As a way ofintroduction to the course: SEX IN THE WEST

The Strange History of Human Sexuality

BIOLOGISTS HAVE taught us that it is the principal purpose of nature to reproduce the species, most commonly by sexual specialization. Human reproduction, however, is peculiar, indeed unique, in a number of ways. The first is that the enlarged size of the cranium makes it necessary for the human fetus to be born prematurely, relative to those of other primates, in order to pass through the birth canal. The infant is consequently especially helpless and unformed at birth, and remains almost entirely dependent on its parents or some adult for at least seven or eight years, and is not fully self-sufficient and sexually mature until about 14 years after birth. In order to survive it needs the combined attention both parents for an exceptionally long time. The mother, consequently, needs to keep the father in the family. To do so she rewards him with on-demand sexual favors all the year round, having at some period in the distant past lost the periodic estrus of other mammals. This biological functionalism explains satisfactorily the evolution of the monogamous and fairly durable nuclear family.

Other critically important aspects of human sexuality, however, have no such functional utility. One is the capacity of the female to continue sexual activity decades after her reproductive capability has ceased. Another is her capacity for multiple orgasms, which not only serve no reproductive purpose but also far outmatch those of the male.

Given this situation, it might be conjectured that human beings live lives of uninhibited sexual pleasure, limited only by physical capacity, and therefore that sexuality has no history. This seems to be the view of a socio-biologist, Robin Fox, who in an essay in the collection by Philippe Ariès has gone so far as to claim that "a great deal that can be said about human sexuality can be disposed of as the sexual behavior to be expected of a large-bodied, large-brained, slow-breeding, omnivorous mammal." But things, alas, are far more complicated. Human beings are thinking animals; they are guided by moral codes and by fears of God's wrath, and consumed with emotions of guilt and shame, to say nothing of an apprehensive comprehension of death in the future and anxiety about mental and physical health in the present. In consequence, they have managed to erect around the simple physiological arrangements for perpetuating the species some of the most bizarre, complex, and glittering edifices of moral, religious, and medical prescriptions and taboos in the whole history of mankind. They are triumphs of man's ingenuity and almost limitless capacity for pseudo-scientific investigation, imaginative deduction, unverifiable speculation, and the formulation of wildly different codes of behavior.

Men and women have always invented elaborate refinements upon the simple 90-second act of penetration and ejaculation that fertilizes the egg, as required by nature. But it is a curious anomaly of modern life that the extraordinary history of the twists and turns of this acculturation process is almost unknown to the most sophisticated and widely read in this sex-obsessed society of ours. We have a vague idea, derived from Freud, that we are especially liable to sexual dysfunctions and anxieties because of the weight of our Judeo-Christian traditions, but just what they were, and when they developed, and what came before them, we mostly do not know. There is something very illogical about the way we scrutinize with so much attention our individual sexual history on the psychoanalyst's couch, but inquire so little about our collective sexual history as heirs-and prisoners--of an ancient sexual culture.

As a result, as Jean-Louis Flandrin has pointed out, the long and weighty history of sexuality that still presses so heavily upon us is largely ignored by sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and sexologists, who saturate the public with their advice on this absorbing topic. A prime reason for this neglect of history is that only in the last decade or so have historians begun to excavate that past, delving into both the values propounded by philosophers, theologians, and moralists, and the actual reality of human behavior insofar as it can be reconstructed.

The libido has always been subjected to the conflicting influences of ascetic repression and erotic stimulation. Both have coexisted in competition with each other in all cultures, but their relative strength and influence have varied enormously from period to period, and within the same period from class to class. On the one hand sexual libertinism, until recently largely confined to a wealthy and indolent elite, often concentrated around a court has invented a remarkable panoply of tricks and devices, including masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, and even physical aids and sexual toys from vibrators to ben wa. balls to dildos. Erotic art, handbooks, and pornographic literature have been produced by every higher civilization from ancient Egypt, China, classical Greece and Rome down to Japan, India, and the early modern and modern West.

But having provided itself with all these artificial stimuli, the human species has then proceeded to enmesh the simple act of sexual reproduction with a massive array of moral and aesthetic injunctions, ascetic codes of conduct, and theological laws and prescriptions of the most extraordinary complexity, variety, and severity. For long periods of time, the full moral, administrative, and judicial powers of church and state have been directed toward controlling the libido and directing it into strictly delimited channels. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the history of sexuality is a long and complicated history, deeply affected by public policy, law, morality, religion, community attitudes and customs, to say nothing of viral change such as the introduction of syphilis into Europe in the late 15th century or technological change such as improving contraceptive devices from the 17th century.

THE DISTANCE we have traveled in our attitudes toward sexuality in the West over the last 2,500 years can be illustrated by some stark comparisons. First, to a young male citizen of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., it was perfectly proper and moral to use the body of a male or female slave for any sexual pleasure that took his fancy, whether it be sodomy, fellatio, or whatever. Today almost the only taboo in the modern sexologist's book is the sexual use of another without allowing the latter any pleasure or profit, and without the latter's free consent.

Second, to the ancient world of Greece and Rome, men - and it was above all a masculine society - were regarded as naturally bisexual. No distinction was made between the love of boys and the love of women. This was simply a question of taste, about as significant as preferring coffee or tea for breakfast. The crucial distinction in law and morality was between those who took the active roles and those who took the passive roles - the penetrators as opposed to the penetrated. This concept effectively degraded submissive boys, women, and slaves of both sexes, and elevated active men, regardless of their gender preference. To us, gender preference is all important, and the distinction between the active and the passive roles of only minor significance.

Third, in the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, doctors were unanimous in telling their contemporaries that masturbation was extremely dangerous to their health, while theologians were equally insistent that it was a mortal sin. Today sexologists tell us that masturbation is not only harmless, both physically and morally, but even an essential step toward the "orgasmic imperative" that now dominates our society. One writer in the Ariès volume quotes the claim that "masturbation... makes it possible to have satisfactory sexual relationships later on."

Fourth, from St.Jerome in the fourth century A.D., to the Spanish theologian Thomas Sanchez in the 16th century, to the English propagandist and novelist Daniel Defoe in the 18th century, it was generally held that passionate sexual love between spouses within marriage was not only indecent but positively sinful. St. Jerome claimed that "nothing is more impure than to love one’s wife as if she were a mistress” ; he called it adultery. Defoe denounced it as "matrimonial whoredom." The reason for this was that Christian ascetic moralists viewed all sex, except for the single purpose of procreation, as immoral. It should not be indulged in for the gratification of pleasure, or even to cement marital affection. And yet today we regard sexual love as essential to a good marriage and its absence as grounds for divorce.

Perhaps it should be pointed out that these modern sexologists with their apparently liberating doctrines are in fact erecting a new dichotomy of mind and body to replace the ancient ones of the pagan world and Christianity. André Béjin has pointed out that "present day norms tend to provoke a conflict between immediate surrender to the demands of the senses, and an increased conscious mastery of the organic processes.... One must abandon oneself to sensation, without ceasing to submit one's actions to a rational calculation of 'sexual expedience.' " He concludes, gloomily, that we are witnessing "the surreptitious re-entry of this antithesis, and all that flows from it, chiefly asceticism and intellectualism." If this is true, which I think it is, then we are still as hog-tied to the dualism of the spirit and the flesh, the mind and the body, as was any Early Father in the Syria desert 1,700 years ago. After all this effort to create a culture of pure sensuality, the body is still, in the 1980s, a prisoner of the mind. Thus the history of sexuality is not the history of what people actually did, which inevitably is a somewhat boring topic, since the options are limited by the structure of the human body. It is concerned, rather, with something much more interesting, which is the ideas that have dominated and controlled this activity and the social systems that have resulted from the adoption of these ideas and patterns of behavior.

IT IS CLEAR from the historical record that sexuality has always been problematic, to widely varying degrees, for every unit in the social system from the individual to the state. For a woman it has been problematic, partly because of the cultural pressures for premarital virginity and marital fidelity to which she has usually been subjected, and partly because of the severe social and economic consequences of an illegitimate pregnancy. For a man, sexuality has been problematic since it is a perpetual challenge either to his virility or to his powers of self-control. For 2,000 years doctors have warned that the semen is a precious fluid, excessive loss of which will bring on almost every disease to which mankind is heir. For the family it has been problematic since it is through legalized sexual union in marriage that family property, prestige, and power is transmitted, accumulated, or diminished. Since a woman's virginity has in most societies been her strong card in the marriage market, along with her face and her fortune, many societies have virtually imprisoned their womenfolk in the home, and married them off as soon as they reached sexual maturity.

For the neighborhood, sexuality is problematic since any adulterous connection, or any rape or seduction of young boys or girls, is liable to lead to violence and civil disorder. For the community, the confinement of the sexual drive within legalized channels is also of prime importance, both to avoid social conflict and to limit the number of deserted wives and illegitimate children who of necessity will become an economic burden upon the public funds. To the church ? especially the Christian and Moslem churches - sexuality and its control serve as a paradigm for other moral and spiritual qualities, and is frequently monitored with the most extreme care, both to reduce the total level of sexual passion and sensual worldly pleasure and to channel sexuality into the legitimate reproduction of the species. Sexuality is problematic for the state, since it has the responsibility to transform the injunctions of religion into enacted law; to enforce that law; and also to ensure that the population reproduces itself and provides a constant supply of young males for war. Thus there is no social unit, political institution, or moral code that is not in some way deeply involved in the simple act of sexual congress.

The writings under review fall into four groups: those that deal with sexuality in the West in general; those that are concerned with the ancient world and with the great transition in the late antique period to the new ethic of sexual austerity; those that trace the story through the Christian Middle Ages; and those that deal with the new transformation of the early modern period from the Renaissance through the Reformation and  Counter-Reformation to the 18th century Enlightenment; and finally those that struggle with the 19th century combination of intense prudery and an equally intense scientific investigation driven by "the desire to know," as Michel Foucault has aptly called it. Only the astonishing sexual revolution of the middle to late 20th  century is missing from the literature under review.

BEFORE discussing what these writings tell us, it is first necessary to enter certain caveats. If anything is certain about the history of sexuality, it is that in no society has a single cultural norm been universally observed, or even paid lip service to. In any complex society there has always been a variety of subcultures of sexual behavior. As Guido Ruggiero points out, there is always a licit sexual culture side by side with an illicit one liable to persecution and punishment, and in between the two a gray area, often a very large one, in which the two come together.

Moreover, at every epoch there has been a dialogue between the competing cultures of eroticism and asceticism. Sometimes one and sometimes the other has for a while obtained the upper hand, but perhaps more frequently each has exercised moral hegemony over certain sectors of the population, while competing for power to control all the others. For example, attitudes to fornication and adultery are directly related to attitudes to the idea of marital sexual monopoly; rape has sometimes led to marriage.

In early modern and modern Western societies, there appear to have been at least three major class cultures of sex. The working class has had a culture of direct and crude male-dominated sexuality, without much foreplay or erotic sophistication. Since no property is involved at this marginal social level, there has always been much casual concubinage or so-called marriages based on vague promises. The middling classes, when we can glimpse them, have tended to be provident and inhibited, an attitude consonant with their thrifty and calculating economic behavior. The elite, especially at courts, have tended to be promiscuous and have sometimes practiced a highly sophisticated and variegated sexual libertinism. In most societies there has been a distinct homosexual subculture, and in one classical Athens - a special kind of idealized homosexuality may actually have predominated over heterosexuality in terms of moral esteem if not of practice. As will be seen, the degree to which homosexuality has been admired, ignored, tolerated, or viciously suppressed has varied enormously over all ages.

A MORE serious problem is that of the evidence. At all times there has been a large - sometimes a gigantic gap between the prescriptions of theologians, philosophers, and moralists supported in part by the enacted laws and actual sexual behavior.  Things may be proclaimed as immoral and prohibited by law, which in practice everyone is doing with a clear conscience, rather like exceeding the speed limit today. This difficulty can be overcome (if at all) only by studying the wide variety of evidence available, in full recognition that each has its own limitations.

The writings of theologians, philosophers, and moralists tend to display the world in stark tones of black and white-divinely ordained sexuality, or Sodom and Gomorrah. On the other hand, moral codes, usually derived from religion, have had enormous impact both on internalized culture and external repressive measures. In addition to these theological injunctions, -medical ideas-usually false ones have had enormous effect upon behavior. One enduring medical belief has been the gross physical harm done by an excessive expenditure of semen by mates. This has resulted in such diverse practices as the emphasis laid upon sexual moderation in the classical world, the anti-masturbation panic of the 18th and 19th centuries West, and in China the careful cultivation of special techniques of intercourse without ejaculation for the conservation of Yang. Another medical belief prevalent in the West at all times except the 19th century has been in the almost limitless lubricity of women. Such medical theories have dominated whole civilizations and the private lives of many who lived in them.

Diaries and letters are useful, but those that deal with sexual matters are few in number, almost entirely the work of men, almost entirely drawn from elite society, and almost certainly atypical even of their sex or class in their obsessive concern with such matters. Thus writing the history of Victorian bourgeois sexuality on the basis of one or two diaries of blissfully orgasmic women, buttressed by heavy Freudian theory, as attempted by Peter Gay, is a very dubious enterprise.

