Special Treatment (Sans Queue Ni Tête) | Review

For some filmgoers, the opportunity to see Isabelle Huppert giggling with detached erotic invitation while dressed as a naughty schoolgirl threatens to obliterate the brain and nervous system with an unprecedented apoplexy of psychosexual anticipation. Unfortunately, director Jeanne Labrune’s Special Treatment provides a muted, uninspired version of this tantalizing vision.

Telling the story of high-class middle-aged prostitute Alice (Huppert), whose own breakdown intersects with the mid-life crisis of Xavier, a prominent psychiatrist, the programmatic script reduces its characters to a set of easily interpreted clinical symptoms. They are case studies from a textbook, instead of unpredictable human beings. The use of Alice’s diary voice-over is a lazy way to provide insight into the character and reassure the audience of her inner life. It’s as if Labrune is trying to overcome the unique quality in Huppert that resists easy audience identification. The neat endings for both characters, reinforcing dull middle-class values, is a cop-out unworthy of Huppert’s inclinations for risk-taking.

His marriage (to the analyst who shares his offices) disintegrating, his faith in his profession floundering, and his interest in his patients waning, Xavier (Bouli Lanners’ surface performance lacks mystery) acts on the recommendation of a colleague and sets up a meeting with Alice. Over a series of meetings, they discover the many overlaps of their professions: each provides an intimate, but impersonal form of therapy to deeply dissatisfied clients, regimented by hourly rates. Seeing Alice as a troubling mirror reflection of himself, Xavier at first resists turning their encounters sexual. His reluctance, in turn, exposes Alice’s vulnerabilities. Can either put the brakes on self-destruction?

Huppert, one of the planet’s finest creatures, is unexpectedly out of place in the film. Known for her daring, uninhibited choices (see, for instance, the mesmerizing self-punishment of her performance in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher), she was cast too comfortably here as a whore willing to indulge the strange, sometimes dangerous sexual fetishes and fantasies of her assorted male clientele. Cheap jokes like a trick’s red-faced discovery of a dildo in her bedroom betray not only Labrune’s middlebrow idea of transgression, but also patronizes, and tries to cage, Huppert’s evasive identity as an actress. Huppert’s natural, ineradicable inscrutability, her refusal to emotionally simplify a single moment, is at odds with the script’s broad character arc and final semi-catharsis.

In one unoriginal sequence, Xavier seeks a sexual outlet by attending a decadent, orgy-filled sex club. A silly montage of moaning, groaning hedonists in S&M poses and mock religious regalia is meant to shock and horrify the audience as much as it does Xavier. Instead, it provides the movie’s only good laugh.

Rating 1.5 stars