This re-post is part the 2012 Queer Film Blogathon, already underway over at Garbo Laughs.
Sex In Chains
isn’t the exploitation film it sounds like, but if you did find it
shelved—accidentally, we’ll say—next to a stack of early-70s convent
skin flicks and womens’ prison dramas, you wouldn’t be wholly misled.
Those films, like this one, are about people veering to extremes.
They’re about people in heat.
Sex In Chains—an
often delicately shot, honest film with compassion for its suffering
married couple, Franz and Helene—is at a low boil even in its quietest
moments. But director (and star) Wilhelm Dieterle
isn’t satisfied with mere melodramatics, even of a kind lurid or
borderline nymphomaniacal enough to hold our attention. He wants us to
be more than observers. He makes us care about these people, all the
while tackling social issues that remain, to this day, contentious. I’ll
not soon forget Sex In Chains, or the people in it.
