E-Mail This Article to a Friend The anti-Christ Jean-Claude Brisseau’s secret things BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	Choses secrètes/Secret Things Written and directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau. With Sabrina Seyvecou, Coralie Revel, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice Deville, and Blandine Bury. A First Run Features release (115 minutes). In French with English subtitles. At the Kendall Square.

Here the customers are sure to find what they’re looking for," the proprietor of a live-sex-show club declares early on in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Choses secrètes/Secret Things. The film that follows, lurid and outrageous but chilling and controlled, bears him out: all the characters find what they’re looking for, but how that happens is proof of the old dictum "Be careful what you wish for."

The film opens with the seductive Nathalie (Coralie Revel) nude on a bed, in the apparent throes of auto-erotic passion. Caressing herself with growing abandon, she moves from the bed to a chair and then to the floor. In a magisterial movement, the camera discloses the club patrons watching her, proving that she’s performing and that she exists as an erotic object not only for herself but also through her consciousness of being watched.

Across the club, as rapt as the patrons, stands the bartender, Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou). Her voiceover narration identifies her as the heroine — but of what kind of narrative? First, it’s a gothic-romantic story, the one about the young woman of shabby origins who fascinates and marries a rich, handsome, seemingly inaccessible man. Second, it’s a comic-conspiratorial variant on that story, in which the heroine, with the aid of her female partner, plots against the male sex, campaigning to arouse men’s passion, take their economic power, and humiliate them. Third, it’s the story of the relationship of the two women, with the more experienced Nathalie initiating her friend into a life of pleasure and revenge.

The "secret things" of the title are the women’s secrets: what’s happening beneath their clothes (early in Sandrine’s indoctrination, Nathalie urges her to slip her bra off under her blouse in a Métro station, to touch herself, to walk through Montmartre nude under a coat); what they think about their boyfriends; whether they really come during sex. The film’s main secret is the complementary nature of eroticism. As Brisseau demonstrates in a series of alluring, devastating scenes, there’s no clear line between simulation and reality, between having one’s own pleasure, pleasure for one’s self, and pretending to have pleasure in order to please another person.

A baroque film, a work of exalted obscenity and grandiose twists and turns, Choses secrètes is so unusual that it seems to come out of nowhere. But it’s apt that the first US run of Brisseau’s film, which was released in France in 2002, coincides with the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, to which Choses secrètes, with its ferocious intelligence and irony, makes the perfect antidote. Both movies are dedicated to the elaborate, perverse display of bodies in extreme states; both have more than a touch of the fantastic, hinting that the obscene is always linked to something else that keeps itself hidden (Gibson’s black-cloaked Satan has his counterpart in the dark-veiled woman who keeps popping up in Brisseau’s film). Choses secrètes even has a Christ figure, the handsome libertine Christophe (Fabrice Deville), who takes away the sins of the world in his own way, by acting them out.

One of the film’s most enjoyable aspects is its freedom from verisimilitude. The society shown here is no more specific than in certain grade-B sex or horror films, and this is, no doubt, just what Brisseau wanted: the kind of flattening of background that good low-budget genre movies sometimes offered, and in which they met up with art-film directors like Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman. Like Bresson’s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne or Une femme douce or Au hasard, Balthasar, Brisseau’s film stays close (for much of its length) to the surfaces of contemporary reality while manifesting a total contempt for the level of naturalism where ordinary films live and die. Here the contribution of María Luisa García, who is credited with production design, costume design, and editing, no less, is essential. Choses secrètes is a triumph of art direction: the physical details of the film, credible but abstract, suggest that it could slide at any moment into a mysterious and fantastic universe. When it does, the movement is irresistible.