Beautiful model Catherine Legrand (Florence Guérin) runs through Paris at night with her dress in tatters. At the police station she reports she has been raped, but is met with laughter. It seems Cathy suffers from delusions, having made false claims before, so the cops hand her back to chic magazine editor Valérie Landis (Brigitte Lahaie). The following night it is business as usual for Cathy and fellow model Florence (Natasha Delange) when they pose for a racy photoshoot at the graveyard arranged by loutish photographer J.B. (Jean-Pierre Maurin). One elderly voyeur is so incensed by their scantily-clad antics, the following morning he stalks and strangles a young woman at the cemetery. He then flings himself under a truck out of remorse. Shortly thereafter, Cathy receives threatening phone calls and is menaced in her apartment. She finds help from her neighbour, architectural student Nicolas (Alexandre Sterling) who later barely survives his own attack at the hands of the stranger in black leather.
France’s most popular porn star Brigitte Lahaie moved on to sexy suspense thrillers throughout the 1980s, although she takes a back seat here to the fetching Florence Guérin. Guérin essays the kind of harrassed heroine Edwige Fenech used to play in what is essentially an Eighties Gallic update of the Italian giallo thriller. It remains the kind of movie where the beautiful heroine answers the phone naked, or runs down the corridor naked, but as grade-B Eurotrash goes Le couteau sous la gorge is distinctly above average. Claude Mulot, whose past work includes horror film The Blood Rose (1969) and the infamous talking vagina movie Pussy Talk (1975), delivers sleek visuals with stylish lighting and suspenseful camerawork. Sort of like Brian De Palma on a B-movie budget. Equally, in spite of an occasionally slapdash script, the performances are largely quite accomplished.
Brigitte Lahaie’s uniquely glacial form of sensuality leaves her unsuited to victim roles, so she functions here as an interestingly ambiguous character. She seduces Nicolas in his hospital bed but spurns the girls’ request to have J.B. sacked, since he routinely forces himself on them in his spare hours. In typical giallo style, all manner of secrets lurk beneath the glossy surface: Valérie is secretly pimping her models out to wealthy businessmen; Cathy’s crazy ex-boyfriend Ludovic (Emmanuel Karsan) is harrassing her for money (and rather stupidly, reckons attempted rape is the best way to persuade her!); and the sinister housekeeper with a scarred face continues spying on all that goes on.
What distinguishes this from a giallo or indeed a Hollywood thriller is whereas those films have characters reacting hysterically, here characters have a coolly detached, borderline indifferent attitude to the ensuing lurid events, with poor, fragile Cathy routinely derided as a “mythomaniac.” Mulot guides the wayward narrative with an admirably steady hand and builds to a suspenseful finale, bringing things full circle with Cathy on the run from the killer and the cops once more refusing to believe a word she says. Although one could do without the nonsensical coda, the identity of the killer comes as a genuine shock.
