Q - Sexual Desire- DVD

Film: The 20-year-old Céline (Déborah Révy) falls into an emotional hole after the death of her father. She tries to fill the inner void with sexual adventures, repeatedly crossing boundaries and breaking taboos to find what she so desperately seeks. Young Alice (Hélène Zimmer) also has dreams in which she finds fulfillment in her great love, escaping the clutches of her domineering mother. In Matt (Gowan Didi) she believes she has found the great love. But all he seems to want is sex. Should she give him what he wants or take what she craves? Virgine (Christelle Benoit) no longer feels desire towards her husband. She has needs, but he doesn't respond to them at all. And so Virgine is left with no choice but to flee into a sexual world of make-believe...

Three women trying in very different ways to find themselves through sex is the central theme of the erotic drama Q - Sexual Desire. That director Laurent Bouhnik is provocative with this film is clear from the very first scene of the film. It is a sequence in blue tones, which takes place in a shower room and continues throughout the film. In this sequence, a group of women talk about love, sex and men, while the camera is initially focused only on the women's buttocks and pubic areas. Only later does the camera step back further and further until, at the end of the film, the ladies can be seen in all their (and by now clothed) beauty. Easily, such a shot as said opening sequence could cause an outcry and be dismissed as pure sexism. Of course, one could argue that the women here are degraded to faceless sexual objects. But on the other hand, the scene in its entirety, in conjunction with the dialogue, can also be seen as a tribute to women's individual beauty and strength.

Besides this, the film as a whole is ambitious and its largely non-simulated sex scenes quite erotic. Still, the film struggles to make any real impression. The individual storylines are dramaturgically too little polished and therefore all seem a bit superficial. The sex scenes themselves don't really seem to be an important part of the story, which gives the impression that they are primarily meant to provoke with their directness. This is not yet pornography, but neither is it the tingling eroticism that could have been built up with a better combination of story and sex scenes.

So Q - Sexual Desire is a visually appealing, but dramaturgically rather weak film, where the good actresses can still do some damage. For lovers of French erotic dramas who do not mind the very direct portrayal of sex, quite still worth seeing!

Picture + Sound: The picture presents itself with a good overall sharpness, which allows especially in close-ups even smaller details to be seen well. Coloration is very warm and pleasing. There are no smudges or picture distortions to be discerned. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix presents itself quite unspectacular. Only here and there do smaller ambient noises like ocean noise provide a little movement in the proceedings, which are otherwise dominated by centrally mixed dialogue. Good!

Extras: As a bonus, the DVD has in addition to trailers and an image gallery still some cut scenes to offer. The first longer sequence is not a deleted scene in the true sense, but rather a long outtake, with which Bouhnik wants to show what can go wrong in the course of shooting a scene. Besides that, there are a few smaller extended character moments, as well as a very tender sex scene, of which Bouhnik says at the end that he finds it a great pity that he had to take this sequence out. Overall, not really extensive, but quite nice. An in-depth interview with the director would certainly have been interesting, though.

Conclusion: Q - Sexual Desire is a provocative, sexy mix of social drama and erotic film, though it certainly crosses the line into (artful) pornography here and there in the eyes of some. It's a film about hidden longings and unfulfilled desires, but it can't live up to its lofty ambitions. For that, the stories seem a bit too superficial and the sex scenes too effortfully provocative. Aesthetically and erotically staged, but dramaturgically a bit too pale to really leave an impression. Nevertheless: for lovers of more demanding erotic dramas well worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp