Julien finds lovely Sylvia at the side of the road, they immediately fall in
love & he takes her home. & since she seems to be obsessed with nature
& plants, he builds her a greenhouse in his garden, as a token of their
love. At first everything is fine, but after a while, Sylvia refuses to have
sex with him, she even refuses to sleep in the same bed with him ... & at
the same time she has visions of killing him right after intercourse. Initially
Julien thinks little of it, interpreting it as one of her whims, but one day he
catches her having sex with Patrick, a local casanova & adrenaline junkie,
& first he beats Sylvia up then leaves in anger. When he later, at a
friend's, receives a phonecall from Sylvia though, Julien realizes he has to go
back to where he found here though to find some answers, instead he finds a
corpse ... Patrick in the meantime seems to have the time of his life with
Sylvia, wouldn't she turn violent towards him every time after sex, like
scratching his chest or even trying to strangle him. So after a while, Patrick
decides to beat it ... but somehow he just can't forget her ... Julien now
returns to Sylvia, having found out she is a sort of Praying Mantis - &
among Praying Mantises, the female eats the male after sex -, & only
because of her love to him she can't have sex with him. But without sex, she
starts to wither, so Julien agrees to bring Patrick back to her, as a mate.
& after long persuasion he succeeds, & he watches them having sex in
the greenhouse, even accompanies them on his cello. Then Sylvia, as expected,
strangles Patrick. Julien is quite turned on by that & persuades Sylvia
to have sex in the greenhouse with him too, at the climax of which he blows up
the greenhouse ... But another Sylvia-larva has already hatched. An
erotic fantasy-love-story that for some reason never gets off the ground: It's
to restrained in its depiction of sex to really be provocative, too sweet in
its story to be over-the-top, too predictable to be mysterious (that Sylvia is
a praying mantis is pretty much given away in the title), & too dull to be
entertaining. Only certain (small) amount of good-hearted humour make
this not a total failure.
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