SOURCE: Johnson, Brian D. “Muse, Model, or Slave.” Maclean's 107, no. 12 (21 March 1994): 60-1.

In the following review, Johnson asserts that Bitter Moon, effectively fluctuates between parody and melodrama, despite Polanski's penchant for “bad taste and carnal excess.”

In Bitter Moon, a young French woman is the love slave of an American writer twice her age. In Sirens, a trio of happily naked women serve as live-in models for a painter in the wilds of Australia. And in The Scent of Green Papaya, a Vietnamese servant girl steals the heart of a handsome composer by cooking, sewing and cleaning for him in submissive silence. Three movies from abroad about women who serve male artists in the role of muse, model or slave: in the current climate of sexual correctness, each film sounds hopelessly retrograde. But all three have redeeming qualities that defy simple moral equations. A crafty, satirical intelligence lurks...