La Toute Dernière

This is an incredibly strange movie. A girl goes to work as a stripper in Paris. She needs a place to stay and finds a girl whose roommate has just left. She convinces her new roommate to waive the rent deposit by tying her up and having lesbian sex with her. Later she becomes interested in the girl who just left--especially, when the roommate tells her she "left" by jumping out the window of the high-rise apartment. She reads a journal the woman left behind, which cues a lot of black-and-white flashbacks and voice-over narration of the dead woman. Interspersed with this are more color scenes of the stripper having more lesbian sexual encounters including one with a woman who comes to the door looking for the dead girl. . .

The lesbian sex in this obscure French film kind of resembles the lesbian sex in the more famous French film "La Vie d'Adele" ("Blue is the Warmest Color") what with girls masturbating other from behind and spanking each other. Many American lesbians--who apparently speak for ALL lesbians--have claimed that that movie does not "realistically" portray lesbian sex, so perhaps this one doesn't either. But speaking for all (more or less) heterosexual men, I don't think these scenes are exactly meant to appeal to them either. The sex scenes are few and far between and kind of abbreviated. They somehow manage to be both graphic (bordering on hardcore) and strangely oblique. The girls range from marginally attractive to downright ugly (although it's only the marginally attractive ones that have graphic sex scenes). They, at least, don't have the fake breast/"sexy Frankenstein" look of most American porn stars, but are more pierced and tattooed "suicide girl" types.

The main point of this I think, however, was to make a feature-length avante-garde film, and in this respect it's slightly more successful. It uses several different types of film-stock and makes good use of the rainy Paris scenery with lots of moody shots of rain falling into the Seine River. At times the ennui almost oozes from the sprocket holes. It is pretty pretentious, but there is no way a French avant-garde film would not be to some degree pretentious. The only way it could be more pretentious is if it was also made by film students (and maybe it was). Still, I have to admire the chutzpah of the filmmakers. Few people have ever been able to make a feature length avante-garde film and get it distributed (on Netflix streaming no less) simply by adding lesbian sex scenes. This will probably be seen by more people than any of the films of Stan Brakhage (if only he had thought to add some lesbian scenes. . .). It's also possible that this really will appeal to some lesbians, especially those who like the French avante-garde films.

American Director Todd Verow makes a spirited attempt to imitate slow, artsy, musically charged French films, with a touch of an attempt at avant-garde. It is as if he is trying to put everything he learned in film-making school into one movie. The use of black and white, the diving around with the camera, the close ups on rain drops. However, there are some good scenes of Paris and rooftop shots.

It's probably good if you have a remote with fast forward. This movie could easily have been cut down to a third or half of its run time. You can see that Verow is previously more of a specialist in shorts and that shows clearly.

Don't expect much, it's a low budget, amateurish movie, but it is an interesting look into their boring sordid lives and mundane sex lives.

This used to be on netflix and i used to goon to it as a kid while it was on there i randomly like last week went hunting to find this now i can actually read what their saying and not just goon thanks big brain anyways the last part of this is just to fill the space😭🙏

I hurt the Gingerbread Boy, Cause he's pretend-bread boy.

Little cookie man never waved to me, So he got knocked out.

Man, cause I flow.

La Jiggy Jar Jar Doo, Dur Dur Dur Dee Dur.

Man, I just flow.

Shoe Shine, No one wanted your stinking tiara, Cause no one wanted your sticky chair.

And why you always talk about the cool kids who take archery, Yeah, you're a shrinky dink.

You'll get a funeral if you don't wise up and call me Carl Poppa, (Oh, oh-oh, oh) La Jiggy Jar Jar Do, Dur Dur Dur Dee Dur.

The single star is awarded here for the dubious achievement in actually getting this project out of the mind onto the table and to the screen.

I cannot fathom how this film got distribution anywhere but the living rooms of the director's friends. The story is aimless, vacuous and dreary. The episodic 'arty' black-and-white sequences with 'arty' photography and overlaid narration are clichéd, cringe-inducing and pretentious. The characters are singularly unsympathetic, uninteresting and unattractive - intellectually as well as physically, I'm afraid - and the acting abilities are dismal. The sex sequences are empty, random, wholly depressing and lack any sensuality. Simply awful.

Those seeking standard elements like plot, story arcs and character development should look elsewhere. Except for the large ornate tats on most of the cast this obsessively artsy film could have come from the French New Wave Movement of the 1960s -'70s. Narratives were relegated to the back seat in favor of abstract presentations focused on moods, largely via new (at the time) visual concepts.

This emulates most of those components. Sparse dialog; unusually long transitions - as in someone doing a lot of walking with no particular purpose; lenses uncomfortably close to actors; grainy look of bleak sets and mostly-depressed characters within them; random switches from color to B&W; an ending as vague and open to interpretation as a Jackson Pollack painting. All that wrapped around a sprinkling of soft-core moments of sex and nudity, with their erotic value muted by the detached attitudes of the players. Everyone is browsing; nobody's buying. Ultimately more pretentious than entertaining or enlightening.