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 creative journey into capturing the intersection of desire and intimacy. Auditioning a series of actresses to act out their unsimulated moments of pleasure during increasing transgressive public situations and resurrecting them before the camera, François’ impenetrability over his unwillingness to cross the line between his role as artist/observer and his implication in the process of his actresses’ arousal as emotional manipulator/voyeur inevitably transforms the nature of the dynamic between the filmmaker and his actresses with profound and irreparable consequences for the both the participants and the film itself. Perhaps the key to the film’s opacity resides in Brisseau’s allusive reference to Luis Buñuel’s comedy of manners, The Exterminating Angel – the awkward encounters, polite conversations, and hollow gestures of feigned geniality that demarcate the intranscendable distance between control and vulnerability, manipulation and complicity, attraction and obsession, reality and performance. It is in this surreal illustration of moribund ritual that Brisseau’s incorporation of quasi-mythology in the appearance of Delphic guardians- one of whom may have been a former protégé who decided to leaving the profession (Raphaële Godin) – that the film’s overindulgent (un)eroticism seems perversely suited in illustrating the filmmaker’s ambivalence towards the role of women as nurturers, confidantes, and objects of desire – the transformation of fallen angels into unreconciled muses hovering the earth in search of true, and profoundly cataclysmic, inspiration.
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