Customer Reviews

A l'Aventure

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

You get exactly what is advertised with this show, a totally French outlook on sex, nudity & human relationships. If, like myself, you enjoy the European way of viewing sex as healthy & violence as obscene this is a recommended purchase. American so-called morality will make this one stick in your throat & you should avoid it.

Thematically, this film is somewhat similar to Jean-Claude Brisseau's first effort in his sexual trilogy, 'The Exterminating Angels', insofar as it revolves around three women seeking the ultimate orgasm /sexual ecstasy and one man who assists them bring this concept (at least in theory and for the sake of the film) to fruition. But the interplay among the characters and outcome are dramatically different, and for me, a lot less enjoyable.

A young French couple are experiencing a melancholy sexual rut - he's too wrapped up in work and stress to desire sex, she's bored and unfulfilled, and masturbates when he's sleeping, but gets caught moaning one night and the relationship buckles as a result. She leaves and is despondent, detached and depressed, but has to eat, and meets a man in a café who's reading books on hypnosis, trances and hysteria as he studies to become a psychiatrist. She invites herself to sit with him, they engage in conversation regarding his work; she declares she likes him, enough to go home and to bed with him without even knowing his name.

In post-coital conversation, he tells her about several women he has hypnotized, one of whom has had orgasmic bliss while under trance, and she's intrigued enough to want to meet this woman, and later they go to the woman's lovers place to watch a game of dominance and submission between the woman, her master and a second woman engage in sadosexual playtime. It's a good scene, but could've been better, voyeuristically speaking. Then, musical chairs take place sexually among the people involved, and this too was a good scene; afterwards they speak of the hypnotic suggestions of the ultimate orgasm all three women seek, and convince the psychiatrist to hypnotize them. Brilliant - does anybody actually believe these things are that easily had?

This whole concept of orgiastic ecstasy while under hypnosis sounds like a lot of esoteric brouhaha, and the philosophical and existential considerations and conversations weigh the entire film down in nonsense as believable as an episode of 'Chris Angel Mindfreak' - too many imaginary weighty concerns being addressed for a sexploitation flick. This Bali Mystic, sexual Svengali-Houdini dribble it descends into is ridiculous after a while, but unfortunately, it gets worse.

Later on, the would-be psych hypnotizes the third woman in this triangle, and this woman experiences an out-of-body convulsing orgasm of epic proportion, then actually levitates about a foot off of the floor as though possessed! When she again becomes earth-bound, a strange, unknown sound is emitted, gradually getting louder as winds swirl most of the objects in the room around as though they're in a mini-hurricane - the Big Bang theory of orgasmic bliss has now become evidenced... Please...

I believe this to be the embarrassment in Brisseau's sexual trilogy, unfortunately, in spite of initial promise, decent performances and beautiful cinematography. As Art House cinema, its hokey plot crevices make it faulty, as arty exploitation it fails to deliver the sexual side of the coin, as risqué sexual cinema it's no kind of adventure at all.

Back in the 1960s there was a sub-genre of French cinema that basically comprised a man and a woman meeting by chance, the man and woman going off to a convenient location and then having sex, and then the man and the woman lying in bed discussing existentialist problems like alienation and the essential futility of life in a bourgeois society. Such films engendered their fair share of parody and for a while they disappeared altogether. While it would be unfair to categorize a l'aventure quite so rigidly, it does bear some passing resemblance to its cousins of yore.

The plot is simple: Sandrine rebels against the claustrophobia of quotidian life by quitting her job and then tumbling into bed with an attractive psychiatrist (yes, in France even psychiatrists are permitted to be sexy) and then informing her live-in fiancee of the fact when she returns home later that evening. She wants to live honestly and openly, and wants to be open to new experiences. What's nice about this film is that the reactions of her family and friends are naturalistic - in short, they think she's silly for not playing the standard games that everyone else plays. As her mother tells her, everyone gets small moments of freedom occasionally, but they have to remain covert. Everyone knows everyone else is cheating, but as long as everyone pretends things are fine, the game can continue without disruption.

Sandrine goes on to meet a friend (and of course former lover) of her psychiatrist Greg, and through that friend she encounters a world of greater passion and eroticism than she's experienced before. It's quite difficult to film scenes of mild S&M (spanking, masturbation) without degenerating into parody or farce, but the movie works reasonably well because it treats the erotic elements as naturally as the non-erotic, with transitions that seem quite naturalistic. Likewise the various sex scenes are adequately done, though the raptures the women experience seemed to this viewer to be somewhat mundane and hardly "the most violent orgasms" they were hypnotically programmed by Greg the psychiatrist to enjoy. A stylistic quirk of the director is to use doors and doorways metaphorically during moments of sexual discovery, and to emphasis this trope by means of a repeated musical motif. Personally I found this a little heavy-handed, a bit like John Wayne wearing the white hat and the Bad Guys wearing black hats in old US Western movies.

