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Writer of O

Literary erotica's real life sophisticate

BY JAN STUART | STAFF WRITER

May 4, 2005

PÃ©nÃ©lope Puymirat as O, as seen in 'Writer of O.' (Photo by - Zeitgeist Films)

(unrated). Unmasking the identity of the woman behind "Story of O," the novel that defied the censors and rocked the literary world of the 1950s. The vivid interviews are the main attraction. Whenever filmmaker Pola Rapaport attempts to bring the book to life, her movie loses air. 1:20. (nudity, graphic descriptions of a sexual and violent nature). Film Forum, Manhattan.

"People's fantasies have a reality which is contradictory to their lives," states writer Dominique Aury in the new chronicle "Writer of O."

Indeed, when Aury broke new publishing ground with her scandalous novel "Story of O" in 1954 (under the pseudonym Pauline Reage), no one could have guessed that its catalog of sado-masochistic reveries could have been cooked up by so refined a woman. Certainly, went the conventional thinking at the time, the author of "Story of O" had to be a man.

Pola Rapaport, the director of this hybrid "dramatic documentary," is fortunate to have Aury around to relate this fascinating history. Lucid, wry and so young at heart in her mid-90s that she is surprised to hear her true age ("good for me," she exclaims), Aury recounts how she wrote the manuscript some 60 years earlier as an editor at the French publisher Gallimard, when she was considered to be so buttoned-down that she was jokingly told, "Your self-effacement is plain to see."

The inspiration for the book, which describes in crisp and graphic language the willful sexual bondage of a well-bred woman, was Aury's secret lover of the time, Jean Paulhan. An avatar of French literary society whom she met while working for the French resistance during World War II, Paulhan was also a notorious philanderer. So, "Story of O" was written as erotic bait with which to lure him back.

There is also an intimation that Aury was seeking catharsis from a repressed, misanthropic mother, but the filmmaker chooses not to pursue that lead. Rapaport peels open the long-kept secret of "Story of O's" authorship in the manner of a literary mystery, even as Aury's openness to a parade of investigators and well-wishers make it clear that the writer had nothing to hide.

That affect of mystery, along with staged sequences from the book that have the half-sanitized, half-sensationalized feel of dramatic re-enactments in historical documentaries, give "Writer of O" the occasional aura of History Channel boilerplate.

Rapaport is on firmer ground with her self-effacing author and a series of delightfully articulate talking heads. One elderly contemporary of Aury recalls how the book liberated women from the moralistic literature of the 19th century.

"The era of beards," she refers to it with palpable disdain, adding, "When men wear beards, it's bad."

Her remark could be construed as a word of warning for literary watchdogs of the Second Amendment, at a time when facial hair would appear to be enjoying a new vogue.