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The Exterminating Angels

Original title: Les anges exterminateurs
  • 2006
  • Not Rated
  • 1h 40m
IMDb RATING
5.4/10
3.5K
YOUR RATING
The Exterminating Angels (2006)
Theatrical Trailer from IFC
Play trailer1:55
1 Video
43 Photos
DramaFantasy

A filmmaker holds a series of boundary-pushing auditions for his project about female pleasure.A filmmaker holds a series of boundary-pushing auditions for his project about female pleasure.A filmmaker holds a series of boundary-pushing auditions for his project about female pleasure.

  • Director
    • Jean-Claude Brisseau
  • Writer
    • Jean-Claude Brisseau
  • Stars
    • Frédéric van den Driessche
    • Maroussia Dubreuil
    • Lise Bellynck
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    5.4/10
    3.5K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Jean-Claude Brisseau
    • Writer
      • Jean-Claude Brisseau
    • Stars
      • Frédéric van den Driessche
      • Maroussia Dubreuil
      • Lise Bellynck
    • 25User reviews
    • 44Critic reviews
    • 54Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 1 win & 2 nominations total

    Videos1

    The Exterminating Angels
    Trailer 1:55
    The Exterminating Angels

    Photos43

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    Top cast20

    Edit
    Frédéric van den Driessche
    Frédéric van den Driessche
    • François
    Maroussia Dubreuil
    • Charlotte
    Lise Bellynck
    Lise Bellynck
    • Julie
    Marie Allan
    Marie Allan
    • Stéphanie
    Sophie Bonnet
    • La femme de François
    Raphaële Godin
    • Apparition 1…
    Margaret Zenou
    • Apparition 2
    Jeanne Cellard
    • La grand-mère
    Virginie Legeay
    • Virginie
    Estelle Galarme
    • Olivia
    Marine Danaux
    • Agnès
    Apolline Louis
    • Céline
    François Négret
    François Négret
    • L'ami de Stéphane
    Christophe Maillard
    • Le producteur
    Françoise Bonnet
    • La voisine escalier
    Olivier Perrot
    • Le gendarme
    Jean-Claude Brisseau
    Jean-Claude Brisseau
    • Un assistant tournage
    • (uncredited)
    María Luisa García
    María Luisa García
    • La maquilleuse
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Jean-Claude Brisseau
    • Writer
      • Jean-Claude Brisseau
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews25

    5.43.5K
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    Featured reviews

    3bcrumpacker

    Kitsch plus Cocteau

    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.
    7christopher-underwood

    sets out to capture the beauty of the female nude during orgasm

    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.
    5kosmasp

    Helping Hands

    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
    RResende

    simple masturbation

    Sex is universal to every art in every time, in every culture. It's universal because it's as animal as every man is. So, no theme is more richly treated, and more thoroughly investigated as sex. That raises the bar of demand, in other words, if you want to do anything interesting that concerns sex you have only two choices:

    -either you do something that, although not original updates somethings that had been previously done;

    -you find any dark corner of sex, usually tied to other equally fascinating worlds, of the human mind or such; this film does nothing in any of the 2 options. it's as dull as its writer sounds. This i say taking in consideration the lines, and an interview i saw on the DVD extras.

    Apparently this film was made as some sort of provocation against some sex related charges related to this director's previous film. I think he might see this as an exorcism or something that could be mapped into the realms of the "art" world. Some personal exploitation of the limits of voyeurism in sex; a man who studies female orgasm by watching (and filming) it. I suppose later in the process of developing this, Brisseau himself understood how thin the whole thing was, so he placed a couple of Wenders' borrowed angels, to add a layer of mysticism to the whole watching game and, i suppose, so we could identify with the more active angel, as a voyeur of the voyeur situations.

    This could actually work, but only if the director was more interested in making a film, rather than looking like he masters the inner depth of the female orgasm. As it is, this is a shameless depiction of the female body, some women are really and genuinely appealing, but the whole work is just dishonest. I really would prefer to have this made into a softcore exploitative film, than this annoying piece. Anything Brass or Franco do is better than this.

    My opinion: 1/5

    http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com
    3etrenkamp

    Boring

    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.

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Lise Bellynck, Marie Allan and Maroussia Dubreuil, the three leading actresses, talked about the erotic auditions for this film: Bellynck said: "I did an erotic audition the first time I saw Jean-Claude. We went to the cafe, he said to me:" It's now or never ... " I said to myself: "What am I risking?" He wasn't going to rape me or kidnap me, I wasn't afraid of him. I thought about Secret Things (2002) and I dared. " Allan said: "We had a coffee, then we were in the set planned for the shoot, and I touched myself in front of him. I didn't really know if I was going to be able to do that, I'm a little embarrassed about my body. I really wanted to be taken, but also afraid to show myself to Brisseau. But I managed to fake an orgasm. " Dubreuil said: "My first attempt was with Lise. We played the first erotic scene of the film, as a duet, in the hotel room. I immediately felt that we were in a search, a job on eroticism, we weren't doing anything. In my head, there was no longer any question of me not being taken for the role. "
    • Quotes

      Apparition 1: You're 20. You're beautiful. You're young.The world's at your feet. You use your charms. But it doesn't last. You become less beautiful. Your hold on people starts to weaken. There's always someone who makes you pay the price.

    • Connections
      Featured in Cinema According to Brisseau (2007)
    • Soundtracks
      Sexy Ladies
      Written by Alexis Pecharman

      Performed by Alexis Pecharman

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    FAQ18

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • September 13, 2006 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • France
    • Language
      • French
    • Also known as
      • Les anges exterminateurs
    • Filming locations
      • Rue Pierre Semard, 9th arrondissement, Paris, France(Street shown at 0: 27: 15 and 1: 18: 20)
    • Production companies
      • TS Productions
      • La Sorcière Rouge
      • Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC)
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $23,308
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $6,485
      • Mar 11, 2007
    • Gross worldwide
      • $154,210
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 40 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby
      • Dolby Digital
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.66 : 1

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