Anatomy of Hell

This French film opens with a guy performing felatio on another man in an alley outside a club, and I don’t mean hinting at it – I mean full-on shows it. Viva la France. Inside the club, there’s a lot of gay men dancing and grinding on each other while a random girl strolls through the crowd. She’s on a mission to kill herself and tries to cut her wrists in the bathroom, but a guy stops her. He gets her fixed up and walks her home (she blows him on the way).

She wants to pay the guy to watch her roll around naked and do things to her. She’s trying to convert him from being gay or something. It’s kind of difficult to tell, since he’s critiquing her very clinically and she’s asking for all kinds of input, saying he knows nothing about women. He talks about the deceptive softness of women and how it’s a trap (all true, of course).

The movie is pretty graphic, with all kinds of things inside other things. There’s a female narrator, presumably, the woman paying the man, who tells you all kinds of intimate secrets about what women are thinking. Then the voice is that of the man, so it’s confusing a bit. He basically has his way with her while she’s just a rag doll for his experimentation. He comes back subsequent nights and does the same thing, though sometimes with gardening implements. There is a tampon scene that will flip squeamish people out, fo sho.

At the end, the guy doesn’t want to take the money because he actually felt something for her, but he does anyway, to sort of wrap up the contract. He has a heart to heart with a guy at a bar about how he shared utter intimacy with this woman and never even found out her name. Then, he leaves all the money she paid him (which is a LOT) for the bartender.

Despite the film being about 85% naked woman and 5% naked guy, it’s not nearly as arousing as one might think. Yes, the French have pushed the envelope with nudity and f’d-upedness, they certainly haven’t pushed the boundaries of a little thing we call plot. I won’t say it doesn’t have a point because it appears to be a mechanism for a modern woman to tell her perspective of intercourse and what she feels and doesn’t feel and what she fakes feeling because she knows men want to hear it. And, of course, it’s much easier to get guys to watch this sort of film is you do the entire thing naked – I’ll admit it. The film is at most, interesting. Not anything I’d rave about, so I’m telling you these things so when you see the box for this film, you won’t be duped into thinking it’s the most awesome movie in the world. It isn’t.