À l'aventure (2008)

 

Director: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Cast: Carole Brana as Sandrine, Arnaud Binard as Greg, Étienne Chicot as the Taxi Driver, Jocelyn Quivrin as Fred, Lise Bellynck as Sophie, Nadia Chibani as Mina, Estelle Galarme as Françoise, Frédéric Aspisi as Jérôme

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sadrine (Carole Brana) begins with a friend on a bench where an older man sat near them on the same public furniture starts talking about their complacency as a species to act like sheep, starting her journey in self doubt which in context to how the film goes, could easily become a pretentious smut film. If my choice of words seem scathing, this will be a kinder review of À l'aventure, though viewing it as a flawed production which still is worthy of examining over and over. It is not a condemnation of erotica as a potential for art, or smut as inherently a bad thing, but in mind that this is a film by Jean-Claude Brisseau. The late French filmmaker presents a film which is doomed in nature, a film by an older cis male director making an erotic film with a female lead, which is common in the history of cinema, and made more complicated due to Brisseau's controversial real life history. A filmmaker since the seventies, I watched a film like Noce Blanche (1989) which still has erotic elements, but is a drama which focused on its characters complexities. Many will probably know him from Secret Things (2002), which was promoted in the early 2000s as a sexually explicit thriller and also begins the contentious aspect of his career. In 2005, he was found guilty in French courts for sexually harassing actresses in the auditions for that film, two actresses asked to perform explicit sexual acts during the audition process which included them being filmed, leading to him being fined and a one-year suspended jail sentence¹. This does not help scrutinise his career afterwards, especially when with The Exterminating Angels (2006), Brisseau had the gall if you condemn the man to depict his own criminal event in a speculative dissection of the incident which is sexually explicit as well. À l'aventure presents, however, something which feels drenched in ennui, presented as an erotic film where sensuality is still there, but the initial premise of Sadrine looking for the perfect orgasm, a premise from any softcore erotica, given way as a Trojan horse to existential dread. This review will not defend the man at all, but it fascinates as if the results of that criminal charge bled into this production completely.

It feels too obvious, before even watching the film and digesting it after, to just damn the production, more as even if its director presents a concern, now he marked himself for sins away from the film camera, films still present complicated psychological readings. The challenge for a man to write a woman's voice, and the perils of them doing it in a way which is potentially embarrassing, does however not ignore how intentionally (or unintentionally) write their own psychological state into any character they touch. With Jean-Claude Brisseau, this is even more of an issue, but Sadrine's lack of satisfaction with her boyfriend and routine starts as a set up for so many erotic works, sleeping with the stereotypically handsome male psychoanalysis, but feels like the work of a man drained in what he made. Even if going through the motions of erotic, it feels instead like Sadrine's sense of dissatisfaction is more than arousal, and this is also Brisseau's own, more poignant when his fascination of female sexual desire rightly got him criminated.

Whether the film itself actually succeeds is subjective, but in this case for this viewer, it is a failure from trying to be a profound about the meaning of life, as it falls into clichés, but becomes far more interesting and more rewarding as the struggle for meaning, and that pervading sense of distance a director-writer who pigeonholed himself into the stereotype of erotic cinema ended up in here. Brisseau has a type, let us be honest, of the slim intellectually beautiful woman who is bisexual in the ideal of certain cis male views, but even the male lead is an erotic ideal for him as a cis male, the ideal erotic man in Greg (Arnaud Binard), handsome and intelligent, embodying the desirable figure for this ideal woman. It is to the point he is named after actor Gregory Peck for a cineaste reference, a figure who believes in confronting conventional morality. The irony is knowing he will be skewered as a false love interest for Sadrine, and that feels on purpose, whilst Brisseau's own stand in is the older male taxi driver, who has no interest in Sadrine physically but like each other as figures wanting to talk about their place in the world. It is an erotic film which however falls back onto Brisseau's static camera takes, from cinematographer Wilfrid Sempé, of talking and Sadrine finding more insight with the aforementioned taxi driver, played by Étienne Chicot, who began her self doubts and shows more interest for her as a fully thinking figure.

