The Exterminating Angels

French film makers are prone to mixing banal philosophy and soft core porn. Their tiresome philosophies of pleasure are ALWAYS mere justification for voyeurism and mental masturbation for the predominantly male viewers, some of whom evidently hope that their wives and girlfriends will be stimulated too. They can thus escape the horrors of monogamy, if only in their minds. This transparently false justification is the essence of kitsch. On an intellectual level this film is no better than Exit To Eden, which also justified voyeurism and diluted forms of perversion with the same pretentious twaddle. But at least we are spared from seeing men in G strings and Rosie O'Donnell in a black corset and fishnet stockings. The borrowings from Orphee are obvious. Death is a sinister beauty, corrupt police do her work, and coded radio messages appear at random. Even the title borrows from Bunuel. However, little is done with these elements. They are tiny bits of brain candy for the critics, like finding Waldo. We do see some pretty girls, but they are mostly insane. BOTTOM LINE: For men who need a jump start.

I feel that I should watch the film again (which I will not, because I don't want to, because it was very disturbing, and although it was, I admit, exciting, physically, and I am definitely a woman who loves men, I don't want to see it again because it made me sad, disconsolate) before I give my point of view, which, by the way, I have never done before in this venue, but-- Postsefalu is correct: "the camera-eye is registering: passion,loneliness, madness and ... love." I saw this movie yesterday and what registered most with me today is the fact that the women were in love with the man who directed them. As was his wife. He should have taken the love he was offered. He lost everything because he was trying to turn it into something else--art? But I know nothing about art.

François is a film director who seems determined to pursue a pretentious film project that springs up unbidden, and with which he becomes obsessed from the start: he wants to make a film about female orgasms, the "reality" surrounding them, and the transgression of showing them uncensored. To this end, he's decided to avoid hiring porn stars, because they can easily fake any sexual climax. So he begins conducting interviews and castings with "real" actresses who, as screen tests, must demonstrate what they're capable of and how "natural" they can be in the final shoot. Exposed to nudity and their own intimacy, the twenty-somethings reveal, session after session, a vulnerability that, little by little, turns against François, oblivious to his own surroundings and focused exclusively on finding his perfect muses. Meanwhile, signs and mysterious apparitions accumulate around him, describing the effort Heaven is investing in his destruction. His own wife, the exterminating angels, and the strange cryptic messages (actual messages sent by radio to the French Resistance during World War II) are a dire premonition of his fate.

It seems that Jean-Claude Brisseau has done his best to imitate the master Cocteau in his use of devices that confront an undeclared war of the sexes. Here, he used an elegant combination of light and shadow for the lesbian and female masturbation scenes, and this same aesthetic pattern served him well in filming, two years later, "A l'Aventure (2008)," an absurd erotic drama in which women once again become an object of the viewer's desire, and little more.

The movie has an interesting theme, unfortunately it doesn't really make the most of it. And I'm not talking about nudity or sexuality here (plenty of that, although it is more for the lover of lesbian eroticism). We also have a problem with acting in this and believability, if you actually care for that.

It might be you only want to watch this for apparent reasons which is fine enough and as said, the movie does work. But if you are out for a coherent story, you almost get it here. With the movie following in the footsteps of the directors prior movie (this being called "part 2" of a loosely strung trilogy), it doesn't have the same characters or anything, but it does seem to have strong roles for women again. Although in this case a man has the lead role

This is one of those movies that you love or hate, but that moves you anyway. It has so many details, so many reactions of the characters so the pleasures game that the director wants to play that is difficult for me to treat the film only in only direction or conclusion. As you may have read before, it tells us about a film director in his forties that is shooting an erotic scene and he discovers how the actress enjoys breaking the taboo of masturbation in front of a camera. She tells him how intense and marvelous that feeling was, but after a time they meet by random and she tells him he traumatized her... now the director is interested about what crosses to someone's mind when breaking a rule himself has imposed. I will not say this is a psychologist study, nor a pornographic film although the extremely explicit content, but it is such and intense and dark look about how we can become blind by our passions instead of use our head and the advices we receive from our friends (wife and grandmother in the film). And we all know how naturally and honestly french talk about feelings, which make the film believable. For me, it was a whole experience and, with the Danish film Princess, and maybe the Swish Snow White and Brannagh's The Magic Flute, the only worthy film of the Sevilla 06 film festival.