Exterminating Angels is an emotionally potent and opulent film from Belgium about sex and psychology.  

It should not be confused with Luis Bunuel’s similarly titled Exterminating Angel, which was about a group of people that couldn’t leave a dining room, although both films are about insatiable appetites. 

Exterminating Angels is a part of the lineup at this year’s European Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Center. The film is playing just once at 8 pm on Saturday, March 24. 

The story behind the film is just as interesting as the film itself.  A few years back, Jean-Claude Brisseau (the director of Exterminating Angels) was working on another explicit film titled Secret Things (2003).  During the shooting, several of the women that he auditioned accused him of sexual harassment. 

It can’t be coincidence that the main character in Exterminating Angels is also a director (in this case wrongly) accused of sexual harassment, by women who do sexually explicit audition scenes. Although the film is supposed to be fictional, it may be Brisseau’s way of revealing the truth, or passing the buck by blaming the women.  

The film begins with a shocking omen. A forty-something filmmaker named Francois gets a message from his dead grandmother in a dream. She  warns him not to get too carried away, and he doesn’t know what she means until the end of the film. A pair of beautiful female angels also occasionally materialize, and act mysterious. 

During an audition for an erotic thriller, Francois asks an actress to fake an orgasm. Instead of faking one, she seems to get excited from being filmed in a personal moment and she really climaxes. When he sees how excited she is by the filming, he decides to do a whole movie dealing with taboo female sexuality. He encourages all the auditioning women to get rid of all their inhibitions, and explore their repressed desires. 

Francois never directly participates in the sex scenes, preferring the role of voyeur. But one day after an especially erotic day of film making, he comes home and makes love to his wife more passionately than he has in years.  

She enjoys the encounter, but she is also disturbed by it because she knows that she is being used as a sexual surrogate. She warns him that he is getting in over his head, and she tells him he “doesn’t understand anything.” 

Of course, once he opens the Pandora’s Box, he can’t close it. He can’t control the unleashed sexuality of the women, and no one is able to keep the necessary emotional distance. Ultimately, he pays a terrible price, which he does not totally deserve.  

Exterminating Angels miraculously is able to both successfully celebrate unrestrained sexuality and warn of its dangers. It may be the best anti-sex sex film since Oshima’s masterful, “In the Realm of the Senses.”  

Compared to Exterminating Angels, most American erotic thrillers such as Wild Things and Basic Instinct come off like unsophisticated Cinemax films.