Piège. 1968. France. Directed by Jacques Baratier. Screenplay by Baratier, Odilon Cabat, Ornella Volta. With Fernando Arrabal, Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, Bulle Ogier. 35mm courtesy Argos Films. In French; English subtitles. 50 min.
Bulle Ogier’s tremendous gifts at improvisation, drawn from her stage work in Marc’O’s experimental theater company, are on nearly barbaric display in this surreally intense and erotic chamber piece about two anarchical young women who go on a looting and demolishing spree as they toy with a man’s fragile ego. Bernadette Lafont, Ogier’s partner in crime, would appear opposite her once again in Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, while the wildly iconoclastic Spanish writer and director Fernando Arrabal seems right at home as the keeper of a “Vermin Shop” that carries all manner of animal trap-and-kill devices.