Filles gone wild

>> Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels is an arthouse film with a porn-monger’s heart

by MALCOLM FRASER

A survey of sexual mores in French cinema could lead a person to one of two conclusions: either French women are a lot more loose-moraled than their New World counterparts, or else French male film directors just see it that way. Again and again, we see the stories of middle-aged male characters with a persistent problem of women constantly falling in love with them or just wanting to sleep with them. Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels takes this male fantasy into Girls Gone Wild territory.

Filmmaker François (Frédéric van den Driessche) is in pre-production on a new film about women’s sexual fantasies. He auditions several actresses, and eventually comes across Julie (Lise Bellynck) and Charlotte (Maroussia Dubreuil), two young women with a voracious appetite for on- and off-screen sexual shenanigans. Blinded by lust to the obvious warning signs, van den Driessche gets lured into the girls’ fantasy lives, half-heartedly trying to convince his wife (Sophie Bonnet) and himself that it’s purely for the glory of art. In a similar gesture to his audience, Brisseau throws in a surrealist voice-over and a half-baked framing device: two grim-looking women, the angels of the title, seem to be orchestrating the whole thing to bring about the hapless hero’s demise.

The plot revolves around an inherently erotic situation, and delivers on its promise with a number of fairly explicit sex scenes. However, Brisseau makes some strange aesthetic choices that make the film resemble late-night TV softcore porn flicks, if not the all-you-can-eat buffet commercials that run in between them. The film is shot on video and lit in a cheap-TV fashion, besides which the music used during the sex scenes is in highly questionable taste (congas and strings, anyone?).

Now, I have nothing against male fantasies—far from it, I enjoy them on a daily basis—but there’s no denying that this is what this film consists of: the concept is a pretty flimsy pretext for copious girl-on-girl action, and the tortured-artist schtick is pretty retrograde. If you need the guise of art to enjoy the sight of writhing naked women, this is the film for you. If no such guise is required, though, there’s plenty of porn for your needs.

Exterminating Angels opens
this Friday, May 18

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