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Tempting Devils (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2018)
🕑 Added 2019-02-15 19:42:35 +0000 UTC
French cinema's favorite pervy uncle is back, and he's using a MacBook Pro to create a strange approximation of the sublime. Brisseau's latest exhibits the nubile flesh to which his audience has become accustomed, although to be fair, one of his three actresses is probably approaching middle-age and is a less glaring example of someone who shouldn't be caught within 100 feet of the old lech. But it's to Brisseau's credit that his softcore lesbian threesomes are probably the least interesting part of Tempting Devils. The real business of cinema is happening in the background.
Part of this is due to the fact that, once again, Brisseau is filming in his apartment. So we have a spectacular disconnect between the characters and the mise-en-scène. Camille (Fabienne Babe) and Clara (Anna Sigalevitch) live in a flat festooned with John Ford boxed sets, and copies of books by Régis Debray and Georges Sadoul, and posters for They Drive By Night. Granted, Camille is a videographer and photographer, but it's obvious that none of these things are hers. (On a shelf in the downstairs apartment is a mysterious box labelled "DAPPER DAN," which makes me wonder whether Brisseau got a shipment of Coen Brothers swag.)
But more than this, the apartments in Tempting Devils, and the flattened cinematography, provide a strangely Rohmerian atmosphere. This is a film in which characters are talking constantly about sex and spiritualism, and only shut their traps to go to bed with each other. In a way, the elderly character of Tonton (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) seems like a stand-in for the director, using transcendental meditation to travel beyond the four walls of the apartment and reach out into the cosmos. Brisseau seems to imply that carnality is both a portal to greater human understanding and a dangerous trap, one that disrupts our connection to the ineffable.
Alas, a cinema that is concerned with the mind/body split needs to be frank about what bodies are and what they do, and this is where Brisseau's dirty mind achieves its philosophical apex. People can do all manner of things to each other, but the ultimate goal is to float.
