Trans-Europ-Express (1966): Robbe-Grillet Film with Erotic Power Games

Trans-Europ-Express is a 1966 experimental film written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Marie-France Pisier. The title nods to the Trans Europ Express, then a major international rail network. For kink-literate viewers, the movie matters less as a train thriller than as a meta-crime story that stages rape and bondage fantasies inside a film-within-a-film—erotic power games as something writers invent, actors enact imperfectly, and the frame story can dissolve at will.

Frame Story and Nested Plot

A creative team on a train to Antwerp invents a film plot. Their outline is intercut with the film-within-a-film: a novice cocaine smuggler and a prostitute who perform the outline incompletely. That nesting is the formal point—storytellers keep rewriting desire and violence while the “inner” characters act out bondage and murder that may or may not “count” as real inside the fiction.

In the nested plot, a Frenchman named Elias carries his first cocaine consignment from Paris to Antwerp on the TEE. Passed among mysterious intermediaries, he spends spare time enacting a rape fantasy with a prostitute named Eva. His top contact later reveals that the cargo was powdered sugar—a loyalty test. Assigned to take a shipment back to Paris, Elias seeks Eva again and learns she has betrayed him to the police. He initiates a bondage fantasy, strangles her, and goes into hiding. Buying a newspaper, he sees a murder report above an ad for a strip club whose bondage-act star resembles Eva. At the club, police surround him; before arrest, his contact shoots him dead. When the frame-story characters return to Paris and buy a newspaper, Elias and Eva appear in the crowd behind them, embracing—murder and snuff-adjacent fantasy canceled by narrative whim. Bondage and sexual violence are thus both diegetic events and authorial toys.

Cast, Form, and Releases

Trintignant and Pisier anchor the erotic and criminal double game; Robbe-Grillet’s script treats plot as something that can be rewritten mid-journey. The TEE title is literal transport and formal metaphor: desire and crime move across borders while the authors rewrite the timetable. Screenwriting teacher Robert McKee has characterized Trans-Europ-Express as a “nonplot” film—a work that refuses ordinary story delivery. The film reached DVD in Italy via Ripley’s Home Video in 2008 and Blu-ray in the United States from Redemption Films in 2014, which kept the bondage and rape-fantasy sequences available to new art-house and kink-curious viewers. Further reading often points to André Gardies’s compiled volume on Robbe-Grillet (Seghers, 1972), including contemporary documents and points of view on how the director staged sexual power as narrative experiment.