THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WE CAN AVOID
After the fable about aging (Jealous, 2017), the brothers David and Stéphane Foenkinos tackle the sketch film, a genre that was in vogue and prolific at the time of the golden age of Italian cinema and the New Wave, which, from a given theme (The seven deadly sins and its two versions of 1952 and 1962), offered a sectional portrait of a society, a satire on the mores of an era. Reactivating the genre, Fantasies is declined as a catalog of more or less curious sexual tendencies: sorophilia (being aroused by the sister of his companion), ludophilia (by the game), dacryphilia (by the tears), thanatophilia (by the death), hypophilia (by the idea of not having sex).
Sanitized form
Served by a varied and daring cast (Monica Bellucci and Carole Bouquet as an thanatophile lesbian couple), the film promises, on paper, a great scriptwriting fantasy and a freedom of tone at the height of its subject which, alas, is keep waiting. This is because the Foenkinos brothers stick to the surface, no doubt in the hope of seducing the general public, and yet aspire to explore the dark recesses of human sexuality. How to say something consistent on the subject inside a sanitized form and formatted for a first part of the evening on television? Impossible to do “dirty” when you are required to “clean”.
Bullied by contradictory demands, the fiction struggles to spill over and the film succeeds in the feat of evading its subject from cover to cover while giving itself the air of a moral and creaking farce. Believing to defeat Puritanism (the last sketch, with Karin Viard), the result is ultimately akin to a prudish adaptation of Kinsey reports on sexuality.
French film by David and Stéphane Foenkinos. With Nicolas Bedos, Karin Viard, Céline Sallette, Ramzy Bedia (1 h 42).