A Woman in Flames (Die flambierte Frau, literally “The Flambéed Woman”) is a 1983 German drama directed and co-written by Robert van Ackeren, with Gudrun Landgrebe, Mathieu Carrière, and Hanns Zischler. West Germany sent it as its entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 56th Academy Awards; it was not nominated. The film is on this site because Eva does not only leave her husband for sex work. She becomes a dominatrix, finds that hurting men for money is the part she likes, and the love story detonates around that fact.
Housewife, call girl, penthouse split
Eva is an upper-class wife who gets tired of an arrogant husband and walks out. She wants to try being a call girl. A prostitute named Yvonne teaches her the basics; they look for clients together. Eva falls for a charming man she meets and goes to his place late for what she thinks is romance. He is a gigolo. They move into his penthouse, big enough that each of them can work separately. That is the setup: two sex workers in love, sharing a floor plan and a client list.
Stilettos on a man’s hands
Eva slides into sadomasochism. Being a dominatrix satisfies her. She likes control and she likes causing intense pain. The scene that teaches her that is small and specific. A man hides under a table. His hands stick out where she can see them. Cold, and with what the source calls intense inner satisfaction, she walks over those hands in stiletto heels and crushes them. Chris, the gigolo, gets jealous. He wants to know what happens upstairs and why she is making so much money. She tells him the truth: she hurts men, and the more she hurts them, the more she is paid. That news wrecks him. She is jealous in return of a long-term boyfriend/client he has been seeing for years.
The upstairs room, the restaurant, the fire
The upstairs sessions get heavier. One day Chris sneaks up and watches her dominate a man tied to a chair. His face says, so this is what you are. Hers says, yes. He tries to pull her out — furs, talk of marriage. She tells him she has been dreaming of hitting him, and that in the dream he likes it. The romantic ending is sitting there, and he panics. He takes all their money and puts it into a restaurant she does not want. When she tries to leave he turns violent: throws her against the wall, hits her, pours alcohol on her, and sets her on fire. The last shot does not leave her burned. She is unscathed, happy with her sex-worker/madame friend, and the two of them are being thrown out of a bar Chris owns.
That ending is the film’s kink argument, whether or not van Ackeren would use the word. The unpaid violence of the boyfriend is the thing that actually burns. The paid, chosen cruelty upstairs is the work she will not give up. Landgrebe’s Eva is a housewife who discovers she is a professional sadist and will not be rescued out of it.
