A director interviews a number of young French film actresses while casting his next film. Certain scenes will involve them in acts of lesbianage, cunnilingus, and attempts to perform a transcendental orgasm on camera. Most of the interviewees storm out, correctly identifying the bloke posing as a director as a cheap sleaze. Perhaps it's his creepy good looks, or that stare...
Eventually he finds two girls prepared to undergo the ordeal of being in a mediocre sexploitation flick.
Oops, sorry, cunningly contrived titillation that should just squeeze past the board and get a screening at film festivals. People will queue up to see it, too, because the poster can show a topless chick without misleading the audiences about what they will get on screen.
The idea's a good one (investigate the erotic power of women through interviews between a director and potential actors in his next movie), but the result is a low-range soft-core that might as well have been made in the late Seventies. But for haircuts and the high polish of the finished image it was.
The French have done their level best to marry art and porn. Several generations have had a jolly good go, and nobody has really pulled off the coup. Prompting once again the question, What is the deal with porn?
Why can't the French get lucky and combine art and porn with success? 'Romance' didn't really work either as drama or as arousal-material. Catherine Breillat went over the problem intelligently in 'Sex Is Comedy' which is actually a good film about a director trying to coach young actors in performing sex acts for the camera. 'Exterminating Angels' is simply the latest in a long line of duds. Most other efforts look like a poor man's re-tread of David Hamilton.
The litmus test is simple to conduct. Any amateur should be able to perform it at home.
Take out the sex scenes from a film and all scenes leading up to a sex scene, contrived purely to arouse, and what do you have left?
If there is still a solid plot-driven drama in which all the characters' motivation hangs together logically and coherently throughout the story, which also has a measurable degree of forward momentum, inclining us to watch to the end and feel satisfaction in and of the story itself, then we have something that can be said to be a decent film.
It's really irrelevant to the question of it being a good film whether or not it has sex scenes. There are good films with sex scenes, there are good films without. Most great films don't have them. But that is probably because of prevailing taboos at the time which obliged writers to sublimate their desires into symbolic forms, which become in the best cases cinematic images. A good thing for great cinema on the whole.
It has recently been shown by science that the sight of a nude woman alters the male brain so terribly that he cannot choose between 'red or white' (wine). We can also say that putting sex scenes in to a filmed drama unbalances the male mind to the extent that bad films are usually result. Bad films like 'Exterminating Angels' (not to be confused with Bunuel's masterly 'Exterminating Angel', a film to which this has no relation whatsoever. So why the title, Monsieur Brisseau?)
It would be possible for instance to pop in to perfectly good films sex scenes, and a board might be set up by the French government, or the council of the San Fernando valley (where most porn production takes place) to perform this useful function.
Take a perfectly wonderful film like 'Claire's Knee' or 'To Have And Have Not' and have directors and actors work carefully to interpolate scenes at regular intervals where the lead characters are seen getting it on, running the full gamut of sexual positions and now-ritualised 'steps'.
It might be a balancing response to what the Christians are doing in the States, bowdlerising movies by taking out the 'unclean' bits.