Francophone Canadian art filmmaker Denis Cote presented himself in the main program of the festival in Berlin with this provocative, almost voyeuristic drama about three sex addicts who signed up for some kind of experimental therapy. Until the end, we won’t really understand why Leonie (Larissa Corriveu), Eugenie (Laure Giappiconi) and Geisha (Aude Mathieu) signed up for a 26-day therapy led by German therapist Octavia (Anne Ratte-Polle) with the assistance of social worker Sami (Samir Guesmi) since none of them seems to particularly want to get rid of their “problem”. And the way in which Cote filmed this sensitive drama seems somewhat exploitative, voyeuristic, while in a naturalistic, almost documentary style, we get to know the three protagonists with a hand-held camera and somewhat grainy retro photography.
I couldn’t fully understand what the point of the film was, which causes discomfort while we learn the life stories of these women. Geisha has decided to monetize her addiction to sex and works as a prostitute who does not hesitate to try to seduce a social worker on the first day. Leonie was abused by her father as a child, and soon after that she began to fulfill her sexual fantasies in group sex sessions with rudeness and humiliation. Eugenie is very close to it, and she is also a drug addict. And very quickly it is clear to us that they all have a severe personality disorder, that they are all deeply traumatized and that they would most certainly love and wish that they were different people, but the question is how willing they are to change their behavior.
The question is whether something like this is possible at all, and it seems that more than one of them will change in those 26 days. The therapist, a university professor from Frankfurt, for whom participation in this bizarre experiment seemed like a good path towards a doctorate that could bring her her own chair. . Cote is already well-known as a filmmaker who likes to shock and provoke, and he did not fail his basic task even with “That Kind of Summer”, a bizarre and rather tiresome film about sex that unnecessarily stretched to almost two and a half hours.