Exterminating Angels, 2006

It’s tough to find something redeeming about Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels, a conflated, borderline pornographic, and execrable projection of the female psyche as seen through the murky gaze of a successful, middle-aged filmmaker, François (Frédéric van den Driessche) whose encounter with an actress recounting her sexual fantasy during an interview triggers his own personal and […]

Sound and Fury, 1988

While the highly stylized, oneiric sequences in Sound and Fury portend Jean-Claude Brisseau’s preoccupation with erotic imagery, his visceral, unsentimental portrait of childhood alienation nevertheless aligns closer to the naturalism of Ken Loach’s Kes and Jean Eustache’s Mes petites amoureuses than the surrealism of his later films. Indeed, Bruno’s (Vincent Gasperitsch) initiation into his new […]