Perhaps the most useful evidence of all is that of prosecutions for sexual deviance in the courts of law, since this link the enacted law, and the moral attitudes of the judges, with actual behavior. In his path-breaking book about sexuality in Renaissance Florence, Ruggiero has used such records to draw a careful and convincing picture of changing behavior and changing attitudes among different social groups from the  records of law enforcement against sexual deviants. From a study of the illicit, it is possible to draw the boundaries of the licit. Prosecution, he argues, does not create boundaries, but it "helps to reify the perception of boundaries." These boundaries are usually internalized, determined more by custom and tradition than by the power of repression. The successful use of legal records by Ruggiero and by K. J. Dover should provide models for future scholarship in this area. Similarly the records of divorce court cases, if they are described in sufficient detail, throw a vivid light upon the values and attitudes of protagonists, witnesses, and judges. If special care is taken to study the rhetoric used in court, reliable conclusions can be drawn about sexual mentalités in the past.

There is also erotic art and literature. This may be more revealing about eccentric and illicit sexuality than the common and the licit. It may be part of a religious cult, say the cult of the phallus in Greece or the tantra in India or Taoism in China, and it may be subject to stylistic and even technical conventions. For example, it is much easier for an artist explicitly to depict a couple in the rear entry position than the missionary, which may account for the heavy preponderance of the former in the erotic art of most times and places the Orient being an exception to this generalization. And last, the writings and artifacts were usually made for an exclusive and possibly a secretive elite, and may well bear no relation to the views or behavior of the population at large-witness, for example, the exotic undergrowth of English elitist pornographic literature of the highest sexual sophistication and obscenity at the height of mid-Victorian sexual prudery. In certain cases - especially that of classical Greece - an embarrassingly large amount of the surviving evidence comes from erotic vase paintings and the semi-pornographic jokes of the writers of stage comedy such as Aristophanes.

Finally, virtually all this evidence, except for some litigation, was produced by men. Direct evidence of women's views about sexuality in the past is almost entirely lacking, and we are left to assume, perhaps wrongly, that they conformed to the stereotypes ascribed to them by men. That stereotype was for a long time a pejorative one since the woman is the passive partner in the sexual act. This led St. Augustine to the astonishing conclusion that "the body of a man is as superior to that of a woman as the soul is to the body." In the light of all these manifest defects in the evidence, Ariès rightly concludes that "it is hard for the historian to penetrate the silence that reigns over vast areas of human life."

If the records are inadequate, the modern models of historical interpretation are hardly more helpful. The pressure-cooker model of modern sex investigators such as Alfred Kinsey, or sex therapists such as Masters and Johnson, treats sexuality as a matter of "outlets" or orgasms, and not at all as the end product of a complex web of cultural, religious, and legal prescriptions whose origins go far back in historic time. Freudian theory hypothesizes that sex is so powerful a drive that it dominates our unconsciousness, and is only with the greatest difficulty kept within bounds by the restraints of civilization. These restraints, however, are often the cause of serious psychological disturbances. This may perhaps be true of certain classes and culture, although it posits the stark alternatives of uninhibited sexual freedom or civilization, which historically do not seem to have been the only options. Clinical Freudianism, with its stress on penis envy, early incestuous experiences (real or imagined), and the Oedipus complex, looks increasingly like the product of a Victorian, central European, middleclass, male chauvinist society. Some of its major hypotheses may well not apply to other times and other places.

THE most ambitious attempt to write A a total history of sexuality has been that of the late Michel Foucault; three volumes have already been published and a fourth is yet to come. Like all his work, it is primarily a highly sophisticated philosophical discourse based upon prescriptive texts, but in this case the historical context has been pushed even further into the background than in his earlier writings. Volumes II and III, which are concerned with Greece and Rome, provide an extremely valuable, if somewhat lengthy and repetitious, analysis of philosophical discourses, pushing one stage further the previous findings of other scholars in the field, such as Dover and Paul Veyne. But Foucault's neglect of historical context is also carried a stage further. He does not inform his readers who were the authors of the texts he dissects with such skill, what were their formative experiences, sometimes even what century they lived in or where they came from in the far-flung Roman Empire from Scotland to the Euphrates. Nor is there any hint of the size or nature of their readership, nor any attempt to discriminate between enormously influential texts such as those of Plato, Galen, or St. Augustine and those of obscure writers such as Artemidorus Maximus or Musonius Rufus. Nor are we offered any hint of the causes of the great revolution in attitudes in the late antique period, except a halfhearted repetition of the tentative hypothesis of Veyne.

The weakness of such a purely textual analysis of philosophical ideas has been set out by John Boswell:

It is almost fatally tempting for the historian, like the moral  theologian, to pick out those fathers and doctrines which eventually gained universal acceptance as orthodox... The historian is apt to accept the notion that a particular opinion triumphed because this or that influential thinker espoused it, disregarding the fact that many equally prominent theologians may have held contrary views.

Boswell concludes that "it is, for example, naïve to think that the deep hostility to homosexuality in Western culture derived merely from the writings of a few church Fathers." He also points out the vast gulf between theory and practice, which makes it so dangerous to focus exclusively on prescriptive texts to construct a history. Thus he correctly observes of St. Augustine's sexual ethic that "Christian society has in the main ignored it and at many points rejected it openly." The gap between the official theology of sexuality and the practice of sex is often a chasm.

There is a clear consensus in all the books under review that sexuality has had a long and astonishingly complicate history, intimately linked to family structure, social systems, religious beliefs, clerical controls, and civic and state power. The Moral Majority is quite right to see the radical changes in attitudes to, and practice of, sexuality in America in the last quarter of a century as symbolic of much wider and more fundamental changes in our society, culture, and polity.

A GREAT DEAL is now known about sexuality in the classical Greek world of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., thanks to the brilliant detective work of Dover on homosexuality, the revelation of the intense stress on the dominance of free mates over women by Eva Keuls, and the patient and sophisticated study of the ideas of the philosophers in the second volume of Foucault's unfinished work. All three add up to a coherent composite picture. It emerges that almost all the key concepts concerning the moral economy of sexuality in classical Greece were entirely different from our own. In addition to dividing the species into those who played the active role in sex and those who played the passive, the Greeks saw a second great division between those who controlled their appetites and practiced sex in moderation, and those who were incontinent or orgiastic. This rule was based on considerations of good health and moral virtue, which are explored in great detail by Foucault. Our modern division between those men who are faithful to their wives and those who are not simply did not exist in classical Greece, any more than did that between heterosexuals and bisexuals or homosexuals.

The sexual culture of Greek male citizens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. was unusual, since in addition to the acceptance of bisexuality as the norm, it was dominated by an idealized form of pederasty. The bond between an older free man and a pubescent free boy was regarded as the highest and purest form of love. This may have been a relatively new development, since there is no explicit hint of it in Homer, not even in the relationship on and off the battlefield between Achilles and Patroclus. On the other hand, this omission can perhaps be explained by the fact that Homer and his audience simply took the sexual bond for granted.

The classical Greek idealization of pederasty was hedged about by all sorts of quite rigid taboos. Anal and oral intercourse were regarded as crude and vulgar, and sexual contact took place face to face between the thighs of the boy, thus obliging the man to crouch in a most awkward position (which looks guaranteed to bring on a backache). If the boy allowed himself to be penetrated anally, he supposedly forfeited his rights to citizenship. Second, the boy was expected to obtain no sexual pleasure from the encounter. Third, it was shameful for a boy of a good family to take money for his services, although he certainly expected rich presents. Fourth, the boy should only surrender his body to a worthy suitor, whom he admired and who would provide him with intellectual conversation and education and moral support. Not surprisingly, therefore, a number of vase paintings depict a handsome boy rudely rejecting the none-too-delicate advances of a bearded man, which usually take the form of one hand stroking his beardless face and the other his nude limp genitals.

THIS was not, however, an exclusively homosexual society. It was a bisexual one, in which the lovers married and had children in the normal way. But the women were confined to the home, while the men and boys strutted about half-naked in the sunlit streets, directing their love and enthusiasm to pederastic flirtations in the gymnasium. It was a fragile cultural construct, limited to male freeborn citizens and hedged around by elaborate conventions. It is hardly surprising that by the late fourth century it seems to have been in full decay. By the time Aristophanes was writing, the society he depicted was basically heterosexual, and the homosexual aspects of it were pushed more and more into the background. The plot of Lysistrata works only because there were no alternative sexual outlets for men except for the striking women. Even the old moral taboos surrounding pederasty seem to have been undermined, for Aristophanes is full of crude, if hostile, jokes about male sodomy. Finally, by the third century B.C., Dover sees the growth of an "inhibited respectability," perhaps a foretaste of the pagan and Christian asceticism that was later to sweep across the Mediterranean world.

Keuls has focused her attention on the women of Athens, the neglected wives, favored hetaerae (mistresses), and sexually exploited female slaves. There is no doubt that there was something very odd about classical Greek sexuality as displayed - visually in vase paintings, discussed in speeches in lawsuits, and obliquely or bluntly referred to by the later comic playwrights such as Aristophanes. In art, there is a repetitious emphasis on the erect phallus, which is obsessive by the standards of any other known society. This is shown not only by the extremely numerous vase paintings but also by the two huge stone phalli, parts of which still stand on their original short pillars in the sacred enclosure at Delos, now passed daily by hordes of unobservant tourists.

We have been taught to regard Periclean Athens as the cradle of much that is most admirable about Western civilization: classical art and architecture, philosophy and tragic drama of the highest quality, and courageous victory by a tiny democracy over a mighty oriental tyranny. Keuls sees it quite differently, as the despotic rule of male chauvinist sex-crazed "phallocrats," who ruthlessly exploited slaves of both sexes for sexual purposes, neglected and imprisoned their wives, and only treated their mistresses -the hetaerae - with any degree of affection. According to Keuls, their ruthless and exploitative treatment of boys, slaves, women, and other city states was not only similar in nature but causally linked. Drunk with male power and with the imperial aggression that accompanies such a system of values, the Athenian phallocrats first committed deliberate genocide on the helpless Greek inhabitants of Melos, who merely asked to stay neutral in the Peloponnesian 's war, and then brought about the ruin of Athens by a reckless military adventure, the ill-fated expedition to Sicily. Keuls backs up her study with 345 illustrations, mostly of erect phalli. They form an impressive spectacle, and she makes a fairly convincing case for a crudely male-oriented society that treated its women and slaves peculiarly abominably and then foundered in military adventurism.

But Keuls fails to demonstrate a direct linkage of the macho sexuality of the Athenian male citizens to militarism and imperial expansion. Still less does she prove her farfetched theory that the sensational scandal of the mutilation of the herms (stone pillars with a male head and a projecting phallus that stood outside most Athenian front doors) was the work of a group of feminist and pacifist women, protesting against both sexism and militarism. She describes Zeus as "the master rapist," sees Greek temples as boxlike vaginae surrounded by phallic pillars, and even a purse full of money as an "economic phallus." The purchase of a woman's favors she calls "rape by money." She positively hates Athenian men, and greets the final defeat of Athens by Sparta in 404 B.C. with the sardonic comment: "The Attic genius had lost its penis." After a while, it becomes evident that there is an obsessive, even manic, quality about Keuls's interpretation of Greek culture exclusively in phallic terms, which renders implausible her tight linkage between the undoubted Athenian fixation upon the phallus and the exploitative oppression of women and slaves on the one hand, and ruthless imperial military aggression on the other. This is a deeply flawed book; still, despite its excess and absurdities, after reading it and examining its illustrations no one can ever quite feel the same again about Periclean Athens.

Sexuality in ancient Rome followed the same basic rules as in Athens four centuries before. Bisexuality was taken as normal, and the main divisions were between the active and passive role players, and between a man's self-controlled use or his intemperate abuse of his sexual powers. The Greek idealization of pederasty with free upper-class boys had vanished, and such relations were now confined to slave boys. This was apparently still extremely common, and Gibbon claimed that during the first two most flourishing centuries of the great Roman empire only one emperor (Claudius) was not either bisexual or homosexual. No one objected when Hadrian had statues of his boy lover Antinous erected all over the empire after his premature death. Marital fidelity was the ideal, but slaves continued to be kept and used for sexual purposes. Mistresses were common, and to judge from fragments of literature and the frescoes at Pompeii, brothels abounded. If we are to believe Petronius's satiric story of Trimalchio's Feast, every form of polymorphic perversity was practiced not only by the court and landed elite, but also by the rich commercial classes.

BY THE SECOND century A.D. there appeared the first rumbling of a major revolution in sexuality, among both pagan philosophers and the Christian Fathers. The Stoics and the Neoplatonists were the first to urge not merely moderation and self-control,  but sexual asceticism. Seneca argued that "pleasure is a vulgar thing, petty and unworthy of respect, common to dumb animals." Some Christian Fathers, such as St. Jerome, preached that all sexual pleasure was sinful and to be avoided. Above all, man should learn to control not only his bodily lust, but his very thoughts, so that both body and mind were free from temptation. As Foucault points out, there was a major shift from an aesthetic of sexual pleasure to a purification of desire.

