La Toute Dernière

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.

This had all the bad qualities of an average, amateur porn effort and only a little bit of limited sex (women using their hands). The rest of the movie is so slow moving, boring and pointless. There's not really a plot, just some junk about a troubled mess of a woman who is only in the movie in confusing flashbacks, but if there is a plot it is never fully executed. It's just a silly, self-consciously artsy attempt to make a "deep" film with a handful of moderately attractive women, one with some decent tattoos (and a couple of real hounds, one with hideous tattoos). What an unbelievably stupid waste of time.

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.

Minimal plot, if at that. Parts in color and parts in B&W. At the start, a woman is doing a striptease. And she has colorful tattoos (tats). She goes to a building to rent a room and the woman says the other woman left, and some of her stuff was left behind. When asked if she has the security deposit, she provides an interesting response. More skin, more tats, more breasts and body piercings. And smoking. Lots of smoking, since this film is French. Later she meets another woman, and there is more skin, tats and smoking. We find the woman who left did not use the door, and left behind a diary. And more smoking. It can get boring, since with little dialogue and an attempt to be super artsy, if fails.

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.