Secret Things (2002)
Directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau
Two young women find themselves struggling to survive in Paris, street-wise Nathalie, a stripper, and naïve Sandrine, a barmaid. Together, they discover that sex can be used to their advantage, and pleasure.
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This soft core porn version of "A Company of Men" in reverse engages throughout, never taking the expected path, although its loopy last act plays like a Sidney Sheldon novel influenced by Mailer's "Ancient Evenings" with Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" orgy as its centerpiece.
For those disappointed by the intentionally frosty and remote erotica of Stanley Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut , Brisseau provides an alternative with Secret Things.
Imagine "Emmanuelle" remade on a shoestring budget or "Eyes Wide Shut" staged by a community theater group, and you'll have a reasonable idea of the tacky yet pretentious temptations offered by the French erotic drama "Secret Things."
Brisseau’s film begins as one thing and ends up as a wholly different beast, and just when you expect Secret Things to be a francophile’s In the Company of Women, it morphs into a bizarre, ritualistic, and violent take on sexual omnivorousness that has more than a few echoes of Eyes Wide Shut (indeed, Brisseau has included a lengthy orgy sequence that feels very much like the unrated version of Kubrick’s film).
Two sequences, one featuring incest by proxy, the other an orgy similar to the one in Eyes Wide Shut, especially hammer home the class differences that exist here, if only because their level of perversity seems beyond those who have to concern themselves with worldly pursuits.
An erotic thriller, "Secret Things'' aspires to the intrigue and moral complexity of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses,'' but it plays rather like a humorless version of Barbara Stanwyck's tongue-in-cheek classic, "Baby Face'' (1933).
Darkly comedic, Secret Things is in league with Barbara Stanwyck’s Baby Face (1933), in which a working class girl sleeps her way to the top.
If the film is erotic on the surface, its undercurrent is as hard and cynical as " In the Company of Men ."
Some reviews have compared the film to Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men or Kubrick's still-misunderstood Eyes Wide Shut, both of which suggested reasonable conclusions to their sexual experiments.
Like Bresson�s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne or Une femme douce or Au hasard, Balthasar, Brisseau�s film stays close (for much of its length) to the surfaces of contemporary reality while manifesting a total contempt for the level of naturalism where ordinary films live and die.
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Equal parts Olivier Assays� demonlover and Howard Hawks� Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Jean-Claude Brisseau�s Secret Things is an exaggerated fable of sexual politics and comic elegance.
This erotic chronicle of two ball-busting, social-climbing women takes place in the present but could just as easily have taken place in the Middle Ages, or in the same future as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
(It's similarly funny when Sandrine schemes to ingratiate herself to him by capitalizing on his status as a Mama's boy.) Brisseau never goes into tragic-romantic mode, a la Louis Malle's Damage, nor does he tip his hand by playing it as outright comedy.
Like Zalman King with "Delta of Venus," sometimes soft-porn purveyor Jean-Claude Brisseau has something more than sex on his mind here.
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Determined to help Sandrine divorce herself from the sticky moral and societal complications of female promiscuity, Nathalie becomes the instrument for both of them to infiltrate a male-dominated financial corporation, targeting the most professionally-advantageous sexual conquests and enlisting the pair on a quest that resembles first the erotic gamesmanship of Dangerous Liaisons, then the carnal impact of Fight Club , and finally the literal stratified ascent of Matthew Barney's Entered Apprentice (Cremaster 3).
This may sound like a tongue-in-cheek variant on Dangerous Liaisons, and I suppose on one level it is.
As in Fight Club , the initial objective with which Brisseau aligns the audience is replaced with a stark ambivalence that tremendously complicates the movie.
Right away, this is a woman in full control of her sex, and her relationship to Nathalie suggests a confrontation between id and ego (critic Zach Ralston rightfully draws allusions to David Fincher’s Fight Club).
Determined to help Sandrine divorce herself from the sticky moral and societal complications of female promiscuity, Nathalie becomes the instrument for both of them to infiltrate a male-dominated financial corporation, targeting the most professionally-advantageous sexual conquests and enlisting the pair on a quest that resembles first the erotic gamesmanship of Dangerous Liaisons, then the carnal impact of Fight Club , and finally the literal stratified ascent of Matthew Barney's Entered Apprentice (Cremaster 3).