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")

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.

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 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.

This movie is about a director who wants to make a film, with a plot which has never been done before. He tries to experiment with various unusual ways to push the boundaries of "what should be" or "what should'nt be". In spite of the warnings by his loved ones he gives himself up to his curiosity. He lets his lust control his actions. The lust forces him to venture forbidden territory (or taboo, as one might call it). His lust eventually, drives him to a place filled with deceit, pain and despair.

Overall I feel the movie is only worth watching for an audience who can cope with the darkness and the ill-feeling which the movie makes you feel. That is why I did not like the movie because I felt the story was not so brilliant and too strange to be very honest.