Stoics and Christians not only advocated a new sexual austerity, they also combined to erect a new dichotomy, this time between attitudes to a wife and attitudes to other women. St. Jerome copied Seneca in arguing that the duties of a wife were to be a fertile breeder, a good mother, and a prudent housekeeper, but that sexual passion should play no part in the relationship with her husband. This is hardly surprising, since until fairly recent times the purpose of marriage had nothing to do with romantic love, sexual passion, or even necessarily friendship. It was a business arrangement between two propertied families for the production of legitimate children to inherit property; for the extension of both families political connections; for the social placement and status enhancement of women; and for capital transfers between families through the dowry. Among the lower classes, where there was no dowry to give or property to inherit, Veyne claims that it was hardly worth the trouble to go through so formal a ceremony.

As is well known, St. Paul put marriage far below virginity in terms of morality, a mere reluctant compromise to deal with the problem of concupiscence. Along with this went the development, borrowed from the Stoics, of the idea of the indissolubility of the marriage bond, a doctrine that lasted until the 19th century. The Christians also insisted on marital fidelity by the husband as well as the wife, a genuinely new idea that would have deeply shocked the Greeks, and which from that day to this has been honored as much in the breach as the observance. In his brilliant summary of a complex story, Boswell rightly describes these changes in ways of thinking about sexuality, sexual pleasure, and marriage as "this crucial transition in Western history. " It was one that had some strange consequences. Thus Peter Brown has shown how the early Christian bishops married and begot children who would carry on the priestly functions, and then at about 40 adopted "virginity" and thereafter lived lives of abstemious chastity.

The causes of the social diffusion of this great revolution in Western thought, however, remain obscure. This is not a subject that interests Foucault, who as a philosopher was only concerned with the texts. Veyne suggests that it is to be associated with the transformation of the senatorial class into a disciplined and obedient imperial bureaucracy; it is thus a psychological reaction to a social situation. The same quest for disciplined respectability was, he suggests, as attractive to third-century Roman aristocratic bureaucrats as it was to 19th-century bourgeois businessmen. In another article, however, Veyne undermines his own argument by talking about the rise of a "popular and ascetic morality. If it was "popular" it can hardly be attributed to the formation of a senatorial imperial bureaucracy.

ALTERNATIVE sociological explanation is offered by Boswell, who suggests that what happened was the overthrow of the more tolerant and hedonistic values associated with city life, reinforced by the rise to power of emperors and theologians whose origins and ideas were those of the distant provinces in the now enormous empire. For Boswell, the new asceticism thus grew out of the collapse of the urban economy and culture in the late Roman period, and their replacement by the austere beliefs of a conservative provincial countryside. Neither of these explanations is at least plausible. Either is preferable to no explanation at all, except that somehow a wholly new ascetic sexual morality preached by pagan Stoics and Christian Fathers replaced the older tradition of tolerant hedonism. Could it be that when things began to go badly wrong, as was clearly happening in late antique politics, society, and economy, men and women took to ascetic morality and mystical religion as an explanation of, and salvation from, their growing misfortunes?

Whatever the cause of this great moral mutation, which at the moment remains obscure, the result was a shift from a bisexual world divided between the penetrators and the penetrated, to one divided between reproductive heterosexuality and sterile homosexuality; from one of marriage as a relatively rare legal condition undertaken for purposes of property disposal and inheritance, to marriage as a normal condition of that great majority of mankind unable to live a life of total chastity; from one of ethically neutral male bisexual promiscuity in marriage, to an ideal of male and female marital fidelity; from the moral acceptability of the use of slaves against their own wills as sexual playthings, to a new universal code of sexual behavior no longer dependent upon the status of the parties involved; and finally from incest as merely a sin to incest as against nature. "The ascetic," concludes Veyne, "is a dandy of morality."

NATURALLY the working out and implementation of this new ascetic morality took many centuries to accomplish. It was not until the 12th century that the church finally managed to establish that priests could not marry, since they were supposed to practice chastity; that marriage was finally declared indissoluble; and, most surprising of all, that the test of a legally binding marriage was declared to be not the blessing of the church nor the will of the parents but the free consent of both spouses. This last was a doctrine that ran directly counter to the practice of the elite laity, who had used - and went on using - the arranged marriage to accumulate property and extend political connections. The result was a 500-year tussle between canon law theory and secular elite practice. Similarly, the Christian injunction that marriage involved sexual fidelity by the husband as well as the wife also ran directly counter to secular practice, and it, too, has been as often violated as observed.

Boswell demonstrates that throughout out the first 1,200 years of Christianity, there was no clear-cut condemnation, and certainly no energetic legal repression, of male homosexuality. It had not yet become the "unnatural" vice. More astonishing still is his discovery in the 12th century not only of courtly love, which we already knew about, but of a major explosion of overtly homosexual literature. Boswell claims that homoeroticism, whether sublimated or physical, was for a while "the animating force of most Christian life-styles." This may be exaggerated, but it certainly affected some of the most famous bishops and saints of the period, such as St. Anselm or St. Aelred of Rievaulx. At a more popular and more openly physical level, there is evidence that specialized male brothels were available in north-central France in Paris, Chartres, Orléans, and Sens, while a common philosophical topos was a debate between Ganymede and Helen about the relative sexual attractiveness to men of boys and women.

This short flowering of sexual tolerance came to a shattering halt in the 13th century, when a new and far more ferocious wave of repression of all forms of deviance descended upon Europe. There was vigorous official repression by church and state of all forms of religious, moral, and sexual deviance, including Albigenses, heretics, Templars, Jews, usurers, witches, adulterers, and homosexuals.

There was one striking exception, however, to this tidal wave of repression. One variety of what is usually regarded if not as deviant then at least as sinful sex, namely the use of prostitutes, was not merely tolerated in the late Middle Ages. It was positively encouraged by the organization of municipally licensed brothels in formally designated red-light districts, a fact which is now beyond dispute, since Leah Lydia Otis and Jacques Rossiaud and Ruggiero have all independently come to the same conclusions. The prime reason for this exception would appear to have been the danger to social peace created by the fact that the average male age of marriage had risen to the late 20s or even early 30s, some ten or 15 years after puberty. All towns were faced with the problem of calming roving bands of sexually frustrated single men, and brothels were regarded as useful, indeed necessary, tranquilizers for bachelors. They relieved sexual frustrations and so both avoided public riots and saved respectable matrons from the threat of gang rape in the streets. These municipal brothels had an additional attraction for married men. A visit to one of them, unlike one to an unlicensed brothel, gave immunity to the client from a charge of adultery in ecclesiastical law, and the consequent obligation of penance, and also from prosecution in a royal court. Finally, the city fathers made money out of the business.

The only limitation placed upon the practice of the profession was that the brothels were forbidden to do business during church services on Sundays and during Holy Week. By the 15th century, almost every town in southern France or Italy seems to have had a licensed brothel, while villages were taken care of once a week by scheduled visits by a licensed prostitute from a nearby town. As for the prostitutes themselves, they were treated as respectable members of society, like any other guild, and were allowed to take a formal part in civic processions and festivities.

In the 16th century, however, everything changed once more. All over Europe, the towns shut down their licensed brothels and embarked on a vigorous drive to suppress all forms of extramarital sex. By 1562 one-fifth of all the criminal cases coming before the courts in Calvinist Geneva dealt with fornication, while the Counter-Reformation was not far behind in its puritanical zeal. Town and village authorities were empowered to break into and search houses where they suspected that fornication might be taking place. Convicted prostitutes were whipped half-naked through the streets until the blood ran down their backs. Their clients were made to stand in church on Sunday on a platform in front of the whole congregation, dressed in a white sheet and holding a candle, a public shame punishment many would willingly pay large sums to avoid.

At the same time every effort was taken to enforce sexual segregation upon the unmarried, and to reduce the amount of consensual unions, concubinage, and prenuptial cohabitation. Children of the middle and upper classes, after the age of 14 or so, were safely shut away behind the walls of boarding schools and colleges under the watchful eyes of bachelor clerics. By the late 16th century, this new wave of repression was fully functioning, both in Protestant and in Catholic countries. It enlisted the combined repressive efforts of state and church, and was directed by political, religious, municipal, and village leaders.

What caused this remarkable shift in public opinion and policy toward extramarital sexuality? No one really knows. A minority movement for the suppression of prostitution was evident in the late 15th century, so that the emotional fury engendered by the Reformation merely built on an existing trend of opinion, just as the sexual asceticism of the early Church Fathers had built on the writings of the pagan Stoics.  What was new was the theological emphasis that sexuality henceforward should be strictly confined within marriage, which now consequently became the prime focus of heterosexual love. "Holy matrimony" now replaced chastity as the Christian ideal. As Ruggiero shows, the new stress on marriage appears as early as 1450 in Venice, where fornicating couples were encouraged by the courts to get married. Even in cases of rape, the courts pressed for a settlement of the matter by marriage. Thus the protection and encouragement of marriage and the family had become a central concern of the Venetian state at least by 1450.

SIMILARLY, by 1400 the Venetian courts were becoming increasingly concerned about sodomy, which they began to treat as one of the most serious of all crimes, along with treason and heresy. It was now regarded as a crime against nature as well as a threat to the safety of the city, which was thought to be liable to suffer the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Two points stand out in this story. One is that the traditional view that the most vile and despicable of the two actors is the passive one had come to an end. Legal opinion had shifted sharply to the more modern attitude of blaming the sexual aggressor rather than his victim or accomplice. The second is the steady and startling rise of sodomy cases before the Venetian courts, from five to nearly 200 every 25 years from the mid-14th to the late 15th  century. The more zealously the court investigated and prosecuted homosexuality, the more cases of sodomy they discovered. Ruggiero plausibly suggests that homosexuality and the repression of homosexuality go in waves, periods of indifference creating greater public exposure generating a backlash of fear and repression.

THE motor force behind the repression of the 16th  century seems to have been new concepts of virtue and honor, now closely identified with marriage and the family. There was a powerful desire to repress, which cannot merely be attributed to the growing power of the Renaissance state to control the lives of its subjects. In any case, states, however powerful, usually have more important things to do than attempt to stamp out fornication and adultery. The 16th century was a period of destructive civil wars, declining real wages, rising population, and increased unemployment and vagrancy. All states attempted to cope with these problems by increasingly harsh measures to enforce law and order. But this hardly explains why the drive to order should be so fiercely concentrated on deviant sexuality, not only on sodomy, which almost everywhere was made a penal offense punishable by death, but also on premarital sex, fornication, concubinage, and adultery.

As Achillo Olivieri points out in an article in the Ariès volume, there nevertheless appeared a semi-submerged undercurrent of eroticism, especially in Italy, which ran directly counter to the general drift to sexual asceticism and repression. Aretino, for example, wrote defiantly in the mid-16th century: "a good pair of buttocks is possessed of greater power than all that has ever proceeded from philosophers, astrologers, alchemists and necromancers." Aretino's writings, 'and Guilio Romano's drawings and engravings of sexual postures, were almost the first works of pure eroticism or pornography in the West for over a thousand years. From Petronius to Aretino there was virtually nothing, as shown by the empty volume edited by Bruno Roy.

The Italian eroticism of the 16th  century suggests that the repression was far from fully effective in confining the sexual drive to the narrow pathway of marriage. And yet, despite that late age of marriage, bastardy rates and prenuptial conception rates in the 17th century were surprisingly low; and homosexuality was largely confined, so far as the records go, to the nobility and courtiers in the major cities, who were largely immune from the law. Where did the libido go? Was it sublimated in religious zeal, or diverted in masturbation or the various forms of non-procreative sexual activity? We do not know, and probably never will. All that can be said with certainty is that in England, New England, and parts of France, there is clear evidence that the courting procedure among the lower classes included what was known in England and America as "bundling." This consisted of all-night sessions in which a courting couple were alone in the dark in a room with a bed, a practice carried out with at least the tacit consent and complicity of the adults. In the 17th century these all-night encounters do not seem to have resulted in a great deal of premarital pregnancies, to judge by the low rates of bastard and prenuptial pregnancy.

IN THE 18th  century the sexual life of the West took yet another turn. Most Protestant churches relaxed their previous tight grip on the sexual behavior of their congregations, although in Catholic areas the confession box remained an effective control device. In England, for example, official tracking down and prosecution of fornication by the church courts had ceased by the early 18th  century, and partly as a result the proportion of all brides at their first marriage who were already pregnant rose to the astonishing figure of 50 percent. In 18th -century England, pregnancy clearly preceded and perhaps caused marriage rather than vice versa. This century also saw the first large-scale production and consumption of high quality pornography, such as Fanny Hill, while homosexuality began once more to come out into the open, at any rate in the great conurbation of London, where homosexual clubs and ale houses sprang up. But public opinion was still officially hostile; those of the lower classes who thus flaunted their sexual preferences ran the risk of severe punishment. Only the upper classes, as usual, were left free to pursue their homosexual tastes with impunity.

A relatively novel philosophical principle of the age was that each individual possesses certain inalienable rights, although it was never finally settled just what those rights were. In accordance with this philosophy, one homosexual brought to trial in 1726 defiantly staked out a new claim to individual freedom: "I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body." It was to take another 250 years for so radical a notion to become generally accepted.

