Search - L' Ennui on DVD

An increasingly restless film

Jenny J.J.I. | That Lives in Carolinas | 01/10/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I become irritated part way through this film. It's like you are forced to watch Berling's character become increasingly obsessed with Guillemin's, to the point where we are not only disturbed, but also completely perturbed by his inability to let go of Cecilia, who seems so wonderfully and completely uninterested and distant. I admit that while I watched the movie, I had to turn it off part way through; I, myself, became so anxious by and annoyed with Martin's obsessive ness. At first, I thought it was because the movie was totally unappealing, even unwatchable. However, once I watched the rest of the film I understood why. Let me explain why.

Berling's growing sexual obsession with Sophie Guilleman is believable because in real life I would imagine that more men, middle aged or otherwise, develop obsessions with ordinary girls/women than with the Pamela Anderson/Jordan in-your-face sex objects. This is not to say that Guilleman is chopped liver but she is an Average girl; average looks, average figure, average sexuality and again it is, I suspect, much easier to develop a sexual obsession about a girl who is much more likely to be available to the Average man, which is what Berling is both on and off screen. The idea of a young girl believed to have killed a man three times her age via sex clearly invests her with a certain cachet not least in the eyes of a philosophy teacher drifting aimlessly yet inexorably towards mid-life crisis and not even searching for a paddle. The concept of a young girl who actually enjoys sex for its own sake and is unwilling and/or incapable of adding love to the mix, a creature in effect prepared and eager to experience sexual fulfillment as often and with as many different partners as possible and remain loyal to none is not exactly new and each time this story is told the only possible interest lies in the man who is unable to share her and how long it takes to reach its inevitable tragic conclusion.

I realized that Kahn probably had every attention of making his subject so intense, so masochistic, and so repetitively annoying in his obsession, the utter irritation and anxiety that the movie provoked in me suggested that not only is the filmmaker very successful in representing pathological behavior, but also in implicating his audience in that representation.
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