Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Seven Deadly Sins in One Movie, January 1, 2006
THE PLOT
Roommates Nathalie (Coralie Revel) and Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) compose a strategy to dispense sex strategically to manipulate men into submission for financial gain and advancement. They commence their plan at a large prestigious Paris brokerage house. After initial successes and rapid advancement, they meet their match in the company CEO, Christophe (Fabrice Deville) the handsome amoral son of the company's founder.
THE STORY
A shapely woman reclines on a day bed. She is restless and she is NAKED. A spotlight seems to highlight her gyrations and machinations. She sits up and slips into high-heeled sandals. She leans back and puffs out her chest. She places one hand upon her breast and kneads her nipple. The hand moves down across her midriff to her sex and she massages it. Suddenly she stands up and deliberately struts across the hardwood floor. After a dozen or so purposeful steps, facing the camera, she lowers herself to her knees and bends back once again. The spotlight is still on her as she masturbates and as she masturbates, the camera pans right. After panning about ninety degrees, you start to see people sitting at tables and the more it pans, you realize you are in a nightclub and the woman is an exotic performer. The woman is Nathalie.
Nathalie and Sandrine a recently hired bartender were fired that night because Nathalie would not allow the owner to force Sandrine to sleep with a customer. Tossed out on the street with nowhere to go, Sandrine accepted Nathalie's offer to spend the night. At her apartment, Nathalie urges Sandrine to loosen up after she admitted to admiring Nathalie's nerve and lack of inhibitions.
Nathalie, with her dry humor and strong will, made Sandrine laugh and eventually coerced her to do in front of her what Nathalie had done in front of an audience. With that, the bond was sealed and plans were laid, based on Nathalie's distorted view of love and sex, to manipulate all men and make a place in society for themselves. After the women's initial successes and having compromised their boss Delacroix, (Roger Mirmont), their plan begins to devolve into a whirlpool of ruthlessness, unrequited love, group sex, lesbian sex, three-way sex, and masturbation, in which the only way out appears to be suicide or murder.
CONCLUSION
The highly charged erotic opening scene set the theme for the movie so well, that I was mesmerized for the rest of the movie. True nothing that came after, with the possible exception of an "Eyes Wide Shut" style orgy scene late in the movie, was quite as electric but I still enjoyed the movie immensely. You see Secret Things had a story. It had a plot. A good story, a good plot, and the overall acting was very good. Secret Things is the closest I have viewed to a commercially viable, mainstream, erotic movie.
The movie Secret Things is appropriately named. The storyline is structured on secrets, deception and the duplicitous side of human nature. It is a reflection of a murky, lascivious side of life, which rarely is truly, captured on film. In fact the movie seemed to touch on one form or another, at one point or another, on all of `The Seven Deadly Sins' - pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth, obviously a perfect sinister erotic movie.
Secret Things, French name - Choses Secretes, is the kind of movie one either loves or hates. I happened to be a lover. Even the fact that the movie was French with English sub titles did not dampen my enjoyment.
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50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Explicit Exploration of Sexual Power., November 24, 2004
"Secret Things" (Choses Secrètes) explores the desires, ambitions, and obsessions that lie beneath the surface of everyday behavior. Specifically, life in the business world conceals a host of psychosexual games. Nathalie (Coralie Revel) is a worldly erotic performer and Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) is the fresh-faced bartender at a Paris club. When they both lose their jobs, they become roommates. Sandrine envies Nathalie's sexual self-confidence and abandon and is receptive to her lessons in life, sex, and manipulation. The two women set out to climb the socio-ecomomic ladder by seducing an earnest, dedicated senior employee (Roger Mirmont) at a company where they have both found employment The plan comes with some risk -in the form of the company's slick, megalomaniacal heir (Fabrice Deville)- that they may fall victim to their own machinations.
Sandrine narrates this bizarre tale of sexual power. The story could be told without voiceover narration, but, since it is essentially the story of Sandrine's self-discovery, the narration doesn't seem gratuitous and is only a little bit lazy. Probably the most helpful thing that I can say about "Secret Things" is that it is a film for certain tastes. This is talky, introverted, neurotic, psychosexual gobbledygook. It is French, in other words. There is a great deal of lesbian sex and nudity. The ideas presented in "Secret Things" are not original, but most of the film is sufficiently seductive and unpredictable to keep the audience wondering how it will all turn out. That is not to say that it is realistic. There is a point at which the story goes over the top and, in my view, becomes laughably baroque and uninteresting. But "Secret Things " is generally enjoyable if you like heavy-handed, explicit treatises on sexual power. In French with English subtitles.
The DVD: Bonus features include a "Photo Gallery" featuring stills from the movie and a text "Director Biography and Filmography".
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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
EDITED, December 28, 2004
This DVD is edited from the original version. This movie is HOT, the cut DVD is NOT.
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