At the same time as there were these hints at greater tolerance, a strong countercurrent is also visible, shown by the extraordinary popularity of books denouncing the appalling moral and medical dangers of masturbation, a revival in a new form of the age-old belief that semen was a precious fluid to be husbanded with care. This anti-masturbation panic appears as something of an anomaly within the l8th-century sexual code. It was a panic that grew to hysterical proportions in the Victorian period, only to die away again in the 20th century. There were also other ways in which the 18th  century displayed a continued modesty and even prudery in its sexual conduct. It is clear, for example, that couples almost never stripped naked in the 18th  century in order to make love. Even honeymoon couples went to bed at night and got up again next morning dressed in a shirt and a smock, and there is evidence that they kept them on all night. Nor, in the hundreds of cases of sexual intercourse and foreplay recorded in detail in divorce court proceedings, is there more than the very occasional hint of the practice of oral sex. Even in the male fantasy world of pornography, it does not occur very frequently in the 18th  century.

SEXUALITY in the 19th century is still much of a mystery. It combined what seems like the all-time pinnacle of hypocritical prudery and sexual asceticism, evidenced by a fairly widespread concept of women as sexless, domesticated child bearing machines, and a fanatical fear of masturbation that today seems altogether pathological. On the other hand, it is known that large numbers of the urban proletariat were living in casual concubinage, that a vast army of urban prostitutes and highly specialized brothels serviced all classes of men, and that some of the most elaborate and obscene pornography ever minority of connoisseurs. At the same time the first major scientific inquiries into the medical and psychological aspects of sex were being launched. The identification of this "desire to know" as a central characteristic of 19th-century sexuality, culminating in the works of men as diverse as Havelock Ellis and Freud, was the key finding of the first volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.

The reasons for the most salient aspect of the 19th century, the evident attempts at sexual repression, are even more obscure than the facts of actual behavior. There was clearly a moral panic among the upper classes of Europe in the face of the threat posed to their status and positions by the ideas of equality emerging from the French Revolution. There was also a strong moral asceticism associated with evangelical religion. Finally, some suggest that a "spermatic economy" was a sexual ethic peculiarly appropriate to the acquisitive and retentive bourgeoisie of the Victorian era. But these are all very vague hypotheses that are extremely difficult to prove or disprove.

Today, in the late 20th century, the wheel of sexual morality has once more turned. We are living in a period of quite unprecedented sexual toleration, and of a sexualization of all aspects of everyday life from sea-bathing to the selling of automobiles. As Ariès rightly complains, "We see sex everywhere. Every cylinder is a phallus." Before now, sexual libertinism has been confined to narrow elite circles, often around a court. Its dissemination among a population at large, as has occurred in the last 20 years, is a phenomenon unique in the history of developed societies.

It may well not last much longer, in view of the deepening moral tangle about abortion, as medical technology makes the problem of what is and what is not a viable fetus a more and  more unanswerable question; the rising tide of anti-pornographic feminism; and the steady expansion of "moral majoritarian" prudery and demands for sexual control. There is also growing public anxiety about the social consequences of the apparent disintegration of the traditional family, now that the divorce rate has reached 50 percent and the illegitimacy rate is creeping up close to 20 percent. The appearance of so far incurable new venereal diseases such as AIDS and herpes makes it impossible any longer to regard promiscuous sex as a cost-free and victimless form of entertainment. Larger and larger numbers of households are today composed of single persons, or pairs of diverse genders living together outside formal marriage. This is not a new phenomenon, but the scale on which it is now occurring and its spread to all social levels are certainly unprecedented. Whether these trends are temporary or permanent has yet to be seen, and the degree to which they are the cause of social instability and of maladjusted children is still unproven. What is certain is that these trends do not seem to be increasing the sum of human happiness, as was anticipated when the sexual revolution began in the 1960s. Sexual liberation is forging its own new chains.

DOVER, Veyne, Foucault, Boswell, Ariès, Ruggiero, Otis, Rossiaud, Flandrin, Degler, Gay, and others have at last revealed the outlines of the extraordinary and erratic history of changing attitudes to sexuality in the West since the fifth century B.C., and they have analyzed with skill the philosophical and religious systems that lay behind those changes. What is disappointing, however, is the extreme poverty of the explanations offered for the success of these great moral revolutions.

As a philosopher, Foucault is not interested in historical causation. For the late Roman revolution Veyne advanced a theory that it filled the psychological needs of a new self-disciplined imperial bureaucracy, which transformed the Roman senatorial class from machismo warlords into sexually ascetic clerks. Boswell, on the other hand, hinges his argument for the popularity of the new asceticism upon the capture of the failing empire by provincials and villagers bringing with them their rural sexual values intolerant of all forms of sexual deviance. This is quite plausible, especially with regard to homosexuality, which has always seemed to flourish best in an urban setting. The trouble is, however, that sexual asceticism is hardly a standard feature of rural life, and Boswell has no evidence whatever that it was so in late antiquity. Moreover, he abandons it, as he admits, when he comes to trying to explain the second, and even greater, repression of deviants that occurred in the 13th century. Since this period saw the apogee of the medieval urban economy and culture, he is unable to explain the repression by a new triumph of rural values. Instead he falls back on the rise of a bureaucratic and legalistic state, coupled with mounting xenophobia generated by the Crusades. But bureaucratic formalism and crusading zeal hardly seem adequate to explain so major a transformation in moral attitudes and official action.

The same problem arises with the next wave of intolerant repression of all forms of deviation in the 16th century. Judaism, witchcraft, sodomy, prostitution, fornication, and all forms of non-procreative marital sex came under vigorous attack. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation are clearly vitally important factors, but the drive against witchcraft began long before, around 1480, as did the drive against prostitution and sodomy. The rise of the Renaissance state hardly explains the obsessive concern with sexual morality. The social and economic upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries obviously called for increased measures of social control, but not for hunting down and exterminating Jews, sodomites, or witches. The persecution of religious heretics can be explained by the Reformation, but not the drive for sexual austerity.

The next wave of sexual intolerance, beginning in the 1790s, can perhaps be attributed to moral panic caused by the French Revolution, evangelical religion, and the austere values of the rising bourgeoisie. These are all quite plausible; still, even taken together they are hardly convincing. As for the alternating waves of intolerance and indifference, there is as yet not even the suggestion of a causal model.

The intermittent ebbs and flows in the long history of the West of a passion for redefining the boundaries of the licit and the illicit in sexual life are one of the most baffling phenomena facing the social historian, the historian of ideas, and the historian of mentality. Thanks to the meticulous research of many scholars, we now know the broad outlines of the facts. But the causal mechanisms still elude us. The characteristics that all these episodes of repression have in common is that they have usually included attacks on most forms of deviance, whether racial/religious (Jews or Arabs), or exclusively religious (heretics), or magical (witches), or occupational (usurers), or political (traitors), or sexual (homosexuals or fornicators). All are driven by moral panic, a great fear. Still, just what it is that triggers this group hysteria and what it is that calms it remain obscure. What is absolutely certain, however, is that over the long history of Western civilization, there has been no such thing as "normal sexuality." Sexuality is a cultural artifact that has undergone constant and sometimes dramatic changes over time, and there is every reason to suppose that there are still more surprising transformations in store for us in the not too distant future.

By Lawrence Stone, © The New Republic, July 8, 1985

Bibliography

Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times edited by Philippe Ariès, and André Béjin (Basil Blackwell, 1985, 220 pp.)
Greek Homosexuality by K. J. Dover (Harvard University Press, 1978, 288 pp.; Vintage Books, 1978, 244 pp.)
The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens by Eva C. Keuls (Harper & Row, 1985, 452 pp.)
L'Histoire de la Sexualité: 2. L'Usage des Plaisirs, 3. Le Souci de Soi by Michel Foucault (Gallimard, 1984, 285 pp., 284 pp.)
Unpublished lectures from a forthcoming book, Virginity and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Late Antiquity by Peter Brown.
"Homosexuality in ancient Rome" by Paul Veyne in Ariès & Béjin.
"La Famille et l'Amour sous le Haut-Empire Romain" by Paul Veyne, Annales ESC, 33, 1978.
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century by John Boswell (University of Chicago Press, 1980, 442 pp.)
Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc by Leah Lydia Otis (University of Chicago Press, 1985, 240 pp.) ,
"Sex in married life in the early Middle Ages" by Jean-Louis Flandrin in Ariès & Béjin.
"Prostitution, sex and society in French towns in the fifteenth century" by Jacques Rossiaud in Ariès & Béjin.
L'Erotisme au Moyen Age edited by Bruno Roy (Editions de L'Aurore, 1977)
The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice by Guido Ruggiero (Oxford University Press, 1985, 352 pp.)
"Eroticism and social groups in 16th-century Venice: the courtesan," by Achillo Olivieri in Ariès & Béjin
"La Prostitution Florentine au XVe Siècle" and "Le Cé1ibat" by Richard Trexler, Annales ESC, 36, 1981; 27, 1972.
Les Amours Paysannes XVIe-XlXe Siècles by Jean-Louis Flandrin (Gallimard, 1975, 256 pp.)
Le Sexe et l'Occident: Evolution des Attitudes et des Comportements by Jean-Louis Flandrin (Seuil, 1981, 376 pp.)
Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Britain edited by Paul Gabriel Bouc (Barnes and Noble, 1982, 274 pp.)
Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England by G.R. Quaife (Rutgers University Press, 1979, 282 pp.)
Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century by Roger Thompson (Rowman and Littlefield, 1979, 233 pp.)
Homosexuality in Renaissance England by Alan Bray (Gay Men's Press, 1982, 149 pp.)
Histoire de la Sexualité: La Volonté de Savoir by Michel Foucault (Gallimard, 1976, 211 pp.)
At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present by Carl N. Degler (Oxford University Press, 1980, 544 pp.)
"What ought to be and what was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century" by Carl Degler, American Historical Review, 79, 1974.
"The Spermatic Economy: a l9th-Century View of Sexuality" by Ben Barker-Benfield, Feminist Studies, 1, 1972.
"Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System" by Peter T. Cominos, International Review of Social History, VIII, 1963.
Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age by Martha Vicinus (Indiana University Press, 1972, 256 pp.)
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Volume I, Education of the Senses by Peter Gay (Oxford University Press, 1984, 608 pp.)

“Sex in the West” in twenty questions  (Due Tuesday, August 1)

1-4. “The distance we have traveled in our attitudes toward sexuality in the West over the last 2,500 years can be illustrated, writes Lawrence Stone, by some stark comparisons.” Summarize in your own words the examples he offers a) in the Athens of the 4th ?5th centuries B.C., b) in ancient Greece and Rome, c) in the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and d) in the works of such Christian writers such as St.Jerome or Thomas Sanchez.

5. “If anything is certain about the history of sexuality,” continues Stone, what is it?

6-8. “In early modern and modern Western societies, there appear to have been at least three major class cultures of sex.” Summarize these three classes cultures.

9. With the use of a dictionary, define the words eroticism and asceticism.

10. Why cannot we take at face value erotic art and literature? Literature written by men or women?

11. “There was, writes Stone, something very odd about classical Greek sexuality...” What oddity?

12. What do the Roman fragments of literature or do the frescoes at Pompeii suggest?

13. What do we know about the Church’s official theology of sexuality (Church Fathers, for example) and the actual practice of sex?

14. Interestingly, in the 12th century, for the Catholic Church, and thanks to the Church, what became “the test of a legally binding marriage”?

15. Surprisingly, what does Boswell demonstrate in the attitude of the Church concerning male homosexuality?

16. What do we know about eroticism in 16th century Italy, for example?

17. What was in England and America the so-called “bundling”?

18. What do we know about sexual conduct in the 18th century about love making?

19. In what sense, as argued by Stone, is today’s sexual liberation “forging its own new chains”?

20. Summarize in your own words Stone’s conclusion on Sex in the West.

Regards sur l'amour entre hommes

Films to be screened:

Film 1:  Three Men and a Cradle (1985) - A Film by Coline Serreau

Maternal men in Trois Hommes et un couffin

Coline Serreau's Trois Hommes et un couffin (1985) is one of the greatest domestic box-office hits of recent French cinema. Over ten million people saw the film in the year of release, rising to twelve and a half million within three years, making it by far the most popular French film of the 1980s, and the most successful home product since Gerard Oury's La Grande Vadrouille in 1966. Moreover, the budget - recouped ten times over - was only 9.7 million francs, and the three leads - Roland Giraud, Michel Boujenah and André Dussolier - relatively unknown.

Serreau was subsequently asked to direct the Hollywood remake but pulled out, leaving Leonard Nimoy to direct Three Men and a Baby in Hollywood. In Serreau's film, three bachelor buddies -Pierre (Giraud), Michel (Boujenah) and Jacques (Dussolier) - live together in Paris. While Jacques is out of the country - he works as an airline pilot - Sylvia, an ex-girlfriend, sends him baby Marie to look after. Although Jacques is Marie's father, he is unaware of her existence. It therefore falls upon Pierre and Michel to act as surrogate fathers and, more pertinently, surrogate mothers too. Their attempts to care for Marie are complicated by a sub-plot involving stolen drugs which, like the baby, are thrust upon them. Jacques's arrival is followed by Sylvia's reclaiming of Marie but she proves a less able mother than the three men, and the baby is returned to Jacques, Pierre and Michel.