It would almost be self parody in some of the scenarios here, as she encounters a submissive mistress to an open minded heterosexual couple, that indulge in cinematic light BDSM, but the idea of a restless middle class who need to escape routine is felt too, following sexual fantasies whether they can help or not. This comes with the issue of gender bias, beautiful women in the conventional idea who are intelligent on a surface level and open to all sexual scenarios as here. It becomes an issue with the figure who made this film who fell into the trap of thinking this ideal would be forced onto women, rather than how much more complex people are, and rightly got a criminal prosecution for this and thus marking all his art work with a stain we need to always point at even if we stay open minded to watching the films still. I would even accept being called a hypocrite for even watching this film or even taking some surface pleasure from it, but it comes with many details that dissect itself, becoming more than the stereotypical film of a bad filmmaker, bad in the true sense for badness as a man and not for something arbitrary as whether the dialogue makes sense, or if the film is well made. Figures, all women, are figuring themselves out existentially, be it from trauma of losing a child, or boredom and stifled sense of their purpose in life, and the mess of this take on the subject is still compelling even from a deeply failed production.

Even if objectifying a figure of desire, if figures speak at all of concerns or pains, even for humour, that can be a writer revealing more of themselves then they may realise. À l'aventure, set in the urban France of so many French films about anxiety and relationship tensions, where tellingly enlightenment comes from fleeing to the countryside, is filtered through divorces, the issue of the ideal marriage of heterosexual couples being hollow, and of how many of these characters here talk of themselves as wives or female figures being bored. The friend meant to say Sadrine's decision to ditch her job and work, drifting along in her sexual journey, is deluding herself ends up running off with an arms dealer in a romance and disappears from the film entirely, an absurd touch in the context but apt for the film. Even if the film ultimately feels like it is grasping at straws sexually and philosophically, that touches on a feeling of conventional reality being unstable from aimlessness that is one of the film's better aspects.

The fantasy the film is set up in is an issue unless you accept the inherent flaw of this particular piece of erotic trying to be serious, instead revealing itself as softcore punching above its weight but with the failed boxing blows still revealing so much more. You cannot work unless you are on the dole, or a true outsider, and there is more to even a naive writer like myself about the notion of a polyamorous relationship that, even for unrepentant and proud smut, you could work with beyond this, whilst this feels tame and falls into the problems of really hollow sexual fantasies shot for cinema that have women as the eroticised figures. But the fantasy still starts as a perfect template because of the fact it collapses, and the fantasy instead exaggerates the fixations that are uncomfortably real. Even when it looks like it is getting into a fantasy scenario that would be considered problematic and requires a lot more concern, even if transgressive to consider, about the place the willing submissive enjoys and controls the scenario as much as the dominant, the film throws the least expected curveball.

That scenario is when Greg is convinced to hypnotise the three female leads by the women themselves, which can make a viewer uncomfortable especially as erotica has the fantasy of mind control and hypnosis, frankly with the issues right to consider about whether it is a healthy scenario to imagine depending on the context. À l'aventure however completely undercuts this. Even if these turns in this type of world cinema I got into from DVD can be the moments which lose viewers as ridiculous, I am always happy when I get what I was not expecting from such films. It is set up that one figure Mina (Nadia Chibani) is susceptible to hypnosis, to the point a coin on her arm when told is hot does leave a real burn, leading into the supernatural crushing this fantasy as she starts to bring up past memories and past lives into what was meant to just be softcore. What was a set up to the sexual fantasy involving all three women turns into a work of figures trying to figure themselves out, accidentally prodding a hole in reality, and Greg making an ill advised attempt to explore this hole that just causes damage. All because he was not prepared to not go into the experiment and went in cluelessly, especially when people start to levitate off the floor in a real miracle.

The philosophical ideas of our repetition and sense of infinite are not original and of depth here, which would become an albatross if a viewer took this film to be a take on existentialism in a really detailed form, but even this abrupt turn in a plot is a surprise, including the one nod to a very contentious subject in French culture when Mima remembers an incident from Algeria in the past, talking of a horrible tragedy she caught the results of when too young to process it. Even the idea, if caught in the issues of Brisseau himself as a compromised artist, of the sexual ecstasy being linked fully to the spiritual is a compelling theory to think of, even if it ends here instead in disaster, those not prepared for the real force beyond their process, and Sadrine realising her ideal erotic man in Greg is not the person she can ever feel fullness as a person from. Ultimately the sex becomes unrewarding, more of a choreographed scenario by the end of this, which is pretty damning for a film that would have been sold on sex, leaving on a beautiful countryside field and discussing how people live in such little time of reality for what has been a millennia plus of the Earth's existence. Eroticism still plays a part in Brisseau's work, but it feels as if it is slowly ebbing away here, burnt by his own controversies of his career but also feeling like it confined him, none of which is a defence of the man in the damndest, but with the sense here the struggle came to the screen in a compelling way.

Abstract Spectrum: Introspective

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) French Director Found Guilty Of Sexual Harassment, written for Movie Mail and published December 20th 2005. Archived for the Web Archive on April 26th 2014.