Secret Things

Directed by Jean-Claude Brasseur

Opening exclusively at the E Street Cinema 1/30/2004

2.5 *

Jean-Claude Brisseau’s erotic melodrama Choses Secretes (Secret Things) may have many charms, but subtlety is not among them. The movie, playing exclusively at Washington, D.C.’s new E Street Cinema, is itself hardly anything new, but however many times we have seen such themes played out, it was probably with fewer lesbian masturbation sequences (for the record, that is not a complaint).

As our story opens, Nathalie (Coralie Revel) is naked (no beating around the bush here—that comes later), lying atop a bed, and taking a two-handed trip to orgasmville. The camera pulls back to reveal a shadowy figure watching (one of the flick’s more pretentious and tiresome devices—who would have thought that a figure that no one can see, draped in black, carrying a raptor might signify death). As the camera continues back, we realize that Nathalie is on stage and that we are in a nightclub. Also watching is the new bartender, Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou). A fight with management slugs results in both girls being tossed out and they end up sharing Nathalie’s apartment. At loose ends (and at each other’s), the pair decides that the only way to escape becoming part of the group they call life’s losers means using their physical charms to become 21^st century courtesans with the only proscription being never to fall in love with a mark.

Sandrine gets a job in an office, finally becoming the private secretary and mistress of the managing director (Roger Mirmont—if this were a comedy, they would have cast Thierry Lhermitte). But she her eyes set on the founder’s son, Christophe (Fabrice Deville), a devilishly handsome reprobate of whom we are warned that he has driven girls to suicide and is unusually close to his own sister. But, undaunted, our plucky pair press on until they get all they want, if not all they deserve.

Hardly a morality tale, the movie is more like a slightly better-plotted episode from the Red Shoe Diaries filled with glossy photography, beautiful if somewhat blank-faced femmes, and a slew of sequences better suited for Penthouse Forum. The group sex scenes are reminiscent of the decadent upper-class orgies in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (scenes which seemed to owe more to Reage/Aury than to Schnitzler), but the whole effect seems more monotonous than erotic. There is nothing particularly original here and little to recommend—except for all the stuff already mentioned.

I have spent the better part of the last two weeks complaining about the inordinate number of movies lately where the remorseless “heroes” happily profit from their crimes while the filmmakers reassure audiences not to worry and take vicarious pleasure at their hollow triumphs. I have no idea why, but I just did not seem to mind it as much here.

–Bill Henry

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