Serreau had considered the cultural difficulties fatherhood raised for men ten years previously in her first film script, On s'est trompé d'amour, which she resumed in feminist terminology as follows: 'On écrase les hommes sous leur propre phallus et on leur inculque qu'il est au-dessous de leur dignité de partager avec leurs femmes les préparatifs de la venue du bébé [Men are crushed under their own phallus, and taught that it is beneath their dignity to share with their wives in preparing for a new baby]. But by contrasting the caring male trio of Trois Hommes et un couffin with female examples of 'bad' motherhood, she gave rise to accusations from American feminist critics that the film was misogynistic, and subverted French feminist theory's emphasis on the importance of biological motherhood. Trois Hommes et un couffin may not be a feminist film, but it does present - like  much of Serreau's work - an optimistic response to a genuine social question (the role  of men in bringing up children). The film also presents a fairly realistic picture of domestic routine - via the shots of nappy-changing, washing feeding bottles, and so on - which recalls the importance of representations of domesticity in feminist cinema, most famously in Chantal Akerman's real-time study of a house-wife's existence, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles (1976). Not only do Pierre, Michel and  (eventually) Jacques thus inhabit a 'female' domestic space, and carry out 'female' domestic chores, they are feminised by their love for baby Marie which, as Françoise Audé has observed, is maternal rather than paternal. This is most evident when Marie is temporarily taken away by Sylvia: in a drunken maternal fantasy, Jacques puts a cushion up his jumper, claiming that he is pregnant, and bemoans the sterility of men compared to the life  giving creativity of women. The question of gender roles also informs Serreau's manipulation of genre in the  film, with the two plots deriving from genres traditionally encoded in gender terms:  the drugs plot belongs to the 'male' thriller genre, the  baby plot to female' domestic realism. The confusion between the two packages - the baby and the heroin - 'introduces narrative rivalry  between a male story of opposition to law and order, and a female plot of compliance with societal norms and values'.  The two plots are integrated when the baby herself (her nappy) is used by Pierre and Michel as a hiding-place for the drugs,  and in a parody of the macho thriller genre, the archetypal set-piece in which bags containing drugs are switched involves not two briefcases (serious, 'male', business-like) but two nappies. As in Serreau's subsequent films, Romuald et Juliette (1989) and La Crise (1992), the apparently banal narrative of Trois Hommes et un couffin thus mobilises an examination of conventional roles and contemporary social problems. If in the latter it is gender typing whic is addressed, in Romuald et Juliette it is racism and class snobber and in La Crise a crisis of masculinity in the face of divorce  unemployment and loneliness, while all three films are characterised by Serreau's use of parallelism in plotting and montage, and of frenzied, repetitious dialogue. © Guy Austin - Contemporary French Cinema, p. 89-90

Assignment #1 (due Thursday, July 13): A one-page double space personal reaction to Coline Serreau's Three Men and a Cradle

Film 2: Two Beautiful for You (1988, Bertrand Blier)

Bertrand Blier's films have explored the sometimes misogynistic sexuality of younger men, but here he offers an absorbing, funny, and moving take on a middle-aged man's adulterous affair. Gérard Depardieu stars as Bernard, an affluent car dealer who finds himself in the grip of a violent passion for his new secretary, a rather plain-looking, middle-aged woman played by Josiane Balasko. Seemingly a happily married man with a beautiful wife (Carole Bouquet) and children, he can't understand what is happening as his life is turned upside down. While it may seem that Blier simply enjoys tweaking convention, he's clearly after far more than laughs given the tenderness he finds in the scenes between the adulterous lovers. Bernard's age has suddenly made him more vulnerable, a state of emotion that he realizes Colette grasps intuitively. Depardieu and French comédienne Balasko make a completely believable couple, and the photography of the great Philippe Rousselot is stunning. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide.

Three reviews

a) Clever film on the meaning of love

In this clever take on love and relationships, the affairs of three people are enigmatically portrayed. Everyone adores Bernard's wife Florence. His friends lust for her, her friends envy her. She is very beautiful, and for Bernard there is nothing more left to desire. And that is precisely what troubles him: she may just be too beautiful. His secretary, a temp named Colette, is completely the opposite to Florence. But in her physical unattractiveness Bernard finds a refuge to his peculiar dilemma. Despite of what may seem as a logical explanation, he is not plagued by an inferiority complex. What drives Bernard is the psychological force of the middle-age crisis. Some people wonder whether what they have is as good as it gets. Bernard actually knows that. The second he is near Florence he knows that that is true; gazes of his friends reassure him in that. With Colette, however, he feels completely at ease. There is no need for self-assertion and he is free to choose. Naturally, there is much more to this film, which is full of surprises and unexpected events. The only country where such a complex and somewhat surrealistic plot could have been brought to life, where careful avoidance of turning the film into a soap opera, a pointless comedy, or a tedious drama meets with the bittersweet taste of love and desire is France, and the philosophy of love, the satire, and the superb acting -- Depardieu, Bouquet, and Balasko make a lovely team -- are also typically French here. Ironically enough, the question of the age is inverted to "what does a MAN want?"  (26 August 1999)

b) Too boring for me

    Bertrand Blier is the French Pedro Almodovar: cynical and shocking. Either you love, either you hate his movies. Some of them have divided French public due to their shocking contents, notably "Les Valseuses" (1974). "Trop belle pour toi" appears like an exception in his work. It means that taste of Blier for provocation is less pronounced. However, it doesn't make the movie better for all that. It doesn't work for several reasons: first, it's hard to follow the plot because Blier introduces sequences that are earlier or subsequent to the present scene. For example, we realize too late that Colette ( Balasko) after she left Bernard, married with a man and she had children. The movie ignores certain sequences that are however essential to the development of the plot.
Then, the movie irritates due to its main characters, it goes without saying that dialogs are the key to the good development of the plot. But here, you are under the impression that the characters don't exchange their words. They're talking in the emptiness and don't seem to care about the others' opinion! Let's add that the movie, sometimes, creates a certain boredom because of some lifeless sequences that drag on (notably during dinners in Depardieu's ravishing house with his wife (Bouquet) and all their guests. In short, "trop belle pour toi" is a cold and no soul movie and it left me unsatisfied in spite of good ideas in the making ( Cluzet who expresses his anger with Schubert's music in the background played very loud). Even a trio of outstanding actors don't succeed in saving the movie.

c) Roger Ebert's Point of View

    His name is Bernard. He is played by Gérard Depardieu, that superb French actor who always seems afraid to break something. Her name is Colette. She is played by Josiane Balasko with such an honesty that you understand why anyone would love her. The wife, the woman who fulfills all standards of modern fashionable beauty, is played by Carole Bouquet, who in other films has shown herself to be warm and comical, but in this film is just what she's supposed to be a woman whose beauty is no match for a woman who can touch a man's heart.
    In "Too Beautiful for You," Bertrand Blier tells the story of these people in a curious way that takes a little getting used to. He opens with strong, stark images of passion, and then allows some of the characters to talk directly to the audience, and then uses fantasy scenes in which we see what it would be like if the fears of adulterers were ever made real. In the most startling of the fantasies, the wife addresses a dinner party at which Colette is present, and tells her friends that she knows that have always hated her because she was too beautiful.
     [...] This is grown-up love, not the silly adolescent posturing of Hollywood sex symbols. It is love beyond sex, beyond attraction, beyond lust. It is the love of need, the love that says, I am a puzzle and you are the solution. The rest of the movie's story circles around the great fact of this love. (Roger Ebert)

d) Love Out of Sync in 'Too Beautiful for You'

By VINCENT CANBY

Bernard (Gérard Depardieu), a prosperous garage owner and automobile salesman, is in a Continental fix. He is married to the beautiful, model-chic Florence (Carole Bouquet) when he develops an inexplicable passion for the sweet, plain, somewhat overweight Colette (Josiane Balasko), a temporary secretary not in the bloom of youth.

It's a situation that is best appreciated by French audiences who are more serious than we are about husband-wife-mistress triangles, especially as defined in boulevard farce. Bernard has somehow got the cart before the horse. He is married to the woman who should be his mistress and in love with the woman who should be his wife.

In ''Too Beautiful for You'' (''Trop Belle Pour Toi''), Bertrand Blier takes this rather slim irony and develops it into an exceptionally rich romantic comedy. Though ''Too Beautiful for You'' has its share of scenes in which people pop into the wrong bedrooms, and though the characters pretend to know what they're doing from start to finish, the slick funniness has a somber edge to it.

The film is the dark other side of the kind of classic bedroom farce in which people never successfully make it to the bed.

There is a small irony in ''Too Beautiful for You'' being chosen as the festival's opening attraction. When the festival changed program directors two years ago, one of the reasons was supposed to be that Richard Roud, the former director, who died last February, was too partial to the French cinema.

Though Mr. Blier has certainly done his share to stir up the French movie scene with ''Going Places,'' ''Get Out Your Handkerchiefs'' and ''Ménage,'' he is very much a part of the establishment. ''Too Beautiful for You'' is a variation on the kind of comedy that has been a staple in France since the advent of sound. In some ways it's very traditional.

The new film will disappoint anyone who has delighted in the nerviness that has characterized the Blier work in the past. Yet ''Too Beautiful for You'' is as risky and full of wit as anything the writer-director has done. It is short on plot and plays fast and loose with the conventions of movie reality.

A number of scenes are simply the fantasies of the characters, though Mr. Blier doesn't waste time identifying them as such. At times the actors address the camera directly, as if they were in the sort of novel in which the author goes into a character's mind whenever convenient. This literary quality will offend purists who believe that movies should be seen and not heard, though much of what is heard here is wonderfully muddled and self-serving. There are reminders of both Eric Rohmer and Alain Resnais in the screenplay.

Mr. Blier has described ''Too Beautiful for You'' as a film primarily concerned with women. He is correct up to a point: that is, to the point at which one considers the gargantuan presence of Mr. Depardieu. Even in a role that is comparatively passive, Mr. Depardieu cannot help but be an aggressive force, a figure of such active confusion that his Bernard is the most riveting character in the movie.

Bernard is a self-made man, still amazed at his good fortune in having married the somewhat better-born Florence. She is magnificent to look at, a perfect mother to their two children and deeply in love with him. In one of the film's most comic and moving moments, Florence tells the guests at their wedding dinner that, though she has been with other men, ''they flew over me.'' Her love for Bernard, she says, will hurt.

Bernard, self-absorbed as he is, feels a stranger in the perfect home that Florence oversees. His young son plays Schubert recordings nonstop, which, when his attention is called to the music, begin to haunt him. He is driven to the edge of fury by the music of a man so sick and unhappy.

With Colette he feels at ease. There are no subtleties in their relationship. Their love-making is flat-out eroticism, which Mr. Blier records with steamy humor and truth. Colette, after one such rendezvous, full of what the sex manuals used to call after-glow, approaches a strange man on a railway platform. ''I have just spent three hours making love,'' she says to his bewilderment, for no other reason than that she has never been so satisfied.

Miss Balasko is superb as the pliant but utterly direct Colette, though she's never quite the frump the movie makes her out to be. After her first surprise at meeting Florence, whom Bernard wants to abandon in her favor, Colette seizes her opportunity and throws herself into the affair with abandon. She's no middle-aged waif but a womanly woman without disguises or defenses.

Her opposite is Miss Bouquet's Florence, whose God-given beauty sets her off from everyone else. It intimidates. Florence is also intelligent enough to realize that it can be boring. ''What's left to desire when you have perfection?'' Bernard says at one point.

Though ''Too Beautiful for You'' doesn't worry much about what will finally happen, it moves effortlessly, briskly, from beginning to end at the clip of an iceboat sailing across a perfect surface. It knows that love is a serious business, and that it can also be very comic to anyone looking on from the outside.  © NYT Film Review (September 22, 1989)

Assignment (See # 5, due on August 1): Compare and contrast Blier's Too Beautiful For You and Depardieu & Aubertin's The Bridge.

Film 3: French Twist (Gazon maudit, 1995) -  A film by Josiane Balasko

 Cheating husband Laurent has it all - a beautiful wife, a good job and two adorable children. Somehow that isn't enough - he just can't stop having affairs. Loli, his gorgeous wife, fed up with Laurent's unexpected evening appointments, meets and is seduced by Marijo, a butch cigar-smoking lesbian. When Loli hears of her husband's adulterous activities, she is outraged and Marijo moves in to become her live-in  lover. With Laurent's male ego in tatters, the stage is set for a sexy hilarious menage a trois battle for Loli's sexual favours. Will Laurent go  to where no man has gone before to win his wife back?

Actress/Director Josiane Balasko's latest film 'French Twist' [was] the second most popular film of the 1995 French box office. Balasko, one of the most popular French filmmakers, has always been a comic actress and author. Through 'French Twist' she wanted to talk about lesbianism to a large audience without hurting lesbian sensitivities and also to erase the guilt from lesbianism. Balasko blames poor  promotion by the agencies for the absence of an international market for French cinema. She strongly denies any feminist leanings and believes that her films address everybody.

