Let’s be clear: the Marquis de Sade didn’t exactly write bedtime stories. His books were violent, sexual, cruel, and philosophical in the way that makes you want to shower in bleach afterward. So when you hear that Jess Franco—yes, that Jess Franco, the Spanish sleaze auteur who treats narrative like a fly treats a windshield—decided to adapt Justine, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re about to watch something disturbing, erotic, maybe even profound.
You’d be wrong. So wrong your eyeballs may sue you.
Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1969) is less an adaptation and more a limp cosplay of the novel’s themes, executed with all the grace of a goat trying to recite Nietzsche. What should have been a shocking, provocative plunge into the hypocrisies of virtue and vice ends up feeling like Franco filmed a perfume commercial during a historical reenactment and forgot to include a script, a pace, or anything resembling dramatic tension.
Let’s start with the lead: Justine is played by Romina Power, daughter of Tyrone Power, and an actress who looks like she wandered in from a shampoo ad and got held hostage in a costume closet for three months. She floats through the movie with the wide-eyed confusion of someone wondering when her call time is actually over. Her Justine is a porcelain doll in a hurricane of perverts, yet somehow never registers fear, shock, or even mild surprise. She’s not so much acting as she is surviving—just like the audience.
Justine is, in theory, a paragon of innocence wandering through a world determined to punish her for it. That’s the central thesis of de Sade’s novel: virtue isn’t rewarded, it’s brutalized. But Franco’s version reduces this existential horror into a disconnected string of sex scenes, tortures, and waxy dialogue exchanges filmed through enough gauze to make your television look like it has cataracts.
The story—if you can call this patchwork fever dream a story—follows Justine as she escapes a convent and falls into increasingly depraved situations. She’s arrested, stripped, whipped, propositioned, imprisoned, branded, nearly sacrificed, nearly seduced, and repeatedly kidnapped. All of this is filmed with the emotional investment of a tax form. Each new trauma arrives not with dread or gravity, but with the narrative weight of someone flipping channels in purgatory.
And then there’s Klaus Kinski, in what might be the most bizarre casting choice of Franco’s career—and that’s a hell of a statement. Kinski plays the Marquis de Sade himself, brooding in a jail cell and mumbling florid narration while pacing like a man who just realized his agent lied to him. You’d think Kinski would light this film on fire with his usual demonic intensity, but Franco keeps him locked away like an expensive bottle of wine he’s too afraid to open. Instead of using Kinski as the wild, unhinged centerpiece he clearly is, Franco films him like a sad poet in a beer commercial.
The sex? It’s everywhere—and somehow still boring. Franco tries to blend eroticism with art, but ends up achieving neither. His camera lingers on bodies with the pervy indifference of a mall security guard. Everyone is beautiful, yes, but so mannequin-still you wonder if they were threatened with electroshock for any facial expression beyond “mildly curious.” Franco’s version of sexuality is soft, sleepy, and strangely polite for a story about moral collapse. It’s like watching a lingerie catalog choreographed by a guy who learned about sex from mime school.
Stylistically, Justine is Franco at his most overindulgent. Long pans across chandeliers. Obsessive close-ups of eyes doing nothing. Zooms so slow and pointless they feel like the film itself is trying to escape. He bathes every scene in enough Vaseline lens and candlelight to make your retinas scream for mercy. The sets look like they were borrowed from a dinner theater production of Les Misérables, and the costumes are all crushed velvet and visible discomfort.
The music? Oh, dear god, the music. Bruno Nicolai tries his best, but the score lurches between sweeping melodrama and oddly cheerful harpsichord noodling, like someone’s trying to score Eyes Wide Shut with a circus organ. It undercuts whatever tension Franco might have accidentally built, drowning the film in tones that scream, “Let’s all just go home.”
Pacing-wise, Justine moves like a funeral march on Xanax. You keep thinking, “Surely this is the last act,” only for the movie to open a new chapter of Justine’s suffering with all the excitement of a DMV renewal notice. At 124 minutes, it’s not just long—it’s eternal. It’s a cinematic oubliette. You don’t watch Justine, you endure it, one velvety shrug at a time.
But the worst sin isn’t even the tedium. It’s that Franco clearly doesn’t understand—or doesn’t care about—what made de Sade’s work interesting in the first place. De Sade was a monster, but a literate one. His books were screaming indictments of hypocrisy, cruelty, religion, and power, wrapped in sadomasochistic orgies and philosophical debate. Franco leaves the philosophy on the cutting room floor and keeps the orgy. Except his orgy is staged like an awkward hotel room party where everyone forgot the safe word and nobody brought snacks.
What you’re left with is a film that mistakes nudity for boldness, languor for art, and literary pretense for depth. It wants to be daring and decadent, but feels like a bored aristocrat’s home movie shot between snifters of brandy. Franco had the chance to make something transgressive, something confrontational, maybe even something grotesquely beautiful. Instead, he gave us a slow-motion car crash in soft focus, with a soundtrack by elevator.
Verdict: “Marquis de Sade’s Justine” is a bloated, tone-deaf mess—a film that tries to seduce you with silk and smut but ends up drooling on its own ruffled sleeves. If Franco was trying to make a statement, it got lost somewhere between Kinski’s tortured soliloquies and Romina Power’s glazed expression. A cinematic flogging, minus the fun.
