Cobbled together from borrowed parts, Jean-Claude Brisseau's Secret Things makes a fearsome Frankenstein monster out of other movies, yet the influences are so thoroughly digested that they come out seeming wholly original. Imagine a post-feminist twist on In The Company Of Men and Fight Club, as conceived by Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl), crossed with the satiric ruthlessness of Kind Hearts And Coronets, the baroque eroticism of Eyes Wide Shut and Caligula, and the chorus of Hall & Oates' "Maneater"—and that's just for starters. Never less than riveting from the first frame, the film floats some provocative theories on sex and power, but its cold-blooded gamesmanship eventually reveals itself to be contrived, schematic, and finally silly beyond belief. One of the rare high-minded skin flicks that could play equally well at the arthouse and the grindhouse, Secret Things opens with a raunchy burlesque routine at a sex club, where stripper Coralie Revel stuns new barmaid Sabrina Seyvecou with her confident performance. When the two women are booted for not giving service to the club's sleazy owner, Seyvecou moves into Revel's apartment and they soon embark on various sexual experiments, public and private. Operating under the belief that control over their own pleasure yields power in all other arenas, they decide to invade a button-down office setting and seduce their way to the top, leaving respectable businessmen in their wake. With Revel serving as puppetmaster, Seyvecou enacts a detailed plan to manipulate a hapless married executive (Roger Mirmont) into falling in love with her and open him up to compromise. But the women meet their match when they go up against rich and dashing young company heir Fabrice Deville, who's such a notoriously vicious playboy that he's driven several lovers to suicide. Mixing sexual politics with office politics, Secret Things expands in several directions, going from a witty and erotic tutorial in female sexuality (with a fake-orgasm scene to drive Meg Ryan under the table) to a toothsome satire on women in the workplace. But once Deville comes into the picture, with his emperor's appetite for debauchery and humiliation, the film's baroque tendencies take over, leading to orgiastic rituals set to Handel and Vivaldi, as well as weighty musings like "Am I crueler than Life or Creation"? In order to float his ideas on sex, money, and power—as well as their naïve and simpering victim, love—Brisseau lets his script devolve amid implausible events and pre-programmed behavior. By the end, characters who once seemed so tactile in their sensuality are reduced to mere test cases, subject to cold torments and colder ironies.