Note:  With French Twist, Josiane Balasko tackles a delicate subject rarely seen in the movies. She admits that it was a "quite a challenge, since the only reference on the subject were films made for the most part by men and dealing with the men, male homosexuality  having beenpresented on the screen under every angle, while lesbianism has remained in the silence domain of the not-said."

Reviews

Twist and Farce by Ginette Vincendeau

Marijo is an unemployed musician and a lesbian. When her van breaks down, she stops at the house of the beautiful Loli, near Avignon. Loli alone at home with her two small children, gives her some coffee and they strike up a friendship. Laurent, Lolitaís womanising husband (an estate agent) immediately distrusts Marijo and wants her to go. He leaves, however, to meet another woman. After dining with Loli, Marijo eventually leaves, though she returns in the middle of the night. The following day she invites Loli and Laurent to a restaurant, with Laurent's friend and business partner, Antoine. When Laurent notices Marijo fondling Loli's knee under the table he makes a violent scene. He orders Marijo to go away and bars Loli from his bed. He goes on a bicycle trip with Antoine, gets very drunk and crashes his bicycle.

Meanwhile Marijo has come back and she and Loli make love. Antoine inadvertently tells Loli of Laurent's numerous affairs. She installs Marijo at home and works out a weekly arrangement whereby she sleeps with Marijo and Laurent three nights each and one night alone. The situation breaks down when two of Marijo's friends, including an ex-lover, drop by. Jealous, Loli leaves home temporarily and demands Marijo's departure. Marijo agrees, but unknown to Loli, on condition that Laurent makes her pregnant. Several months elapse. Loli meet Marijo's ex-lover on a train bound towards Paris, and learns that Marijo is pregnant and working in a gay night-club in Paris. Thinking she has been betrayed, she decides to go and make a scandal: Laurent joins her by plane. A scene takes place at the nightclub and Marijo is sacked, whereupon she goes into labour. Later, Marijo, Loli, and Laurent are seen living happily all together, with Loli and Laurent's two children and Marijo's baby. Laurent is called to see a client. Diego; while they discuss the deal it is clear that the two men are attracted to each other.

The strength of Josiane Balasko's French Twist, and the reason for its huge success in France, is that it revives the tired, though ever popular, triangular structure of the French vaudeville farce - (man, wife and lover) with topical issues and the dynamism of modern comic acting.

The original title of French Twist, Gazon maudit (literally 'cursed lawn' is one of the metaphors for female genitalia discussed by the giggly Marijo and Loli after their first dinner. It sets the tone for the film's representation of lesbianism: both oblique and frankly stereotypical. 'Butch' and 'femme' are taken to their limits in the looks of the two actresses. "Mummy, there's a man at the door," says one of Loli's children  when the stocky and short-haired Marijo first calls in trucker's jeans and cap, while the adorable Loli, frequently holding a child in her arms,  is all lissome curves, cascading curls and girly frocks. The lesbian as a mannish (and childless) woman, literally an outsider, is thus  immediately evoked. Moreover, French Twist is clearly not interested in the politics of lesbianism: issues are dealt with on a stnctly personal level. Within this format however, Balasko explores the myth of the 'normal' family and pinpoints the double standards of the laddish husband.

In a scene apparently cut in the film's American release print, Antoine is seen attempting to seduce a young woman who is (unknown to him) his estranged daughter. The daughter has set up the encounter to check that her mother's derogatory portrait of her father is accurate. The scene economically condenses patriarchy's 'own goal': male predatory sexuality leads to men's loss of patriarchal power. In this respect, French Twist uses the figure of the lesbian as a catalyst. She reveals the problems of the heterosexual family and ultimately resolves them through motherhood. More than "love conquers all" the idea is that "maternity conquers allî. A conservative discourse in some ways, but one which relocates power structure of the family along the mother-child axis; the large audience for the film in France would seem to indicate the acceptability, and thus recognition, of this phenomenon. The reduction of man to mere instrument of procreation is made plain in the very funny yet rather uncomfortable scene in which Laurent and Marijo force themselves, to 'make love' in order for Marijo to become pregnant.And while Marijo is initially the outsider, she becomes the figure of identification. The film laughs with her, not at her.

Balasko, as a director, is aware of her theatrical and filmic comic heritage The ménage à trois scenes are a witty reprise, with the 'twist' of lesbianism of Labiche, Feydeau, Guitry and a host of other classic comedies, with frantic bedroom interchanges, slammed doors, and comic domestic scenes. An as in the best of this tradition. Balaskoís timing is almost consistently excellent. That this type of comedy depends on precise mechanism shows on the few occasions when the film sags, or, on the contrary, when it strays into slapstick, as in the scene where
Laurent's bike crashes into a pig. This scene also demonstrates the difference between successful stereotype (Marijo) and unsuccessful caricature (the two English sisters, apparently always sexually available for the men's visits). But Balasko, as director and actress, is also a prime exponent of a more modern comic tradition, that of the café-théâtre. Born in the wake of May 1968, café-théâtre humour combines  topical issues, derision and naturalistic performances. Balasko, known in Britain for her dramatic role in Bertrand Blier's Trop belle pour toi, [Too Beautiful for You] is here a consummate comic actress precisely because she injects a stereotype with a subtle, intimate performance. Abril who, in the last few years, has begun to carve out a comic career in France alongside her Almodovar résumé, employs her Spanish sex bombís image to excellent effect. As Laurent, Alain Chabat, a well-known television comic, is a triumph of bemused ordinariness.

Beyond their contemporary resonance, French Twist's 'new family' and sexual mores also strongly evoke Balasko's café-théâtre origins. A congenial, utopian atmosphere bathes the film, from its credit sequence evocation of Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' to the ending and its hint of gay male couple joining the group, as in Coline Serreau's 1977 "Pourquoi pas!"  As with Serreauss films, it is easy to criticise this gently comic, utopian perspective as undermining the serious issues raised by the film. Nevertheless, while Pourquoi pas! was an independent art film with a limited distribution, French Twist made a lesbian relationship acceptable to a mass family audience,which is no
mean achievement.  © Sight and Sound, April 1996.

"Gazon maudit: French national and sexual identities"

By Lucille Cairns

Gazon maudit, written and directed by Josiane Balasko, was a huge  box-office hit when it was released in France in 1995: a surprising success, perhaps, given the film's spotlight on lesbianism, a subject not normatively regarded as particularly congenial to mainstream audiences,' and given, also, the film's apparent dislocation of that privileged social configuration, the 'normal' family. In her review of the film for Diva, a British lesbian magazine, Gillian Rodgerson recalls one reaction overheard as the credits rolled: 'the straight, middle-aged woman behind me drawled to her companion: "So that's what the French get up to!" ' Rodgerson's anecdote is followed by a claim which makes an interesting starting point for discussion: 'Ironic or not, her remarks do illustrate our view of French sexuality as just somehow more complex and naughty than our own.

The view summed up by Rodgerson is predicated on the perception of various arguably national traditions: those of French libertinage, French farce, and French contestation of conservative norms. It is a view which can easily over-estimate French tolerance of deviance from norms. The comic tradition of French sauciness has been overwhelmingly heterosexual in structure and logic. Equally, popular forms of entertainment and recreation have been subject to the surveillance of successive heterocratic regimes, as is illustrated by two twentieth-century examples. When Colette and the Marquise de Belboeuf, alias Missy, performed 'Egyptian Dream', a mime act with definite  lesbian overtones, at the Moulin Rouge on 3 January 1907, the performance was stopped by an outraged audience, and the Marquise was requested by the Prefect of Police to refrain from taking part in any further  performances.' And on 1 February 1949, in the wake of the so-called Liberation, an edict issued by the  Paris Prefect of Police proclaimed that 'dans tous les bals, établissements et lieux publics, il est interdit aux hommes de danser entre eux."  Homosexuality is certainly less repressed in contemporary French society: since the early 1970s, successive gay groups have emerged; in 1982, the gay age of consent for sexual acts performed in private was harmonized with the heterosexual age of consent; and Gay Pride marches now take place every year. But the heterosexual family, which since the nineteenth century has been more of conscious priority in France than in Britain (because of chronic demographic anxieties about falling birth rates and consequent threats to national survival, both economic and military), has formed and still forms one of the most salient constituents of French national identity in the modern era.' The content of Gazon maudit seems subversive in its flouting of this sacred cow; how, then, might
we explain the film's immense popularity in a nation which takes the institution of family so seriously?

A number of responses suggest themselves. Firstly, and most obviously, the film is amusing. Comic treatment of a dissident sexuality is palatable in the late twentieth century because it does not demand a politicized reaction (although it does not, crucially, preclude one). Secondly, the film's formulae are familiar and accessible. The narrative is linear; as Ginette Vincendeau remarks, there is 'the tired, though ever popular, triangular structure of the French vaudeville farce - man, wife and lover'; conventional narrative codes are deployed (for instance, instead of showing sex between two women, the film uses the techniques of ellipsis and beatific music to convey Loli's post-orgasmic high); and two popular traditions are invoked: that of farce, sometimes shading into slapstick (such as in the fisticuffs scene between Marijo the bull-dyke and Laurent, Loli's womanising, dyke-hating husband), and that of heterosexist stereotype.

The first tradition is what makes the film entertaining, and the second is what makes it interesting - for the tradition of heterosexist stereotype is exploited rather than simply upheld. Balasko plays with stereotypes; but, beyond this ludicity, does her film ultimately  challenge them? One of my aims here is to explore to what extent Gazon maudit, within the sécurisant [= safe] context of comedy, either services or subverts normative conceptualisations of dissident sexualities and of the family within the context of French national identity. To this end, I shall engage with a number of claims made by Vincendeau in her stimulating and incisive review of the film. Vincendeau states that Gazon maudit 'is clearly not interested in the politics of lesbianism'.' But lesbians may be interested in the politics of her film. It is axiomatic that no representation of a minority group can be innocent; it ineluctably makes judgments, which in turn gives rise to questions of power. Vincendeau's assertions that Gazon maudit's representation of lesbianism is 'both oblique and frankly stereotypical', that the film 'reveals the problems of the heterosexual family', and that it made a lesbian relationship acceptable to a mass family audience' will provide fruitful scope for analysis.

'Frankly stereotypical': from the very first appearances of Marijo and Loli, the mainstream audience is reassured by the familiar visual code of representation - the butch-femme dyad. Interspersing the credits, the opening sequences feature a conspicuously mannish-looking woman  (Marijo, played by Balasko) driving a van; later on, when Laurent sees her, he immediately and contemptuously pigeon-holes her as a 'gouine'  (dyke). Conversely, the first images of Loli instantly establish her as feminine according to established canons, indulgent and loving in her maternal role. The audience is thus not challenged in its assumptions about lesbian styles and aesthetics, at least not initially. True, th  hackneyed model of the butch-femme is subtly offset later on. But for the greater part of the film, stereotypes of lesbians seem to be reinforced. This may perhaps serve to inveigle the mass family audience, lulling it into a sense of security which blunts the impact of the rather less conformist representation of lesbians in later parts of the film. Dany (one of Marijo's ex-lovers), for instance, is neither excessively feminine nor excessively masculine. The women at the lesbian nightclub in Paris reveal a far greater range of styles and types than the reductive butch-femme dyad admits. Further, the butch and femme characters of Marijo and Loli respectively undergo a subtle transformation. When we see her in a train some time after Marijo's departure, Loli, still very attractive, is newly androgynous, her short hair
and sober trouser-suit contrasting with the cascading curls and girlish frocks of before. In counterpart, the butchness of Marijo is much attenuated: though her hairstyle and sartorial habits remain unaltered, she acquires through motherhood a softer, more feminine glow (as witnessed in the somewhat schmaltzy shots of her doting on her child). But it could be contended that, even before giving birth, she combines a hard masculine image and manners with feminine tenderness, discernible, for example, in  her comforting a distressed Loli out of what seems to be genuinely disinterested love, and in her compassion towards Laurent as he sinks into depression: it is she, his despised rival, who magnanimously exhorts Loli to mercy, which leads to the sharing arrangement between the trio (Loli spending three nights with Marijo, three nights with Laurent, and one by herself).

Does this new set of lesbian images displace the unashamed stereotype which dominates the greater part of the film? Maybe, for those who desire such a displacement. What is likely to remain engraved in the minds of the mainstream audience, however, is the classic, familiar model. This model is the most lisible [readable] for the collective heterocratic consciousness, since the butch-femme coupling can be construed as dependent on, and thus inferior to, the heterosexual model, with one woman remaining a woman and the other aping the man. Such an interpretation can, of course, be disputed, particularly with reference to Judith Butler's cogent work on gender. Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity  posits a more dissident dynamic, that of  parody and redeployment, within the sexual stylization of butch-femme identities. 'The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within [...] the sexual stylisation of butch-femme identities' (:137). As she observes, 'Within feminist theory, such parodic identities have been understood to be [...] an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the practice of heterosexuality' (:137). She argues, however, that such parody destabilizes, through denaturalizing sex and gender. 'The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate.Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original [...]' (: 13 8). While Butler's argument is a compelling one, it may not be the most appropriate in the case of Gazon maudit's general reception,  since, as she herself acknowledges, 'Parody by itself is not subversive'; while 'certain types of parodic repetitions' are 'effectively disruptive, truly troubling', others 'become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony' (:139). For a parodic performance of gender to disrupt heterocratic
 norms, it has to be perceived  as parodic, and it is highly questionable whether the subtleties of Butler's analysis have widely informed the general reception and understanding of Gazon maudit. Assuming that the more common perception of the butch- femme coupling in the film is  likely to have been that of  derivative dependency on and, by implication, inferiority to the heterosexual model, we might propose that a more radically destabilizing scenario would have been for Loli to team up with  another equally feminine-looking woman, for in such a union the
male element would have been  elided. As it is, the male element persists, on at least two levels: that of hegemonic views of gender identity,  as suggested by Laurent's insinuation that Marijo is merely an ersatz male, and, secondly, that of biology: sperm (Laurent's) is an  indispensable commodity for the mannish lesbian's 'true' fulfilment, achieved in motherhood.

