The Exterminating Angels

The French filmmaker François (Frédéric van den Driessche) decides to make a movie about female pleasure and break of taboos in sex. He interviews many young women about their secret fantasies and proposes auditions, with each woman naked and masturbating in front of a camera until they reach orgasm. He finally casts Julie (Lise Bellynck), the unstable Charlotte (Maroussia Dubreuil) and the compulsive liar Stéphanie (Marie Allan) to the lead roles and creates a sexual tension among them in a threesome. The relationship with the three actresses affects his marriage, while two fallen angels and the spirit of his protective grandmother follow him.

"Les Anges Exterminateurs" is a pointless and pretentious soft-porn with lots of eroticism and voyeurism. The movie is pure exploitation, with the exposition of the gorgeous unknown naked actresses, and disguised of "art-movie" with the beautiful cinematography and the omnipresence of two fallen angels which existence is never explained and the ghost of the director's grandmother. It is funny to see intellectual explanations to such a silly and messy story of female orgasm. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Anjos Exterminadores" ("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.

I agree with most negative IMDb reviews of Brisseau's film, and want to take the discussion one step further: the booking of this film (and his next film) at Lincoln Center in NYC, as well as becoming a Cannes Film Festival selection, showing how easily a phony like Brisseau can hoodwink the gatekeepers of the international festival circuit.

On all key points, Exterminating Angels (title a la Bunuel) is a failure: originality: Zero; writing: Zero; realization: Zero; self-serving content: 100%.

On the DVD, Brisseau is interviewed alongside his collaborator (dating back to his humble super 8mm beginnings) Maria Luisa Garcia by a French critic who comically looks like Bill Gates -what Gates might have become if he'd gone to some Film School instead of studying math and science at Harvard. They discuss the evolution of the film's screenplay, and it becomes evident that what started as an unapologetic defense of Brisseau's sexual harassment activities on his just-previous film Choses Secretes, was elevated to pretentiousness by the insertion of fantasy elements STOLEN whole cloth from Jean Cocteau's classic 1950 film Orphée. The voice-over recitations by Brisseau are familiar to any art-house fan of the Cocteau work, allusions to the radio transmissions from the Underground during WW II. Since every film student and film buff over a certain age has seen Orpheé and absorbed it as perhaps THE art-house film of all time, I don't know how Brisseau thought he could get away with this ripoff.

The screenplay is extremely poor, with the director/hero repetitiously going through a gee-whiz, do women have orgasms? approach that is ludicrous. Structurally, it is reminiscent of the "white-coat" earliest hardcore porn films at the end of the 1960s, when sex had to be treated in fake-documentary fashion to escape censorship (before the semi-documentary style I Am Curious (Yellow) was famously cleared by the Supreme Court, thus opening the floodgates for modern porn). Brisseau as interviewed is proud as a peacock of his dialogue, which he says he adapts from run-throughs and meetings with the cast, but it is a mass of boring clichés.

The casting of the actor playing the Brisseau-like director in the film is a real mistake no one seems to have noticed -he looks a lot like the famous American porn director/star Paul Thomas, known as PT to his crew. Thomas has made many hundreds of adult films and in several of them he portrays a director working on a sex film project, closely resembling the format of what Brisseau is doing here. It's easy to imagine mainstream fans not picking up on this, but perhaps Brisseau can claim ignorance of Thomas's work, though I doubt it.

Brisseau works with a budget most porn directors (not the makers of epics like Pirates) would die for, yet his lighting and framing of the sex scenes here is remote and unimaginative, ultimately failing to "deliver the goods". Unlike his compatriot Catherine Breillat, he does not feature male actors in sex scenes (no ever erect Rocco Siffredi on call), avoiding the censorship problems of hardcore footage. Though both films are about lesbian sex, he also carefully avoids the paraphernalia, such as dildos and strap-ons, of hardcore lesbian sex films. Julie at one point holds up to the camera a small egg-shaped device she claims to use as a masturbation device, but it is not visible during the subsequent auto-erotic scene, again rendering the material softcore and as usual, simulated.

