The Exterminating Angels

This film is nothing like as meaningful as I am sure the makers would have wished but neither is it tosh. Brisseau tells of a director who sets out to capture the beauty of the female nude during orgasm. Not interested in the porn actresses' rehearsed turns he seeks young women not used to performing the act so that he might thereby capture the 'mystical moments'. He also proposes that if she transgresses the norm she will more likely reach the maximum sensations. Hence, we get masturbation in a restaurant, in a hotel room with the door open, with other girls etc. I do not particularly take issue with any of this but I just don't think it's particularly profound. It is a slight theory which if proved does not really lead us anywhere. Where it does lead us of course is to the frank and pretty explicit presentation of some pretty erotic scenes. Not all bad then! Simple enough to start with this gradually turns into a melodrama involving the director's wife, the girls' partners and even the police and the ghost of his grandmother. Gradually we seem to loose sight of what seemed the film's only premise, but who knows maybe Brisseau really was making a film about the nature of love and how men and women are affected so differently.

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.

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.

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.

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.