Reflections on ... Nico in Strip-tease (1963)
Graham says:
In June 2025, I screened Strip-tease at my monthly Lobotomy Room film club. As I put it on the event page:
"Join us on Thursday 19 June, when the FREE monthly Lobotomy Room film club at Fontaine’s (committed to cinematic perversity!) whisks you away to early 1960s Paris with Strip-tease (1963)! Note that this film is in French (ooh la la!) and will be subtitled (so bring your reading glasses!). This one (directed by Jacques Poitrenaud) should be catnip for cult cinema connoisseurs. For one thing, it stars Nico. Yes, that Nico! Strip-tease follows the German diva’s earlier vivid appearance in Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), but it captures her a good few years before she became a Warhol superstar and the Velvet Underground’s chanteuse. (For some reason lost in the mists of time, she’s billed as “Krista Nico” – which seems to partially acknowledge her real name, Christa Paffgen. Strip-tease would be Nico’s sole starring role in a relatively mainstream film: her destiny lay in the underground cinema of Andy Warhol and her lover Philippe Garrel). And the moody finger-snappin’ cool jazz soundtrack is by Serge Gainsbourg (and he even appears in the film! The theme tune is huskily warbled by beatnik chanteuse Juliette Greco). Not without justification Strip-tease was promoted as a sexploitation flick (it was released in the US as The Sweet Skin in 1965 with the tagline “Fills the screen with more adult entertainment than you dare to expect! The intimate story of a striptease goddess!”), but more accurately it’s a stylish, melancholy melodrama. Nico plays Ariane, an idealistic ballet-trained German dancer in Paris with high-minded artistic ambitions. Out of economic necessity, Ariane reluctantly accepts a job at Le Crazy burlesque club – and soon captures the attention of a rich, louche playboy (John Sobieski). If you’ve seen Lobotomy Room’s presentations of other burlesque-themed movies like Too Hot to Handle (1960), Beat Girl (1960) and Satan in High Heels (1962), you won’t want to miss this obscure French gem!"
Strip-tease is a criminally unsung and fascinating movie and boy, do I have notes. So, I had to write a blog post about it!
In brief: Strip-tease shows Nico like you’ve never seen her before! So why have you probably never heard of this movie? Neither director Jacques Poitrenaud nor Nico herself took a lot of pride in Strip-tease. For Poitrenaud (1922 - 2005), this was probably just another assignment and he’s also seemingly not well known outside of France. (He’s certainly not a filmmaker I’m otherwise au fait with).
Strip-tease is Nico’s sole starring role in a relatively mainstream film, but for the rest of her life, Nico never discussed it in interviews. It most definitely didn’t align with the deeply serious, austere and gloomy “Moon Goddess” image she embraced later in the sixties. BUT: within a few years after its continental debut Strip-tease was belatedly released in the US under the title The Sweet Skin (which makes it sound like a movie aimed at cannibals). In the 1995 book The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67 by photographer Stephen Shore, there’s a great shot of Nico standing outside The World Theatre in New York where The Sweet Skin is showing on a double bill (“2 Daring Adult Films!”) accompanied by a group of her Warhol Factory friends, so clearly she assembled them to “come see this film I made in France in the early 60s!” The other “daring adult film” on the double bill is called The Love Statue (1965), which I’ve Googled and it sounds interesting.
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