À l’aventure (2009) - film review

Sandrine is bored with her comfortable middle-class existence in a dull provincial town.  Finally, tired of the daily rituals and the endless compromises that constrain her freedom, she leaves her home and her boyfriend and sets out in search of adventure.  She gets to know a young psychiatrist who happens to share her thirst for passion and self-fulfilment through the most intense sensual experiences...

With À l’aventure, director Jean-Claude Brisseau concludes his provocative erotic trilogy, not so much with a bang as with an overly intellectualised analysis of female sexuality which makes an Open University lecture on quantum physics look like kindergarten stuff.  After Choses Secrètes (2002) and Les Anges exterminateurs (2006), Brisseau’s latest attempt to enlighten us on the mysteries of sex looks suspiciously like a highbrow re-make of Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (1974).  By throwing in a few tonnes of pseudo-mystical posturing, Brisseau presumbly thought he could give his film at least a veneer of art house respectability and so prevent it from being marketed exclusively to the dirty mac brigade.   In fact, what is presented as a woman’s search for sexual fulfilment outside the confines of bourgeois respectability is little more than a pretext for pornographic self-indulgence of the dullest kind.

Although Brisseau tries hard to make this more than just a high-blown piece of erotica he doesn’t quite pull it off (so to speak).   The film’s artistic flourishes (which include some appropriately moody location photography) are not enough to elevate it much beyond the level of tacky porno trash.   Had the characters been more than just bland caricatures with a morbid fascination for Sade the film might have stood some chance of looking less like smut for intellectuals and more like an honest exploration of human desire.   Far from breaching the sexual taboos as he intended, Brisseau merely reinforces one’s prejudices against the erotic film, a deservedly reviled genre which, thanks to the internet, is now well and truly dead in the water.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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