#Les choses secretes how to

And sex is rampant throughout from masturbation to lesbian to menage-a-trois to incest.

Secret Things, however, replaces fists and feet with sex as the weapon. They face a mutual adversary and must work their way through his henchmen until ultimately facing the big boss. A teacher discovers a student, who in her own way begins to surpass her teacher. In an amusing way, Brisseaus film is structured like an archetypal martial arts movie. But as it turns out, she runs into another femme fatale figure who just happens to be a man. Secret Things is essentially a femme fatale story told from the point of view of the femme fatale, in this case, Sandrine. From his mansion perch, he talks about regulating the spectacle of human destiny. Irresistible to women, he has driven several past girlfriends to suicide. Now he is an amoral Dionysian and Nietzschean Superman who carries himself like an Egyptian pharaoh wallowing in his own perceived divinity. When he was a child, Christophes mother died of a heart attack while his father was away on business and Christophe spent two weeks with the decomposing corpse. But Christophe and his sister, Charlotte (Blandine Bury), turn out to be far more than what Nathalie and Sandrine bargained for. While Sandrine works on decent, tender family man, Delacroix (Roger Mirmont), Nathalie aims straight at the top with Christophe (Fabrice Deville), the son of the dying company owner. The two start by getting lowly secretarial positions and using their physical and mental assets to manipulate their male supervisors.

#Les choses secretes how to

She teaches Sandrine how to use sex to influence others, but warns her that love is their biggest enemy. She says she is sick of being yet another woman who is too meek to move up in the world.

Coming out of dance school, Nathalie was only able to find work as a stripper, but now she tells Sandrine of her plan to sleep her way to the top of the corporate ladder. Moving in with Nathalie, Sandrine confides that she is envious of Nathalies exhibitionism, and Nathalie decides to open her up by having Sandrine masturbate herself to climax in front of her. As with Y Tu Mama Tambien and Sex and Lucia, two other recent films about sex, the explicitness in Secret Things is so essential to its being that it would be pointless to try to cut it down to an R-rating.įresh-faced Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) is a bartender in a strip club who watches Nathalie (Coralie Revel) perform her nightly act with rapt attention, but when Nathalie tries to protect Sandrine from the owners sexual advances, both women are tossed into the street. Hot and scintillating, Brisseau and his actors arent afraid to get down and dirty. Cahiers du Cinema called it the best film of 2002 and theres at least a little merit to the claim.įor those disappointed by the intentionally frosty and remote erotica of Stanley Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut, Brisseau provides an alternative with Secret Things. Pretentious it may be, but it is also wickedly delirious and transporting. Guided more by an intellectual adherence to theme than considerations of realism or naturalism, Secret Things even occasionally evokes the supernatural (an angel figure that also appears in some of his other films), though the plot can scarcely carry so much symbolic weight. Who but the French would continue to push the envelope of sexuality in cinema? And Jean-Claude Brisseaus Secret Things is very French.