À l’aventure: Brisseau’s 2008 Film on Total Submission

À l’aventure is a 2008 French erotic drama written and directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau. The title covers both adventure and pleasure-seeking. It screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2009. Carole Brana plays Sandrine, Arnaud Binard plays Greg, and Étienne Chicot plays the old man on the park bench, among others. The film follows a young woman into sex built around total submission, then has that older man tell her the search is immature and dangerous.

The bench, Greg, and Mina

Sandrine is young and sick of a flat daily life. She is eating a sandwich on a park bench when an old man starts a conversation. What he says about a woman standing on her own, and about going out to find who she is, stays with her. She stands up to her boyfriend. He leaves. She quits a dull job. In a café she meets Greg, a young man working through a psychiatry book. They have sex soon after. Greg takes her to a private dinner and introduces Mina, a woman whose approach to a man is total submission. For Mina, letting him do what he wants is a way of releasing herself.

At the dinner Greg hypnotizes Mina. She regresses and takes herself for a Flemish nun from the fifteenth century. With Greg and Mina, Sandrine goes through a run of encounters that mix spiritual practice, hypnosis, and bodily submission. Total submission, in this film, is played through that hypnosis and through the nun from the 1400s.

She does not come out with the insight or the fullness she expected. She comes out empty and unmoored. She confides in the old man from the bench, whom she has kept in contact with. He tells her straight that an extreme search cut loose from ordinary life is immature and dangerous, and that she has to get her feet back on the ground. In the film, that warning is the check on the experiment.