The Final Girl (2010)

This is an incredibly strange movie. A girl goes to work as a stripper in Paris. She needs a place to stay and finds a girl whose roommate has just left. She convinces her new roommate to waive the rent deposit by tying her up and having lesbian sex with her. Later she becomes interested in the girl who just left--especially, when the roommate tells her she "left" by jumping out the window of the high-rise apartment. She reads a journal the woman left behind, which cues a lot of black-and-white flashbacks and voice-over narration of the dead woman. Interspersed with this are more color scenes of the stripper having more lesbian sexual encounters including one with a woman who comes to the door looking for the dead girl. . .

The lesbian sex in this obscure French film kind of resembles the lesbian sex in the more famous French film "La Vie d'Adele" ("Blue is the Warmest Color") what with girls masturbating other from behind and spanking each other. Many American lesbians--who apparently speak for ALL lesbians--have claimed that that movie does not "realistically" portray lesbian sex, so perhaps this one doesn't either. But speaking for all (more or less) heterosexual men, I don't think these scenes are exactly meant to appeal to them either. The sex scenes are few and far between and kind of abbreviated. They somehow manage to be both graphic (bordering on hardcore) and strangely oblique. The girls range from marginally attractive to downright ugly (although it's only the marginally attractive ones that have graphic sex scenes). They, at least, don't have the fake breast/"sexy Frankenstein" look of most American porn stars, but are more pierced and tattooed "suicide girl" types.

The main point of this I think, however, was to make a feature-length avante-garde film, and in this respect it's slightly more successful. It uses several different types of film-stock and makes good use of the rainy Paris scenery with lots of moody shots of rain falling into the Seine River. At times the ennui almost oozes from the sprocket holes. It is pretty pretentious, but there is no way a French avant-garde film would not be to some degree pretentious. The only way it could be more pretentious is if it was also made by film students (and maybe it was). Still, I have to admire the chutzpah of the filmmakers. Few people have ever been able to make a feature length avante-garde film and get it distributed (on Netflix streaming no less) simply by adding lesbian sex scenes. This will probably be seen by more people than any of the films of Stan Brakhage (if only he had thought to add some lesbian scenes. . .). It's also possible that this really will appeal to some lesbians, especially those who like the French avante-garde films.