Education Anglaise (1982)

 

I first read about Education Anglaise (1982) in an article about spanking films that Ramsey Campbell wrote for one of the paperback book editions of Shock Express, (although the third and last one was titled simply Shock as a result of a dispute over who actually owned the rights to the title).  After more years than I care to think about, I finally got around to watching the film, thanks to the magic of my Roku box.  As Campbell explained in that article, Education Anglaise is a manifestation of the French belief that spanking is very British fetish, the result of all those strict public schools where beatings were de riguer, resulting in a nation of sexual perverts.  It has to be said that corporal punishment does feature very prominently in British pop culture depicting the nation's schooldays - I well remember the comic strip version of Billy Bunter, where he was forever getting a caning, for instance.  Headmasters flexing their canes weren't confined to depictions of public schools either - state school kids could also expect 'six of the best': part of the plot of Carry on Teacher, set in a Secondary Modern school. for example, involves a debate over the efficacy of corporal punishment. Despite this apparent obsession with beating the backsides of British youth on the pretext of enforcing discipline, I'm not sure that spanking fetishes are uniquely British.  After all, if that were the case, a film like Education Anglaise - which puts the chastisement of schoolgirls front and centre - wouldn't have been made in France, with a French setting.

Nonetheless, Education Anglaise follows the template of the classic British school story: orphaned girl is sent by her guardian, (in this case her decadent uncle, who sees her presence as an impediment to his shagging of his female domestic staff), to a strict boarding school for girls.  Said school prides itself on its adherence to the 'English' principles of discipline.  Which means, in practice, that the slightest infraction results in a bare-arsed spanking.  Indeed, our heroine arrives in her first class just as such a punishment is being administered.  But while it might be argued that such a disciplinary regime might well be considered par for the course in a 1930s private school, even in France, things quickly take a very sinister turn with sudden arrival of a new deputy headmistress.  To the viewer it is patently obvious that Miss Georgina is a man in drag, most specifically the escaped convict that everyone has been talking about.  Yet, none of the staff or students seem to see anything amiss.  Now, if this was a British sex comedy, the arrival of a bloke in drag, masquerading as a teacher in a girls school, would be cue for all manner of humourous shenanigans, probably culminating in him being chased around the school, semi-naked, by police, students, school governors and angry parents.  But this isn't a seventies British sex comedy - it is an eighties French sex film, so instead of farcical humour, we get a dark plot where Miss Georgina starts to dominate the school, using the girls as playthings in his increasingly sadistic games.

Rather than just handing out spankings as punishment, we now have various of the girls systematically humiliated - made to beg like a dog or made to participate in chariot races, with girls instead of horses pulling the chariots, for instance.  Most disturbingly, our heroine is gradually brainwashed by Miss Georgina and the headmistress, (who, it becomes clear, does know that Georgina is a man and is actually his lover), into becoming the instrument of their punishments, beating and caning her fellow students.  As the girl herself admits in her diary, she begins to get a thrill from the cruelty she is helping to mete out.  But it is clear that the film's makers aren't simply aiming at audience titillation here: they appear to have serious intent.  The goings on at the school, it seems, are meant to be a microcosm of the wider political situation in Europe during the thirties, namely the rise of fascism.  Miss Georgina's gradual imposition of an ever more draconian regime, on the pretext of being a legitimately appointed authority figure, endorsed by the headmistress seems to be an analogy for the rise of fascism withing the frameworks of existing democracies.  Like the populations of countries like Germany and Italy, both staff and students simply acquiesce to authority, not questioning its legitimacy until it is virtually too late.  Just to ram home the analogy, it is the Jewish student, whose family has apparently 'disappeared' in Germany, who comes in for the most brutal punishments.

It isn't just the staff and students who are shown to be blind to the potential threat: the wider community is also shown to be complacent, with various local dignitaries discussing what had been going on at the school, decrying the sordid goings on, while they continue to pursue their usual decadence at the local brothel, oblivious to the gathering political threats surrounding them.  Likewise, the uncle, who had earlier, in typical bourgeois fashion, dismissed all politicians, whether democratically elected or dictators, as being of no consequence to him, finds himself, at the film's end, under the thumb of his niece, now transformed into a full blown dominatrix, the tables turned in their relationship, forced to acquiesce to her authoritarian power.  This political sub-text - while ambitious for a sex film - is problematic, slowing down the film and for those going into it expecting some lightweight romp full of naked twenty something schoolgirls getting their behinds spanked, somewhat takes the fun out of it.  Because, the truth is that is exactly what most people watching a film titled Education Anglaise are going to expect, rather than a treatise on the rise of fascism. 

Indeed, the format of the sex film really can't bear the weight of the analogy being placed upon it, with the expectations of the genre constantly frustrated by the dark turns and often clumsy parallels being drawn between the authoritarianism of the private school and the rise of the authoritarian state, with the one indoctrinating its participants to accept and justify the latter.  As a spanking film, or even just a sex film, Education Anglaise is something of a disappointment - while there is quite a lot of nudity and spankings on display (although surprisingly little actual sex), none of it is particularly erotic, let alone titillating.  On the plus side, Education Anglaise has superb production values, with meticulous period detail, authentic looking locations, excellent cinematography and lighting and even some decent acting performances.  It just isn't very sexy, though.