As a counter-point to her physical discoveries, Sandrine befriends an old taxi-driver who turns out to be a former physics teacher and would-be spiritualist. It was his initial conversation with her that set her on the path of self-awareness, and it is his conversations with her that expand her mind in parallel with expanding her knowledge of sensuality. These, for me, were the most enjoyable moments of the film not least because the relationship between Sandrine and the Prof conveys initially cautious but increasingly trusting mutual affection and humor. At times the interactions have the quality of ad-lib, where each actor is enjoying the development of character and relationship.

Eventually Greg abandons Sandrine for Mina, the ultra-suggestible woman whom Greg's hypnosis (in typical French fashion he uses a cigarette as his hypnosis object rather than a pen or a fob-watch) carries back into a past life from whence her dream-memories of ultimate ecstacy spring. In an odd little scene, Mina experiences a profound rapture and levitates (sic) for several moments, before gently descending. Immediately afterwards, the room is swept with noise and wind, a supernatural force having been unleashed. After this curious incident (redolent of "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dream'd of in your philosophy") the film ends with Sandrine seeking some kind of explanation from the Prof, but he has none - we are just accidents in the void.

For French speakers, one of the pleasing things about this movie is that for the most part the sub-titles are reasonably accurate and therefore don't distract too much.

As much as I admire the fact hard core pornography has managed to liberate storytelling from all vestiges of plot, my admiration for soft core porno ranges higher still for the simple reason that it HAS discovered innovative ways to incorporate far ranging plots into its efforts. And make no mistake, from its cover image to its closing scenes A l'Aventure most definitely is soft core porn, even by the standards of own my sensibilities, refined somewhat after just having spent much of the year in sunny Provence.

This film has everything a discriminating onanist would demand from a skin flick, be it full frontal nudity, on-screen female masturbation, domination and spanking, girl on girl cunnilingus, simulated hetero-sex, a couple bathing together, and nude open-mouthed kissing among a trio of natural-breasted chicks so hot they make the thoughts of some straight women wander. But in amongst the penises, breasts and minimally-trimmed fur, the belt-reddened derrieres and the moist climaxes via hypnotic suggestion, the story A l'Aventure presents strays around so much that for my very life I'd have trouble describing what the movie is "about." Sure it concerns a bored woman's erotic quest and where that lustful pilgrimage takes her, but it's also about her Socratic relationship with a Yoda-esque cabbie, a man wise and mysterious and just possibly largely in her mind. (The best parts of the film were the sequences that concerned the woman, Sandrine, and this older man, a sort of philosophical mentor known to us only as "L'homme sur le banc" and portrayed by The DaVinci Code's Etienne Chicot.)

Cast member Jocelyn Quivrin, who died shortly his role here, is mostly notable for the brevity of his onscreen time, which is a shame because he seemed an interesting figure and I kept expecting they'd do more with him...and Sandrine's mother...and Sandrine's co-worker...and Sandrine.

There's beauty in this film, flowing scenes of nature and the immaculate perfection of the French countryside and of the human form, but there is also terrible confusion, partly deliberate confusion and partly, I think, unintentional. The story begins off in one direction and then meanders so far in another that the conclusion was an unexpected and unnecessary flirtation with aspects of first metaphysics and then sheer and literal horror. All in all A l'Aventure (a melodious title to say aloud) was worth seeing once but is probably not going to hold anyone's interest except in a pornographical sense. Much is left unexplained (in the air, as anyone who has seen the film will get the joke) and the entire project feels less than well thought out, and utterly incomplete.

It is, however, a good way to keep up one's familiarity with the French language, as it is all subtitled and the accents of the cast are very mainstream and not the twanging dialect of Provence that throws so many of us academic French-speakers off.

I'd give this film 3 ½ stars if I could.

In attempting to understand and overcome the hypocrisy of a strong-willed woman who has no shame in exploring her sensuality, with no intention of inflicting emotional pain, this film captures such a moment. The central character is doing just that (what the conventional mind would applaud in a man but will condemn in a woman). The film makes a contribution to that alternative perspective. The film can be visually stunning at times and with an intriguing additional dimension. It is well worth watching.

Ian Hunter.
Author of `e-Love'.

Another terrific dvd from Jean-Claude Brisseau. The third in his trilogy with "Secret Things" and "Exterminating Angels" he again excels with beautiful cinematography, erotic and interesting scripts, extremely good looking women, and a touch of the metaphysical. All three of these films centers around the female orgasm. l a'aventure has three women who hope to achieve extraordinary ecstasy through hypnotism. Brisseau creates unusually good dramatic tension in all of his films, especially for the erotic genre, and this is no exception.

I am reviewing the REVIEW (NOT the film)likely to be just above this. There is a reason the film is not widescreen. It was shot/released in 1.37 to 1. Normal non-widescreen is 1.33 to 1. The difference between the two is negligible -and it is quite possible the DVD release is in 1.37 to 1 as it will still not appear widescreen in the sense that term is normally used.

For verification, please see the film information in imdb.

This is not a review of the contents of this DVD. This is a complaint that it is listed as widescreen when it isn't. I can't believe that a brand new movie is released on disc without the widescreen format. Very misleading and disappointing.