The resulting package is aimed squarely at the festival set, an international group of cineastes who live the life of jet setters (sort of), showing new films by mainly esoteric but also anxious-to-self-promote mainstreamers, throwing gala parties, and holding endlessly boring (I've walked out on enough in my lifetime) q&a sessions, on a circuit that has expanded in recent decades to something of a cottage industry. Cannes was invented 70 years ago as a gimmick to promote the town during the off-season, and the idea has spread far afield, to the Hamptons and (courtesy of Robert De Niro) even TriBeCa in my neck of the woods. Many films (and filmmakers) never escape from the festival route, showing at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Montreal, Edinburgh, Sundance and hundreds of other places, but worn out (or deemed unworthy) by the time it comes for theatrical distribution. The schmoes who booked this one at Cannes, and both this one and his next at Lincoln Center, are not-so-closet voyeurs: the so-called art film has always had a thread of sexploitation about it. (Recall that the most successful art films in the 1950s imported to the U.S were sexy Bergman ("Monika") and other Scandi product, then Bitter Rice, Lollobrigida, Loren and finally endless Brigitte Bardot vehicles.) The first hardcore porn film shown at Lincoln Center was a pseudo-docu Exhibition which I remember seeing back in 1975 -a piece of junk, still in circulation on DVD to bore a new generation of unsuspecting fans. The tastemakers of this "elite" side of the film industry are easily bamboozled by a fakir like Brisseau, with his embarrassingly undercooked combination of art & exploitation.

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.

My girlfriend and I saw this at the IFC in NYC on Friday night. I went to film school, she studied French in college, we both loved Short Bus - we thought this would be fun date movie. Man, were we wrong.

As a film that's trying to be "art" it humorlessly apes just about every art film convention from the early days of Bergman to Wenders Wings of Desire. It is literally a shopping list of art film cliché's. That in itself would not be a crime if the film's treatment of these cliché's wasn't so boring. As well, the script is mediocre at best. Maybe this is due to a bad translation, but my girl, who speaks French, told me the translation was fairly accurate. And cinematagraphicaly, the film is just shot badly. Many shots are ackwardly framed and staged. It reminded me of Kevin Smith's Clerks, only at least Clerks had a strong story and clever script that over came it's tech limitations. This whole film just feels slightly less than mediocre on every level.

As for the story, the director wants us to believe that his doppleganger in the film is observing these woman play out their erotic fantasies because he doesn't understand female pleasure. But it's obvious that he enjoyed watching three girls get naked and screw each other. Just because he didn't touch them doesn't mean he didn't enjoy it egotistically. Yet the film never holds him accountable for this. He is presented as a victim of crazy actresses, an unsympathetic wife, a corrupt judicial system, and ultimately a victim of fate or divinity itself. The film seems to ask us to envy his power at getting these girls to kink it out in front of him at his beck and call and at the same time we are suppose to sympathize at what a good husband, artist, and father figure he is and how nobody understands what a victim he really is. It just doesn't work. Apparently, the events of the film are based on a real situation that happened to the film's director. This story sounds like something a philandering husband would tell his wife about being taken to a strip club. "No, dear, I didn't enjoy it all. I spent the whole time talking with the girls about Hobbes and Locke." Bullsh!t. Also, there is a lot of talk about taboos in the film. Apparently, the director's idea of taboo is having sex in a hotel room. Oh, how daring! Lastly, there are two fairly sexy sequences in the film. However, they are almost completely ruined by the film's score. Every time the girls start to get naked, this bizarre 80's horror film score comes on the soundtrack. This combined with the bad writing and staging just kills any feelings of arousal you may have. Throughout the screening people would just get up and leave. And when the final "tragic" moments of the film were played out the whole theatre was laughing at how bad it was. The only thing anyone was talking about as we filed out into the lobby was how much we wanted our money and time back.