothing else.
The film is bookended with footage of Mata Hari (Kristel) in Java, carrying out a Shiva’s dance, but performance is foregrounded throughout. For one, we get extended glimpses of several of Mata Hari’s different routines throughout, and there’s a sequence in Berlin with a cabaret singer (Erzsébet Galambos) who performs a number in German. The very idea that a spy enacts a number of different roles in the course of duty only adds to the overall emphasis on performativity. This is never made clearer than in a scene late in the film that shows Mata Hari making her way behind enemy lines while wearing the disguise of a Red Cross nurse.
After the prologue set in Java, we’re introduced to the two men who will pass Mata Hari between themselves like a pawn in a game of chess, to which international espionage is explicitly compared: Georges Ladoux (Oliver Tobias) and Karl von Bayerling (Christopher Cazenove). Their attraction to Mata Hari is pitched somewhere between genuine affection and uncontrollable desire. Both men will inadvertently place her in harm’s way. Most assuredly, they both get to “possess” her over the course of the film.
The film’s eroticism is resolutely of the softcore variety. Occasionally, it even tips over into parody, as during a lovemaking session between Mata Hari and von Bayerling that’s accompanied by gothic flashes of lightning and resounding claps of thunder. Hilarity also ensues when von Krohn (Malcolm Terris) observes Mata Hari through a keyhole before, then, his crescendo of self-pleasure approaches the risible. Only one sequence really pushes the erotic envelope: a wonderfully decadent opium-fueled orgy replete with full frontal nudity from both sexes and featuring the film’s most notorious moment: a round of topless female fencing.
Late in the film, Harrington stages a couple of fascinating set pieces. The aforementioned battlefield sequence with Mata Hari in nurse’s uniform plays out as an obvious nod to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, complete with several extensive tracking shots through the trenches, albeit accomplished with a handheld camera in this instance. And then there’s a suspenseful scene in a cathedral about to be blown to bits that nicely illustrates Hitchcock’s famous maxim about showing the bomb under the table (in the crypt, in this case) before it goes off. The use of a real cathedral definitely adds to the atmosphere and verisimilitude.
Harrington also does an especially commendable job dramatizing the firing squad execution, using a wide-angle lens to make the array of raised rifles appear more imposing, even allowing us to see things from Mata Hari’s POV as she expires. The epilogue has Ladoux and von Bayerling reuniting after the war in the same museum gallery we first encountered them in, venting their grief over the woman they both loved and lost. It’s an affecting bit of pure melodrama, and, together with the bookend set in Java, brings the film around full circle.
Image/Sound
Kino’s 1080p HD transfer of Mata Hari looks quite good overall, with solid color representation (albeit on the more muted end of the spectrum), decent depth and clarity, and largely uncrushed blacks. Grain levels can get a bit thick at times, and there’s some slight frame damage visible. The Master Audio two-channel mono is a workhorse, carrying along the clean dialogue, and doing well by composer Wilfred Josephs’s sumptuous score.
Extras
The commentary track from film historian David del Valle and Nathaniel Bell, who runs a webpage on Curtis Harrington’s films, is a very engaging listen. Del Valle knew Harrington for several decades, has a lot of amusing personal anecdotes to share, and even does a pretty wicked imitation of the filmmaker. The discussion covers a lot of ground, with topics including Harrington’s relationship with Cannon Films, his disappointment over the final edit of the film, the true history of Mata Hari and earlier film depictions of the woman starring Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, and Sylvia Kristel’s career and personal life. They also mention that an early role for actress Gaye Brown had her singing a few bars of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Overall
Curtis Harrington’s Mata Hari is an erotic melodrama of consummate craftmanship, given a mostly spiffy transfer and informative commentary track by Kino Lorber.
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