On these points, it is interesting to note Gillian Rodgerson's  comment that 'British dykes might not have minded that Loli and Marijo make a  fairly classic butch-femme duo, but some did have a problem with another plot twist. Marijo wants a child and decides that Laurent is the perfect donor. Balasko didn't really answer when I asked why the script calls  for the two actually to have sex but I suppose Gazon maudit  is  sex farce, not a syringe farce.' This is a scene to which I will return; for the moment, let us revert to Vincendeau's analysis.

Vincendeau is certainly justified in qualifying the film's representation of lesbianism as 'oblique'. The mass family audience is never  offended by explicit sex between the two women. It is tantalized, even titillated, by the lustful kisses, touches and squeezes exchanged by the two women; but each such shot is cut short, and the promise of lesbian love-making  vaporizes. When Marijo returns in the night after her first evening with Loli, on the pretext of having left behind her wallet and identity papers, ellipsis is deployed to suggest without actually showing sex between the two women: they embrace, then the camera cuts to a shot of Loli looking euphoric. The hyperbole of her enraptured expression, reinforced by the epiphanic music on the soundtrack, confirms the woman's gratification through the comic codes of excess. Balasko could be accused of  pandering to dominant notions of good taste in using such devices to convey Loli's high after the  event, rather han having that event enacted. Film is a visual medium, but lesbian sex is invisible in this film. This may be a judicious commercial calculation on Balasko's part, but by the same token it could be criticized by lesbian viewers as selling out, and as censorship of what differentiates innocuous same-sex sentiment from subversive same-sex passion. In her interview with Thierry Jousse, Balasko claims: 'je me suis donné comme principe d'éviter le voyeurisme. Le voyeurisme est purement masculin et le voyeurisme devant deux femmes faisant  l'amour, on le trouve dans n'importe quel film porno. En revanche, la force des sentiments - beaucoup plus violente - m'intéresse davantage.  [...] C'est peut-être plus dérangeant que de voir deux femmes se caresser et rouler sur un lit. Les sentiments sont beaucoup plus dérangeants que l'acte sexuel.'(As a matter of principle I decided to avoid voyeurism. Voyeurism is purely a male thing, and showing two women making love, you find that in any porno movie. I am more interested however in the power of the feelings ? which is something much more violent [...] It is perhaps more disturbing to see two women caressing each other and rolling over a bed than viewing the sexual act.)

 These statements simultaneously invite dissent and assent. On the first count, Balasko is right in implying that lesbian sex scene are a commonplace in pornographic films designed primarily for male heterosexual consumption. But this does not mean that any filmic representation of lesbian sex is inevitably pornographic or voyeuristic. The proble with Balasko's stance is that it posits a male heterosexual viewer and neglects to ask whether some lesbian viewers might not havc appreciated an enactment, non-prurient of course, of lesbian love-making. One doubts that this was beyond the bounds of Balasko's imagination. But even if it was, she could surely have consulted real lesbians for tips, Rodgerson notes that Balasko did not consult any of her lesbian friends about character development, and quotes her as saying 'I didn't need to make an inquest.[...] In myself I found the way to play this  character. I realized that love is the same, the feelings are the same, jealousy is the same, the desire for  possession is the same. The technique may be different..."' Quite. The techniques (I pluralize intentionally) are indeed different, and exploration of this difference might have enriched and further authenticated the film for lesbian viewers.

One could take a cynical view of Balasko's hypothesis that 'la force des sentiments [...]est peut-être plus dérangeant[el que de voir deux femmes se caresser et rouler sur un lit', and infer that she feared alienating the mainstream family audience by explicit lesbian sex scenes. French national identity appears relatively disinclined to provide a space for  representation of lesbianism; possible reasons for this will be explored later, but the situation is summed up tellingly in the words of Carole Kéruzoré, president of the new French lesbian organization  named 'Les Lesbiennes se déchaînent':'On parle très peu de nous. Notre sexualité reste très floue dans l'esprit des gens."' (Very little is said about us [lesbians]. Our sexuality remains vry fuzzy in the minds of people.).Balasko was perhaps unwilling to take the risk of making that sexuality clearer to the mainstream audience on whose tolerance threshold, as much as anything else, the  commercial success of her film depended. Conversely, one could credit her with sincerity, and credit the feelings her two principal female protagonists express for one another with more weight than their comic vehicle would seem to support. Her assertion intersects with observations made in more serious contexts by such intellectual grandees as Michel Foucaul and David Halperin. Foucault opined that:
 

Imagining a sexual act that does not conform to the law or to nature, that's not what upsets people. But that individuals might begin to love each other, that's the problem. That goes against the grain of social institutions: they are already crisscrossed by emotional intensities which both hold them in place and fill them with turmoil - look at the army, where love  between men is endlessly solicited and stigmatized. The institutional regulations cannot approve such [emotional] relations [between men], with their multiple intensities, variable colorations,  imperceptible movements, and changing forms - relations that produce a short circuit and introduce love where there ought to be law, regularity and custom.

'Hence', as David Halperin comments, 'it is "the homosexual way of life" that, according to Foucault, is much more threatening "than the  sexual act itself". (Which may be why it is easier to legalize gay sex than gay marriage.)"'

In Gazon maudit, a lesbian love goes against the grain of a specific institution: the patriarchal family. It enrages the representative of that institution's apex, the husband, who is symbolically castrated, and himself admits how much less disturbing it would have been for Loli to have fallen for another man.[...], Laurent is utterly disarmed by his inability to compete with unknown and unknowable lesbian jouissance.[= sexual pleasure] Laurent's refuge lies in vapid phallocentrism, witnessed, for example, in his efforts to insult Marijo by the taunt 'les couilles te manquent', (you have no balls) and in his plaintive laments to his friend Antoine: 'Elle se tape la gouine [...] Pourquoi avec cette espèce d'ersatz?' (For him, a lesbian lover can only be an inferior substitute for the plenitude of phallic man. Yet he is forced to  admit defeat, as in his reproach to Marijo: 'Vous êtes en train de détruire mon foyer.' (= You are destroying my family). However, he has not moral leg to stand on; his past wrongs against his wife come home to roost, and his own responsibility in the breakdown of family life as he knows it becomes obvious.

This brings us to Vincendeau's claims that Gazon maudit  'reveals the problems of the heterosexual family', and that it 'made a lesbian relationship acceptable to a mass family audience'. I would give a qualified assent to.the first statement, but would wish to problematize the  second. The film evidently does reveal certain problems of the heterosexual family, but does it truly challenge that institution? In the film, these problems appear to boil down to male irresponsibility and philandering (epitomized by Laurent, but reiterated also in the rather pathetic attempts of Antoine to seduce a young woman who is in fact, unbeknownst to him, his long-estranged daughter). At the start of the film, Loli seems contented in her orthodox role as wife and  mother (although occasionally nostalgic about her former dancing career, she does not question her renunciation of it in the name of love); her only source of discontent is her husband's absences, and later on, discovery of the reason behind them (his sexual infidelities). In fact, it is pique at Laurent's absence from the family home that causes her to invite Marijo t stay for that fateful dinner. And  although love between the two women is powerfully conveyed, this love is ultimately reconciled with Loli's enduring love for her husband rather than supplanting it. By the end of the film, the crisis of the heterosexual family suddenly, and with comic implausibility, cedes to utopian idyll. At Loli's behest, Marijo and her baby have moved in permanently with her and Laurent, father  the baby. The last shot of the two women features them more as mothers than as lesbians. Of course the two are patently not incompatible, and prominent film scholar Susan Hayward has averred that it is precisely the combination of lesbianism and motherhood which is truly transgressive in Gazon maudit. Hayward's argument has much to commend it: the scene may be read as infringing cultural norms by showing  two mothers who remain lesbians, yoking two categories popularly deemed  incommensurable due to the purported naturalness of the former and the purported unnaturalness of the latter.

However, close scrutiny of the scene may lead to doubts about whether it actually does continue to signify the two women qua [= as] lesbians. They kiss, yes; but is the kiss enacted erotically or merely affectionately? If merely affectionately, as I would suggest (the kiss seems like a routine peck, and insignificant in comparison with the attention showered on the infant; insignificant, too, in comparison with the passionate kiss Loli has minutes before planted on Laurent), in what sense can it be taken as signifying lesbianism, if lesbianism, as is my contention, involves sexual attraction, as well as love and affection, between women? Clearly, affection and eroticism are not mutually exclusive;  but my point is that the emphasis of this last shot of the two women is not on what would distinguish them as lesbians. Occupying centre groun is love for the baby and affection for one another, rather than lesbian desire; the latter, it seems to me, has been bowdlerized, downgraded to a fondness merging into the ocean of cooing maternal love. This is in fact the only type of lesbian relationship which is enduringly  'acceptable' to a mainstream audience: one in which lesbian desire takes back seat to the  putatively more natural instincts of mothering and nurturing; and, significantly, one in which the patriarchal figure is respected (in the scene where Laurent visits his new baby before leaving for work, Marijo repeatedly directs the child's attention to its father: 'Regarde, C'est papa [...] Au revoir papa). = Look, it's daddy [...] Bye, daddy.

So what has changed? It appears that, close to the end of the film, the heterosexual family has undergone extension rather than demolition.  Its appendage is the extra mother; the husband/father figure which is its traditional cornerstone is still firmly in place, even fêted by all. It could even be argued that Loli's sexual involvement with Marijo was a mere dalliance serving as a strategy of revenge against her womanizing husband, and that the film positions homosexuality as an available choice for fully socialized heterosexual family members rather than as anything more destabilizing. By the end, the temporarily dislocated heterosexual family has been restored to its 'natural' order, with its ability to accommodate extension and appendage simply serving to reiterate its perennial strength.

The final scene, showing Laurent's move into the gay market, transfers our attention from lesbianism onto male sexuality. There is little doubt that, in the crosscutting of shots at the close of the film, it is the interaction between Laurent and the dashing Diego rather than that between the women which is the more charged and the more intriguing. The film ends with its focus on Laurent: on his having learned his lesson that family is supreme, and that if a man wishes to supplement his conjugal sexual diet, he had better do so not with another woman but with another man, homosexual flings being less serious than straight ones, and ultimately no threat to the family. It is precisely as a heterosexual père de famille  [father and head of the family] that he has the right to indulge in homosexuality, as a sideline.

It is relevant here to foreground another of Balasko's comments  during her interview in Diva  regarding the words 'gazon maudit'. Noting that the title of the film 'is itself a comment on the position of lesbians in French society. Gazon maudit  means "cursed lawn" but gazon  is also a word for pubic hair', (see note). Rodgerson quotes Balasko as saying: 'I like the expression because it's not vulgar or coarse or crude. It's poetic and it explains clearly that lesbianism has- always been more forbidden than male homosexuality'." Historically 'more forbidden' than male homosexuality, lesbianism in Gazon maudit is apparently legitimized, only to be watered down in the milk of motherhood and to be upstaged by a yet more empowered variant of male heterosexuality: one that can simultaneously maintain its pivotal position in the family and indulge in gay flings. Laurent can have his cake and eat it.

