"Secret Things"

Nudity, lesbian love scenes, threesomes, incest and orgies, sure -- but the most shocking thing about this French film is that it dares to address the fate of the soul.

By Charles Taylor

Feb 20, 2004 | The shock of Jean-Claude Brisseau's "Secret Things" has less to do with what we see -- copious nudity, lesbian scenes, threesomes, public masturbation, incest and a hardcore orgy -- than the movie's unfashionable level of seriousness and ambition. "Secret Things," the first of Brisseau's films to be released in the U.S., has been talked about as if it's the latest in French cinema's ongoing series of provocations, a list that encompasses the work of directors as talented as Catherine Breillat ("Romance," "Fat Girl") and as fraudulent as Gaspar Noé ("I Stand Alone," "Irreversible"). The movie is a French provocation, but one whose lineage is Choderlos de Laclos and (fleetingly) the Marquis de Sade.

Not only is Brisseau's narrative classically structured -- this is a rags-to-riches story about the material and social rise and moral fall of its protagonists -- the film has a deepening sense of consequence. Souls, if not lives, are hanging in the balance here, and Brisseau takes the ideas of corruption and damnation very seriously. At times the movie feels like an updated version of a scandalous 18th century novel, the sort of thing Roger Vadim accomplished in his 1959 retelling of "Les liaisons dangereuses" starring Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philippe as a modern, bourgeois Merteuil and Valmont.

Brisseau risks ridiculousness and sometimes teeters right on the edge of it. This is a director working in a contemporary setting and in a (deceptively) naturalistic style who, in some scenes, includes a hovering Angel of Death, replete with raven. We still accept stories about people destroyed by fate or by their own flaws in opera and in novels of past centuries. But in a contemporary setting we tend to find those same potentialities silly, as if this scale of passion or hubris is something that we've collectively and sensibly outgrown in favor of Wes Anderson comedies.

Which may be why some of the advance reviews of "Secret Things" suggest that critics are content to enjoy the movie as long as it's the cool, cynical comedy of sexual manners it starts out as. As soon as it becomes clear that there are human casualties of the power games the two female leads are playing -- that is, as soon as the movie becomes more than an elegant, art-house turn-on -- those same critics start talking about how nutty and overheated it is.

But the tone shift that Brisseau engineers in "Secret Things" is essentially the same as the one de Laclos employs in "Les liaisons dangereuses," which seems to be the movie's main inspiration. Nathalie (Coralie Revel) and Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) meet working in a strip club (Nathalie as a dancer, Sandrine as a bartender) and are fired on the same night for refusing their boss's attempt to pimp them out to a customer. Unable to pay the rent on her room, Sandrine moves in with Nathalie, who decides to use the sexuality that makes her the focus of attention when she's performing to haul herself and Sandrine up the corporate ladder.

The early scenes of the more experienced Nathalie instructing the novice Sandrine in how to be a corporate courtesan recall the licentious comedy of Pietro Aretino's "The School of Whoredom." Nathalie explains to Sandrine how to seduce without being seduced, and warns her that love is Public Enemy No. 1. She tells Sandrine that, above all, she has to dare, and this becomes a series of challenges during which she prods Sandrine to masturbate on a subway platform, or to walk around with nothing under her trench coat and to feel superior to the people constricted by their clothes and undergarments.

The story proceeds as a fable, confirming Nathalie's logic of sex as power. That power is enough to secure them jobs with the same company on their very first interview. Sandrine's boss Delacroix (Roger Mirmont, evoking sympathy for a character who could easily seem dull), a decent man who's never cheated on his wife, is an easy target for her newly acquired wiles and the two are soon sleeping together. Sandrine's ultimate target -- and Nathalie's -- is Christophe (Fabrice Deville), the boss's son, a smooth-faced brat who has had every privilege handed to him as a birthright and who has the gall to say, "Society proves every day that merit is all that matters."

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