Les Salopes or The Naturally Wanton Pleasure of Skin aka Les salopes ou le sucre naturel de la peau (2018)

(On TV, March 2022) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A couple with an open marriage suddenly realizes that it doesn’t work anymore. Yeah… Carrying neither the freshest nor the most subversive premise around, erotic drama Les salopes nonetheless has its own appeal. Not strictly on a prurient level, mind you: while the film can’t resist executing its glum premise with a moderate amount of leering at couples having intimate relations in university offices, staircases and in front of high-rise windows, this is a film with more nakedness than nudity. The often-clinical nature of the film’s approach is bolstered early on with a potentially interesting idea about biological evidence of lust, but that concept peters out as quickly as the protagonist’s “open” marriage. Our protagonist, bravely played by Brigitte Poupart, uses scientific research as an overt excuse for affairs, but her lust for more partners opens up a can of trouble when she doesn’t stick by the rules of the open marriage and her partner storms off. Subplots include an older friend/fling who gets in trouble with a student whose boyfriend sets out to seduce the protagonist, a teenage daughter who takes after her mother’s interest in sex, oversexed retired moms, and a friend with her own problems with her ex and various lovers. For such a melodramatic narrative with so many raunchy moments, there’s an undeniable joylessness to the entire thing: Our protagonist accumulates affairs out of something like suburban boredom (a feeling apparently far more common in low-budget dramas than in real-life) and the film doesn’t have much to add once her marriage breaks up for real. One imagines that a potential sequel would see her pick up a few other hobbies. Les Salopes works better as a character study, but writer-director Renée Beaulieu only manages half a success here: while the film does feel more interesting for tackling its topic from a female point of view, the pointlessness of it all gets hard to ignore once the credits roll. I was half expecting a “P.S.: Monogamy is far less troublesome” PSA to pop up at the end.