Tempting Devils (2018) – AKA Que le Diable Nous Emporte
A Lost Phone Full of Sex Videos Brings Three Women, One Desperate Man and a Levitating Yogi Together in a Strange, Intimate French Tale of Lust, Jealousy and Spiritual Escape. Camille, a mature photographer, finds Suzy’s mobile at a railway station and naturally becomes curious about its owner. What she discovers is a private archive of Suzy filming her anonymous sexual encounters in public places—raw little souvenirs that seem daring at first but gradually reveal a lonely young woman trapped inside her own appetite. Suzy comes to Camille’s Paris apartment to collect the phone, champagne is opened, questions become flirtation, and the women are soon in bed. Camille’s lover Clara returns, but instead of exploding with jealousy, she joins them, creating an unusually tender ménage à trois. Their pleasure is interrupted when Fabrice, Suzy’s drunken and dangerously emotional former lover, arrives determined to reclaim her. Suzy is hidden upstairs with an eccentric older neighbour known as...
Tonton, while the compassionate Clara tries to calm Fabrice and pull him back from self-destruction. From there, attractions and loyalties keep shifting: Fabrice responds to Clara’s warmth, Suzy learns meditation from Tonton, and Camille’s erotic confidence begins to expose older scars. Nobody is quite as liberated as first advertised, and supposedly casual desire proves capable of awakening possessiveness, pain and the stubborn need to be truly loved.
Jean-Claude Brisseau treats the story as part bedroom farce, part confessional drama and part homemade mystical fantasy. People speak openly about orgasm, trauma, cinema, loneliness and the damage they have done to themselves, sometimes with disarming honesty and sometimes in dialogue so stiff and peculiar that it becomes funny. Yet the film’s oddness is also its charm. Sexual ecstasy opens into images of naked bodies floating against stars and galaxies, while Tonton’s yoga produces levitation, disappearance and other little breaches in everyday reality. The digital effects are visibly modest and often kitschy, but Brisseau believes in them completely. Beneath all the nudity lies a surprisingly moral idea: compulsive sex and voyeuristic technology may offer excitement, but they cannot automatically provide intimacy. The characters must eventually decide whether freedom means collecting experiences or surrendering to another person with genuine trust. The result is warm, talkative, uneven and extremely horny—less a polished erotic thriller than a strange philosophical chamber piece about damaged souls trying to rearrange themselves into workable couples.
Set firmly in late-2010s France, the film belongs to the age of smartphones, amateur pornography and private lives carried around in one easily misplaced device. It begins with the chance encounter created by Suzy’s lost phone and then settles mainly inside book-filled Paris apartments, where bedrooms, kitchens and spare rooms become shelters from the outside world. Shot in Paris, it has a deliberately small, enclosed feeling, almost like an intimate stage play in which strangers wander through doors and leave as lovers, rivals or reluctant therapists. The atmosphere moves freely between bohemian domestic comedy, sensual fantasy and spiritual fairy tale, with 3D photography used less for realism than for bodies, rooms and cosmic visions that seem to push toward the viewer.
The women are unquestionably the main attraction. Fabienne Babe gives Camille a ripe, intelligent sensuality: she is mature, composed and capable of looking at another woman with such direct hunger that the seduction needs very little explanation. Isabelle Prim makes Suzy slender, unpredictable and sexually brazen, yet there is sadness beneath her provocative manner and naked confidence. Anna Sigalevitch brings softness and emotional grace to Clara, the most generous member of the trio and the one who understands that men and women sometimes need affection more than another clever theory about liberation. All three appear nude, share prolonged lesbian encounters and participate in a threesome filmed with full-bodied sensuality, simulated masturbation and convincing female pleasure. It is explicit by ordinary drama standards but remains softcore rather than pornographic: no crude close-ups, just breasts, bare bodies, intimate touching, orgasmic abandon and Brisseau’s unabashed delight in feminine beauty.
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