Review: Choses secrètes (2002)
Harvey S. Karten
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: A-
First Run Features
Directed by: Jean-Claude Brisseau
Written by: Jean-Claude Brisseau
Cast: Coralie Revel, Sabrina Seyvecou, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice
Deville, Blandine Bury, Olivier Soler, Viviane Theophildes
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 1/22/04
Says here in the paper that Kerry and Edwards surprised the
heck out of Dean in Iowa and that Kerry is favored to win in New
Hampshire as well. Does that turn you on? If not, maybe that
helps explain why only fifty-one percent of eligible Americans
vote in a presidential election eight percent in a school board
vote. Politics may be dirty, but even worse, it's just not
interesting enough. But wait: not all games of power are so
mundane. Sexual politics: that's another story, but then again,
put the three-letter word starting with "s" and ending with
ecstasy into a story and you've got audience attention. The only
question is: how long can you hold it lest the voyeurs in their
seats bolt prematurely? With "Secret Things," honored as
Cahiers du Cinema's best pic of 2002, writer-director Jean-
Claude Brisseau takes a risk that his story of office politics
involving two women who use their sexual powers to get what
they want from men, will not collapse once the regisseur's
signature surrealism and flights of fancy take hold, alarmingly
changing the genre from a Hitchcockian tale of suspense and
intrigue into a scene out of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo, or the
120 Days of Sodom," with sadism, scatology and debauchery
galore.
Hitchcock and Pasolini aside, the principal segment of this
envelope-pushing melodrama could be called "Jean-Claude
Brisseau's Revenge Against Neil LaBute." LaBute's stunning
1997 film is about two yuppie office workers, frustrated by the
world around them and women in particular, who make a pact
that they'll both date a woman and then dump her just for the
satisfaction. In Brisseau's film, though, the women--tossed out
bodily from a strip club for refusing to sleep with some influential
patrons--are in need of money and seek vengeance against
men. They conspire to use the only commodity they believe they
have to climb the corporate ladder in much the way that some
Hollywood stars have historically been accused of doing the
same in the cinema game.
Brisseau's two principals, Nathalie (Coralie Revel) and
Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou), set up housekeeping together in
Nathalie's Paris flat and soon obtain jobs because they can
cross their legs better than their competitors. Sandrine swiftly
attracts the attention of the male statisticians, keeping them at a
distance until she casts her lot with the 50-year-old, unhappily
married immediate supervisor, Delacroix (Roger Mirmont).
Easing her way into his confidence, she sets up a dalliance,
partly as a diversion and in part to climb even further by
attraction the attentions of the fabulously rich Christophe
(Fabrice Deville who looks good but can't act), who is about to
become heir to the family business. The buzz about this
Christophe which elicits audience laughs seemingly
unintentional given the film's non-campy seriousness is that he
has not only seduced the entire female staff of the office and
perhaps half of Paris but that his ultimate rejections have driven
women to suicide, one even dousing herself with gasoline and
setting herself afire.
Story aside, "Choses secretes" as the film is called in its
original French, is about visuals, shocking ones for audience
members who have not seen Catherine Breillat's "Romance"
(about a rejected woman who goes on a sexual odyssey), and
who have never charged up the pay TV in any hotel worthy of its
name. You wonder how Halle Berry could negotiate a cool
million extra for exposing her top for six seconds when you
witness the opening scene focused on Nathlie's onanistic and
balletic performance in a Parisian strip club followed in fairly
rapid sequence by Sandrine's sexual mentor Nathalie's teaching
the more timid woman how to arouse herself in a solo bed
performance, in the Paris Metro, and in the office. The
relationship of Nathalie and Sandrine has its ups and downs (so
to speak), the pupil quickly outdistancing her teacher in the race
for sexual and monetary power climaxing in a tragic end for one
of the young women and the heights for the other.
By the time "Secret Things" is over, "secret" has been
removed from "secretary" to such an extent that you'll wonder
whether there are any confidences left in this Oprah-Jerry
Springer world at all. While full frontal and back nudity
abounds, Brisseau keeps the core soft by avoiding shots of
serious action below the belt, making "Secret Things" still one of
the most sexually frank pictures to hit the U.S. screens ever. If
Brisseau's work, which abruptly turns to grand opera in the final
half hour, were dealing merely with how women sleep their way
to the top, this would be a fine production. Beyond that what the
director may have had in mind on the deepest level goes
beyond mere naturalism into a surreal exploration of the
fantasies we all have, deny them as we might what we think
about when our imaginations run free: the secrets of the office,
the secret lives of roommates, the secret things buried in the
unconscious minds of people who have been abused, who have
witnessed destruction, in short, who have lived. Acted with
credibility particularly by Sabrina Seyvecou in the role of a
woman who reaches beyond her naivete to cast herself as one
of society's winners, backed by bold, stirring music from the
classics and grand opera, "Secret Things" allows us once again
to cast aside the formulaic, the trite, the simple melodramas of
life, to transcend the mundane and explore cinema as it is
meant to be a world of imagination, exploration, and delight.
Rated R. 115 minutes.(c) 2003 by Harvey Karten at
Harvey...@cs.com
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X-RT-RatingText: A-