It might seem a little perverse for writer/director Jean-Claude Brisseau to take a scandal from his real life—where he was accused of sexual assault by several actresses related to a casting process involving masturbating for him in both private and in public—and make it the fictional subject of his newest film, Exterminating Angels. But then again, what is at stake for Brisseau’s director protagonist, François (Frédéric van den Driessche), is not necessarily an explanation or excuse for his motives for asking actresses—and the three willing in specific, Charlotte (Maroussia Dubreuil), Julie (Lise Bellynck), and Stéphanie (Marie Allan)—to masturbate and make love to each other under his direction as well as his watchful eye and camera. In fact, the film begins with an actress from a previous project accepting his audition requirements but then turning down the part. Running into her several years later, she is cold to François and claims his bizarre process traumatized her. So the betrayal that the later girls will elicit is not exactly unexpected. François claims his new project and its auditions are inspired by this old snub; his new idea is a film based around both the on-screen “mystical” sensuality expressed by actresses exploring sexual taboos, as well as semi-improvised sequences of the girls talking about themselves before, during, and after the sex. What he really seems to be fascinated by is less the sexual acts or the much touted taboos themselves than the idea of him, the director, as an instigator of the acts, involved but at a remove from the passion enacted. At the same time, the abrupt dismissal of the original girl and her insistence on his potential cruelty point towards his re-use of his old techniques as a way of looking at these seemingly open and trusting girls with a bit more savvy and distance. In other words, they express their desires to him, tell him their troubles, their lives, or their feelings, and then make love, but the degree to which any of it is genuine and where the real motivation comes from doing it (“it” being either the acts themselves or the potential falsity of the acts) are mysterious. The on-screen magic François seeks seems to be less about which actress has the ability to truly show ecstasy (false or not) on screen, which the director initially says his aim is, than for François to carefully observe these girls in the process of their mystification. As in the work of Jacques Rivette, the purpose or motivation behind actions takes the back seat to the very process of those actions. We learn very little about François—why he wants to explore these women and why he remains so emotionally distant from them at the same time—just as we learn very little about his various actresses; but what we do see is him nurturing their performances, them playing roles specifically for him, and the danger between François’ attempt at distance and the tie the girls’ intimate actions have with their director.

In one of Brisseau’s trademark moments of surreal coyness, of that strange, slightly parodic, playful tone that scampers right under the surface of his work and seems to leave the viewer unsure just how seriously things should be taken, Exterminating Angels (the title already referencing Buñuel) begins with the voice of a nonsensical radiobroadcasts straight out of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. It also begins inside a dream of François, and, in a manner echoing Rivette’s Duelle, where various Goddesses manipulate characters from behind the drama, the story here also includes two “fallen angels” who manipulate events, be it encouraging François to involve himself deeply with Charlotte rather than other actresses, or push Julie to approach the director. This emphasis on spectatorial control, of the consequences of initiating a drama and then stepping back to see how it plays out, extends from François to his sensually diabolical-looking angel (Raphaële Godin) and perhaps beyond her to the messages-through-the-ether of the radio. That creepy-silly voice on the radio is a signal that, as we step back farther from the tightness of the drama, the “direction” makes less and less sense, the motivation and inspiration less logical, the originator more mystical, and the consequences more metaphysical. The girls open themselves up both sexually and vocally as if François were himself an outside force, allowing them to confess and explore themselves under his gaze but distant from his touch and his involvement. His interactions are mostly passive and observational, and his motivations Brisseau both shortchanges and eventually mocks (towards the end François in frustration exclaims that maybe he his experiments were about the nature of truth). The reason behind it all, the attachments and the sharing between the girls, the girls and François, the angels and François, and the radio and the film, becomes lost in the talk and the sex, the investment and the distance, and, paradoxically, Exterminating Angels gets more and more supple and seductive as it becomes less and less clear.

Brisseau employs his characteristically elegant style even for a film that limits its locations and is made up mostly of long, and surprisingly tightly photographed shot/reaction-shot conversations (the meat of the film, besides for sex, is talk and communication) and, of course, scenes of female masturbation. The centerpiece of the film is the sequence where François has Charlotte play with herself at a public restaurant, later to be joined by Julie, and all under the uncomfortably drawn eye of waitress Stéphanie, because Brisseau shoots this sexual taboo with the tightness of framing and spatial setting (a dinner table) of a regular conversation. The velvety surface of the film seems to bask in François’s hubris and the film’s apparent turning of Brisseau’s lawsuit into an erotic film, but the focus of the rather thin plot on the inscrutability of people’s fascination with human interaction undercuts this sexiness considerably. The big Why’s—why does François insist on this process, why do the girls agree to do it, why do the girls lie, why is François so distant, why do the girls betray—are clearly not what the film seeks to answer. Instead, Brisseau wryly suggests that the very mystique of these answers to the characters’ emotional investments and bitter betrayals are what is interesting. It matters less why Charlotte, hilariously, claims to be possessed by the devil, or Julie, melodramatically, to be in love with François, or why Stéphanie, like out of some thriller, vengefully seeks sadistic revenge against her supposed mistreatment, or any number of questions about what François gets out of all this. Rather, it is the mysterious existence of this behavior that is the focus of Exterminating Angels, which frames Brisseau’s recent troubles as a presentation on the inscrutability of the darker and more sensual motivations that cause connections, clashes, and distance between humans.