If Eyes Wide Shut never quite cashed in on its own potential for humor, Jean-Claude Brisseau pays Kubrick a wonderful homage by making his erotic social drama hilariously grandiose.  Opening with a sweaty, sexy Nathalie (Coralie Revel) gyrating to on-again-off-again classical music while a menacing spirit hovers in the background, Secret Things rarely lets up intensity; its overwhelmingly potent mixture of unabashed eroticism, voyeuristic self-awareness, comedic self-awareness, and operatic power struggles are utterly seductive.

After her glorious exhibitionist performance, Nathalie is fired from the erotic club she works at along with her younger, more bashful and inexperienced co-worker Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) when they refuse to grant sexual favors to the club’s customers.  Though the line between masturbating to an avid audience and sleeping with a member of that audience seems slim, after Sandrine moves into Nathalie’s apartment the later admits that such exhibitionism turns her on.  Envious, Sandrine comes under the deep, coldy alluring gaze of the more experienced women, who first talks Sandrine through masturbating in front of her, then covertly removing bra and panties in public, masturbating in the subway, and later strutting around the streets wearing nothing but an overcoat.  Initially playful, the jobless girls eventually acquire an agenda--use their new found “daring” to rise through the corporate ladder of dull office work (when Sandrine suggests more interesting careers such as movies or fashion Nathalie, still teaching the youth the ropes, remarks that girls like them are a dime a dozen).  The idea that what they are planning on doing to corporate bosses is only marginally different than the very act they refused to give into at the film’s start seems to go right over the aspiring girls’ heads.  Here Secret Things abruptly switches from a femme Fight Club-like story about the dynamic between the two women as one teaches the other to break social norms to an opportunistic, erotic portrait of the bland corporate world, where the women attract every man they work with.

Inexplicably, Nathalie is left aside in the story and the film firmly focuses on Sandrine, who occasionally narrates from sometime in the future.   While remaining the perfect employee--hard working, friendly and highly and unusually ethical--she eventually finds the best target for career climbing in M. Delacroix (Roger Mirmont), a kind, handsone but ordinary family man who is second in charge of the firm.  Sandrine easily ropes in the older man using Nathalie’s techniques of overt sexual play, constant teasing and ridiculous amounts of sexiness, quickly making the charming older man fall for her.  Sandrine, however, feels nothing; she fakes her way through the job and through Delacroix’s love and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the firm’s mysterious CEO, the womanizing Christophe, played with arrogant, hardbodied, smug perfection by Fabrice Deville.  He represents the ultimate goal, not just as the man at the top of the social food chain but also as a man who has a reputation for manipulating countless women the way Nathalie and Sandrine manipulate men.  (He hilariously has the reputation of having several girls light themselves on fire due to the torment of their love for him.)

The manipulating women become sucked into a world of sexual comeuppance and by the time they think they have risen themselves onto Christophe’s level they find themselves in a parody world of aristocracy straight out of Eyes Wide Shut--that of the conspiratory, philosophizing rich with their bizarre sexual entwinement and extravagant self-importance.  Coated in ostentatious and overblown selections of Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach, we watch Sandrine and Nathalie gorge themselves with the empowerment of their voyeur mind games--just as we are sucked in by Brisseau’s beautiful, warm camerawork and the, er, more primal pleasure of incessantly grinding and exposed beautiful young actresses.  The ethical differences between the women and the incestuous, power-mad, god-like Christophe are not far apart and they are all as wrapped up in their erotic power struggles as we are.  Brisseau knows it as well, and he keeps Secret Things plowing along in its eroticism as it gets more perverse and over the top.  While the typically class-conscious ironic ending is a bit of a let down after such gradual and meticulously paced erotic class-climbing, and points to the film probably being more devilish and exciting than meaningful, as it also is in Brisseau’s 1994 pseudo-noir The Black Angel, the ride was great while it lasts.