I can’t imagine that Jean-Claude Brisseau will find himself among the critically coddled members of the art-house canon, or that his American premieres will someday be greeted with polite, eager reviews in hip city papers. The reason for this is simple: there’s no shorthand explanatory blurb that can comfortably contain his oeuvre and help lazy filmgoers leave the theater secure in the knowledge that they “got it.” That’s because Brisseau is making some of the strangest and most profoundly challenging films today; the curdling comic grotesquerie of the Paris ex-burbs in his 1987 De bruit et de fureur shows up La Haine as the toothless, po-faced problem picture that it is. Every bit as compelling and difficult, the director’s latest film arrived stateside amidst a long-overdue U.S. retrospective of Brisseau’s work last February, one of the few certifiable moviegoing revelations of 2004.

Secret Things is one of those rare movies that strikes familiar emotional tones from new angles to produce a completely foreign timbre. It brims with awkward hybrid emotions, juxtaposing operatic ardency with sweaty, stereotyped soft-smut episodes worthy of Zalman King, a work as lavishly ludicrous as Cruel Intentions but working without the safety net of kitsch. For J. Hoberman in the Voice it was “porno-risible” stuff with a “dubious kick,” and the New York Times’ Dave Kehr found it was “impossible not to allow a snicker to occasionally escape” in the theater. What this presupposes is that we’re obliged or expected to hold our snickers in, but when I watched Secret Things simple diametric opposites like somber artistic reverence and comedy seemed sadly insufficient for dealing with what was onscreen. Such smug, hands-off critical responses are predictable enough; the same sniggering and snubbing greeted the diabolically funny Eyes Wide Shut (which earned numerous mentions in write-ups of Secret Things, if only for the films’ shared inclusion of baroque, painterly orgies) and Trouble Every Day, both movies that—though it’s a grave and common error to call them humorless—had the guts to be really serious about fucking.

Brisseau’s newest prurient product begins with Nathalie (Coralie Revel) supine and fully nude on a divan whose lush, saturated crimson throbs against a black backdrop. She arches, pointing her breasts skyward, then sits to lash on a pair of strappy high-heels, all with a dancer’s sharply choreographed timing. As she stands to prowl forward, the poised roll of her hips, and her stabbed steps seem sumptuous and strange—for a moment it seems like the film is being run backwards, or at the wrong speed. Revel collapses on her haunches to melodramatically churn her sex, and the camera breaks away to move over a crowd frozen in rapt tableaux; the illusion of intimacy dissipates as the scene is placed on the stage of an apparently avant-garde strip club, and from behind the bar the withdrawn Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) watches her “secret role model,” awestruck by Nathalie’s power to hold the room in thrall through sheer erotic presence. It’s a perfect, bravura summation of things to come; the sex in Secret Things, like so much real sex, is high melodrama, pure theater staged through the proscenium arch of the bedroom door.

The club’s swinish pimp/manager dismisses both women that night; they team up, and over champagne Nathalie begins to tutor Sandrine in a program of erotic self-liberation and control. Should one need an auteur trademark to hang on Brisseau, the best bet is probably the former schoolteacher’s devotion to the idea of education as an improving and a subversive force; Secret Things is at its heart a mentor-student narrative where sex is the curriculum. Nathalie teaches her pupil to channel her pleasure—real first, then representational—instructing that “Every time you hesitate, make that little effort to keep going, dare yourself to make yourself feel good,” and Seyvecou radiates eager, precocious glee as she discovers the heady power between her legs. Steeling themselves against “love, enemy number one,” the duo undertake to infiltrate and assault the heretofore inaccessible corporate world, the tactic being to “use [their] asses and brains” toward upward mobility.

The fantasy scenarios and “dares” which supplement Sandrine’s lessons are familiar soft-porn tropes, and their execution is as erotic as it is hackneyed; an erection, after all, has no critical faculty. The frictions built through all this sizzling, stereotyped sex is the crux of the film; the corporate environment, whose blandness is only relieved by ugly beige-and-green office artwork or inspirational posters, contrasts intriguingly with a world of individual fantasy and the debauched realm of company heir-apparent Christophe (Fabrice Deville), whose Sadean nihilism is the ultimate, inferno endpoint of the girls’ sex-as-a-weapon agenda, and who, with his fleshy-faced handsomeness and wine-colored pajama shirts, is both the quintessence and a parody of venal sensuality. Brisseau’s tapping into the contemporary Western libido shares something with the work of French novelist Michel Houellebecq—certainly the denizens of Sandrine’s office recall the “anxious bureaucratic face” of Platform’s narrator—but I think Brisseau goes deeper in his plumbing of the collective sexual imagination.

Brisseau’s is an ornery, exciting filmography ripe for discovery, and it’s to the credit of Secret Things that I haven’t nearly space enough here to distill its essence. At best I can talk about its images, clean and unabashedly beautiful in a way that shocks eyes degraded by degraded pictures, images like Christophe burning a fanned-out handful of 500 Euro bills, or Sandrine—shielded only by an open door—shimmying out of her culottesin a bisected composition straight from Marnie. And then of course I should say something of Revel’s accomplishment in moving Nathalie from proud, jade-eyed idol with a placid feline smile to a limp, tear-suffused thing who accepts a rock thrown at her forehead with gratitude and then, finally, to a chastened wife and mother… I may be blathering by now, but therein is my enthusiasm: the more films that I see, the more I distrust those that I can find a final word on. So for all who are contentedly resigned to a cinema of diminishing returns there is the tidy familiarity of Sideways’ odd-couple hi-jinks; this is the movie of the year for those who enter the theater in search of unknown pleasures.