An Interview with ScareFlix Executive Producer Larry Fessenden.

By Jeremiah Kipp

Sabrina Seyvecou, Fabrice Deville and Coralie Revel in Secret Things. Photo courtesy of First Run Features.

Secret Things, Jean-Claude Brisseau’s tale of two women who set out to take on an amoral, Machiavellian, male-dominated corporation, only to become pawns of the machine itself, was named Cahiers du Cinema’s best film of 2002.

A former schoolteacher-turned filmmaker, highly respected in his native France but largely unknown in the States, Brisseau never loses control of his material, even when it spirals wildly from somber realism into the realm of fantasy.

This dark psychological thriller with a discernable undercurrent of comedy is already causing a stir with its frank depiction of female sexuality and graphic nudity. But make no mistake, this is no empty exercise in shock tactics; Secret Things is instead a post-feminist meditation on office politics, class systems, and the struggle between the sexes.

The film follows the adventures of two attractive young women, Nathalie (Coralie Revel) and Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou), who are fired from their jobs at a seedy Parisian strip-club after refusing to sleep with the owner’s affluent friends. The worldlier Nathalie takes the naïve Sandrine under her wing, so to speak, helping her young charge shed her inhibitions while coaching her in the art of exploiting the power of her sex. (While it is made clear neither of the girls is lesbian, they nevertheless enjoy a physical relationship with each other. Sandrine’s learning curve, we discover, is not that steep.)

Before long, they embark upon Nathalie’s master plan, seeking employment at a respectable business firm where they intend to weild sex as a weapon to rise quickly up the corporate ladder.

Sandrine proves suprisingly adept at this new challenge as well, moving deftly from man to man. Playing the virginal ingenue to the hilt, she wraps her supervisor, the 30ish Cadene (Olivier Soler), around her little finger, feigning a broken heart to ward off his physical advances. Smitten, he nontheless recommends her promotion to his direct superior, the very married Delacroix (Roger Mirmont). Soon the older managing executive is Sandrine’s new target, and after a few not-so-nice tricks, she ends up his personal secretary. Cadene now out of the picture, she seduces the vulnerable Delacroix, cruelly making him fall in love with her.

Sabrina Seyvecou and Coralie Revel in Secret Things. Photo courtesy of First Run Features.

It’s ultimately Nathalie who bites off more than she can chew when she sets her sights on the handsome but nihilistic Christophe (Fabrice Deville), a CEO set to inherit the company when his sickly father passes away. The tragedy that ensues, most of it of Wagnerian proportions, leaves one giddily wondering how far Brisseau is set to go.

While comparisons have been made to Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men, Secret Things never succumbs to that film’s affectations, its ultra cool detachment or disdain for its characters. With admirable pluck and verve, Brisseau manages to turn potboiler cliché’s into cutting social commentary, and cheap melodrama into an over-the-top exploration of sex and power. No easy feat, this.

Sabrina Seyvecou and Roger Mirmont in Secret Things. Photo courtesy of First Run Features.

Not only is Brisseau concerned with class issues, (his early film Sound and Fury portrayed gangs in French housing projects and earned him a short-lived reputation as a realist) but sexual politics are very much at the heart of all his work. In Black Angel (1994), for instance, an ex-porn star/hooker now married into respectable bourgeois society, is charged with murder. She then seduces and breaks her lawyer, the very man who can save her. Sex is death for Brisseau, and the sex in his films is frequent, unabashed, and entirely essential to the story. It never seems salacious or exploitative.

Whether American cinephiles, far more puritanical in their tolerance of sexual frankness on screen, will come to embrace the work of Jean-Claude Brisseau, remains to be seen. Brisseau’s almost unclassifiable brand of baroque drama — blending the mundane and the outrageous as he blurs the lines between fantasy and reality — will finally reach U.S. audiences this winter with the release of his eighth feature, Secret Things.

In conjunction with First Run Features’ release of Secret Things, on February 20, The Film Society of Lincoln Center will present “Antisocial Realist,” the first U.S. retrospective of Brisseau’s work, as part of its Film Comment Selects series, February 17-26. See www.filmlinc.com for more details.