Gli angeli sterminatori

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.

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

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This is one of those movies that you love or hate, but that moves you anyway. It has so many details, so many reactions of the characters so the pleasures game that the director wants to play that is difficult for me to treat the film only in only direction or conclusion. As you may have read before, it tells us about a film director in his forties that is shooting an erotic scene and he discovers how the actress enjoys breaking the taboo of masturbation in front of a camera. She tells him how intense and marvelous that feeling was, but after a time they meet by random and she tells him he traumatized her... now the director is interested about what crosses to someone's mind when breaking a rule himself has imposed. I will not say this is a psychologist study, nor a pornographic film although the extremely explicit content, but it is such and intense and dark look about how we can become blind by our passions instead of use our head and the advices we receive from our friends (wife and grandmother in the film). And we all know how naturally and honestly french talk about feelings, which make the film believable. For me, it was a whole experience and, with the Danish film Princess, and maybe the Swish Snow White and Brannagh's The Magic Flute, the only worthy film of the Sevilla 06 film festival.

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")

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.