La jouissance des hystériques

This one really hits you in the face. But not because it is good. In fact, it is terrible. Bucqouy is an egoman. It is him talking, it is him trying to womanize, it is him who fails, it is him being offensive towards the actors... it is all about him. But who wants to see that? Even the actors got p***ed off. And the movie, well, in the end there was film material you can show in a cinema, but it was neither a feature film nor was it a documentary of how a movie comes into being. One of the very few movies I must warn you not to watch it. But go ahead if you enjoy spending boring evenings watching silly films.

This movie is an introduction into psychoanalysis combined with an apprehension of Marxism, but never in a boring way. In the sixties some youngsters claimed for sex, drugs and rock and roll. That is not the point of this movie. It is the story of a director who thinks that every movie he makes must be: 1. an introduction into the revolution and 2. an exercise in how to seduce women. The director, who looks as a mixture of the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh or the writer Jan Wolkers and the French television-star Colluche, does not realize that when you make women think independently for the sake of the revolution, that they get more personality and that they become more difficult to seduce. Above all he must keep order in the film studio (in a wood), which is apparently not so easy because at the end the film ends in complete chaos. The director, in fact the main character of the movie, understands that his actresses have grown mature by his own teachings and he must admit that they go their own way: he must also accept from now on his solitude. Funny approach of an "Education Sentimentale" in the film environment.

The title of the movie is from the book of Lucien Israël: "La Jouissance de l'Hystérique"(French) which means to take pleasure by becoming hysterical. When I saw the movie I thought that the director meant with hysterical only women, but this is not the case for the author of the book. The story of the movie, which has nothing to do with the book, tells us the difficulties of a director to find really good actresses who have solid nerves, can start a revolution and... who can just be good actresses. But the movie speaks about the human ambition to control everything by the viewpoint of a director who makes a movie with insufficient means. The movie is slow but learns us a lot about psychoanalysis and female psychology and about the battle between the opposite sexes. The poster of the movie shows us a little girl sitting on the tomb of the famous French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. This is what the movie is about: the innocence and (female) beauty of youth against the power of human culture and the power you need to achieve something in the real world, and the life and the time that it takes away to achieve something in society. I liked this movie because it is like going on therapy by watching a movie.