This reading of Gazon maudit  may appear ungenerous and unfair, especially in view of Balasko's laudable project to give lesbianism a long overdue cinematic representation (Alain Riou quotes her as saying: J'ai trouvé qu'au cinéma il y avait un véritable manque dans la représentation de l'homosexualité féminine. Il y a beaucoup de films qui montrent avec justesse les hommes qui aiment les hommes. Pour les femmes qui aiment les femmes, rien, sauf des mélos vaguement littéraires, ou des films érotiques faits pour exciter les mâles.  Sur les lesbienne de base, l'archétype, rien. J'ai voulu aborder la question par la comédie, bien sûr, puisque c'est ma façon d'écrire') (I discovered that there was a real lack in representing woman homosexuality in cinema. There are many films that show well men who love men. For women who love women, there is nothing except vaguely literary melodramas, or erotic movies made to excite the males. On the basic lesbian, nothing. I wanted to tackle the problem, by means of a comedy of course, since this is my own way of writing.)  Amore charitable  interpretation might argue for the sexual politics of the film as kaleidoscopic: assembling diverse forms of desire, mingling and collapsing them to the point where a unitary analysis becomes impossible and irrelevant. The interest of the scene of contractual sex between the hitherto firmly gay Marijo and the hitherto 'gouine'-hating Laurent lies in its polysemy. Balasko's own attitude towards this scene has been labile [= instable]. In her February 1996 interview she insisted on its comic nature and on an absence of desire between the two contractors  ('A lot of heterosexual people would expect her to sleep with the guy and then discover this pleasure. [...]  To me, it was a scene that seemed very funny. The comedy comes from the fact that they have no desire for each other and they must make love. It's a chore.' However, less than a year before she had given a very different judgment of the same scene: 'C'est une des scènes les plus érotiques du film.[...] On ne saura  jamais s'ils ont éprouvé du plaisir ou non, l'ambiguïté persiste.' (Itís one of the filmís most erotic scenes. One will never know whether they experienced pleasure or not, the ambiguity remains.)  And indeed, Marijo's transition from apathetic resignation to sudden physical movement, coupled with her intense facial expression at the very end of the scene, raises the same question: has this been a revelation? Has she experienced sexual pleasure for the first time with a man? It could be argued that any sexual pleasure felt by Marijo derives from her fantasizing about Loli rather than concentrating on Laurent, who had himself exhorted that they both think hard about Loli in order to facilitate the ordeal. This is a tenable supposition, but it fails to account for the ambiguity which the scene generates, raising further questions. If Balasko intended that we understand Marijo to have experienced sexual pleasure through fantasising about Loli, why has the director chosen not to confirm this? Why did she choose to have Marijo focus intently on Laurent and to make no reference to Loli? Are the implications of the permeability and vulnerability of a veteran lesbian character to hetero-male desire merely symptomatic of the film's reluctance to accord full status to any form of homosexual relationship, lesbian or gay?

Crucial to the cultural intelligibility of Gazon maudit  in France is its implicit promotion both of the hegemonic social unit - the heterosexual family - and of the Northern/Southern European divide. The interplay between stereotypes of national/regional identity and sexual identity  functions to endorse cultural myths and normative models of social organization. The Parisian dyke scene purveys an image of lesbians as one small, peripheral part of French national identity, and advertises the ability of the French to accommodate, contain, and ghettoize sexualities which do not fit into the hegemonic social unit of the heterosexual family. The centre of French national identity in this film is displaced from Paris, mediated as locus of social exoticism, to the Midi (the film is shot in Avignon, Cavaillon and Roussillon), with its constellation of traditional family-based values. This is most obvious in the figure of Loli, who at the Parisian dyke nightclub insists that Marijo and her baby come back to live with her and Laurent, thus in the South, claiming that a child needs a mother and a father: 'C'est comme ça que ça se passe chez nous', (That's the way we do things done at home) meaning, presumably, in Spain - a country where the family is still considered to be of paramount importance. It is also discernible in all three of the other sexual players in the film: Laurent, Diego and Marijo. Laurent embodies Mediterranean macho man - a figure who is, by the end of the film, reformed in the sense that he is newly cognizant of the centrality of love for wife and children; henceforth his sexual adventures will not threaten the integrity of the family, for they will  'only' be homosexual dalliances, which have historically been permissible to Mediterranean man provided he treat them as the peripheral and necessarily discreet indulgences they have tacitly been treated as in Southern cultures. Diego, largely a feminized figure, pays tribute to phallic machismo: his Catalan utterance at the end of the film can loosely be translated as 'Power to the penis'. Finally, it is reiterated by the fact that the ephemeral threat to Loli's commitment to good Southern values is configured in a lesbian from Paris: until her recuperation within the framework of motherhood, Marijo is a sexual and a cultural outsider.

The final scenes of Gazon maudit serve to focus the drama in terms of its impact on Laurent, and on his successful emergence from the sequence of humiliating castrations he has undergone. Balasko titillates, with he kaleidoscopic inversions and reversals of normative sexual patterns, but ensures that all elements settle in their proper place by the end; ultimately her film comes nowhere near genuine dislocation of  the normative family model so integral to French national identity, The philandering husband is duly punished, but his repentance and return to the family fold both restore him to his former position at its centre and grant him new scope for sexual games outside the sanctity of that  family fold, with the proviso that they do not jeopardize its integrity. What better avenue than gay flings - from the heteronormative optic, the epitome of triviality?

Thus, although the traditional family has undergone two extensions to it: customary territory (appendage of Marijo as the extra mother, courtesy of Laurent's seminal powers; and Laurent's lush, exotic little conservatory of gay flirtation), its integrity remains intact, and indeed central to the film. This is all perfectly consonant with traditional French national identity though the specific model invoked in Gazon maudit  is the Southern, Latin variety, in which, as we have seen, the locus of the family and its enduring heritage within the individual is the supreme reference-point within the general moral topography. French national identity, like Laurent, is able to have its cake and eat it; the French nation is projected as strong and sophisticated enough to tolerate (and contain) a good dose of sexual dissidence, confident in the knowledge that the basic principle of social order and reproduction - the heterosexual family - will survive unscathed. No matter which extensions may have occurred, the solid edifice of male privilege will endure. Contrast this with the deviations of Northerners the Paris disco dykes, with a cultural indebtedness to American communautairisme and commercialism; and the English Crumble sisters portrayed as comical eccentrics (dressed in hippy-style attire, offering dandelion tea to the crazed Laurent) and alien nymphomaniacs. The Crumble sisters, like Diego later on, are peripheral to the family, and figure (as playthings of the film's god: Laurent.

Thus, a French film which may appear iconoclastic - spotlighting lesbianisn and apparently undermining the social configuration of the  'normal' family - turns out to be something of a sop to millennial anxieties about crises of national identity. It figures traditional, Latin France as a model for French national identity generally: tolerant, relaxed enough to have fun, but ultimately committed to preserving the  two foundation-stones of its identity - the family,  and the Law of the Father, which is what, in the end, it is all about.

Far from giving a cultural space to lesbianism, Gazon maudit  exploits it the better to reinforce the strength of the legitimate social unit, the  family. The film does little to make lesbian sexuality less 'floue', [= fuzzy] to recall the words of Carole Kéruzoré, president of 'Les Lesbiennes se déchaînent': the ménage à trois situation at the end of the film hardly reflects lesbian practices or aspirations, and prompts at least two questions. Why, if Balasko had genuinely wanted to give lesbianism a place in cultural representation, did she not have Loli, Marijo and children set up home together, independently of Laurent? Why must their 'alternative' family be under the aegis of the Father? A humanist reply would be: because of Laurent's natural love for his children; because of Loli's natural love for her husband. Balasko was not ready to propose a truly radical end-scenario, that of a lesbian family. This may well be due to the general unwillingness of French society, whether Northern or Southern, to support or even acknowledge minority social units, the Republican model being adamantly opposed to what it disdainfully labels communautairisme, dismissed as an American deviation. Curiously, while Gazon maudit reveals regional divisions within French national identity, on this point at least it posits a unity: Mediterranean values may be best, but Northern and Southern France unite in tacitly excluding any signs of the cultural Other - the Anglo-American model of communautairisme,  found so singularly lacking by the universalist Republic.

Note: Gazon maudit  literally translates as "cursed grass". It is an outdated, familiar expression which signifies a lesbian, because gazon (grass) refers to a woman's pubic hair and it is cursed because it's forbidden to men. The phrase had fallen into disuse until the movierestored its popularity, but is has literary credentials, having been used by Baudelaire in a poem (which was banned on publication) about a esbian in his masterwork Les Fleurs du Mal  (Flowers of Evil) © FCS, ix (1998) 225-237

Et en français ...

" Pourquoi ce sujet saphico-socio? Parce que l'homosexualité masculine est toujours traitée avec civilité au cinéma. La féminine? On tombe dans l'X majuscule, sinon, c'est toujours joué par des siliconées en porte-jarretelles. Balasko a voulu ses femmes tendres,  amoureuses, quotidiennes, non caricaturales."

Dernier tabou

L'évolution des moeurs et la permissivité n'empêchent pas qu'il reste ici ou là des sujets délicats à aborder. L'amour entre femmes, même et surtout après Coup de foudre [Entre nous  in English translation]  qui en traitait avec une pudeur extrême, reste un de ces sujets "tabou", peu  représentés, qu'il est tentant de traiter par le rire pour les désamorcer. Ce qui est exactement le projet de Gazon maudit. Prenant le parti-pris inverse de celui de Diane Kurys, Josiane Balasko lance le sujet sans ménagement d'aucune sorte dans le grand public, le propulsant avec toute la force comique telle est capable d'y mettre elle-même en tant qu'actrice, dans un trio équilibré ou elle s'adjoint deux partenaires connus pour leur efficacité, Victoria Abril et Alain Chabat. Pour le meilleur et pour le pire, le sujet semble définitivement dédramatisé, assaini parce que tiré au grand jour hors des replis fétides du cinéma porno, démystifié parce que rentrant dans des clichés commodes à l'usage du sens commun.

Le cinéma de Josiane Balasko se situe au niveau des apparences, c'est-à-dire dans un travail sur les apparences, transformations, travestissements, métamorphoses, etc. Travail qu'elle exerce d'abord sur son propre corps, comme on pouvait le voir dans un film antérieur, Ma vie est un enfer. Pour gagner en force, la réalisatrice y tirait le plus petit parti possible d'un sujet qui ne manque pas d'intérêt: les souffrances et les fantasmes de la grosse fille laide qui voudrait être belle et séduisante.
              .../...
La dédramatisation de l'amour lesbien se fait par le comique de farce, ce que l'on ne saurait reprocher à la réalisatrice, qui ne fait que reprendre la gestuelle et les situations propres à ce genre comique, échange de coups de poing sur la figure, nez tuméfiés de part et d'autre, gens qui se promènent les fesses à l'air avec un tablier de cuisine par devant, etc. Cependant les faiblesses du film apparaissent dans ses dernières parties, lorsqu'une série d'épisodes totalement gratuits l'éloignent de plus en plus de son sujet. Faute de trouver une solution à l'existence du couple à trois et faute d'accepter une fin ouverte comme le faisait Coline Serreau dans Pourquoi pas!, Josiane Balasko sature le sujet de pitreries complémentaires qui ne le font pas avancer. Alors que, dans la première partie, on sent parfois à travers la drôlerie une vérite qui passe, la fin du film nous ramène aux clichés et semble s'y complaire. Le sens des derniers épisodes, s'ils en ont un, pourrait être que les femmes se retrouveront toujours autour des enfants à élever, tandis que les hommes rejoindront finalement leur fond d'homosexualité refoulée pour cause
de virilité officielle,

Grâce au brio des acteurs, on se dit que cette néo-pantalonnade ne manque pas d'un certain talent; il est plus difficile de savoir si de quelque manière le film représente une avancée hors des chemins battus pour ce qui concerne les comportements amoureux, conjugaux homo, hétéro, et les pratiques familiales ou sociales. Un tel résultat est à dire vrai peu probable, et le cinéma français reste à cet égard sur des positions conventionnelles. Sur ce même sujet qu'est l'homosexualité féminine, le cinéma anglo-saxon fait preuve de plus d'audace et de plus d'originalité.  Le film de la Canadienne Patricia Rozema, When night is falling ( 1995), en est un bon exemple.  © Denise Brahimi, Cinéastes françaises, p. 106-107.

Assignment #2 (due on Thursday, July 20): Please answer the folloing questions on French Twist

1. Why, according to Josiane Balasko, is the French title of the film, Gazon maudit,  a statement on the position of lesbians in French society?
2. You may have read it in my added footnote: When Balasko states that the expression is “poetic”, she refers to which well-known French “poète maudit”?  and to which specific poem?
3. Diva is the title of Beineix’s first film. It’s also the title of a British magazine, what type of magazine?
4. Lucille Cairns as well as Ginette Vincendeau refer to Balasko’s film as “laudable project”. In what sense and for which specific reasons is it a praiseworthy attempt?
5. In what sense does Balasko’s film reverse “the tired, though ever popular, triangular structure of the French vaudeville farce”?
6. Why did Balasko state that, as a matter of principle, she has avoided voyeurism in her film?
7. “In Gazon maudit, a lesbian love goes again the grain of a specific institution”, which specific institution?
8. Or said differently, “crucial to the intelligibility of Gazon maudit in France is its implicit promotion” of which two components\
9. In what part of France was the film shot?  Have you retained the name of at least one city (known for its famous bridge and its “château des papes”?
10.What are supposed to represent the English Crumble sisters?
11.What type of man Laurent is supposed to embody?
12.What type of man is Diego?
13. Explain: “This is in fact the only type of lesbian relationship which is enduringly ‘acceptable’ to a mainstream audience.” What type of relationship?
14. For ‘prominent film scholar Susan Hayward” (a confessed Lesbian), if there is one thing that is transgressive in Gazon maudit, what is it?
15. Why, according to Cairns, does the film ends with its focus on Laurent?
 

Film 4: Betty Blue (1986). A Film by Jean-Jacques Beineix

Synopsis:  Zorg is a handyman working at the French Riviera, maintaining and looking after the bungalows. He lives a quiet and peaceful life, working diligently and writing in his spare time. One day Betty walks into his life, a young woman who is as beautiful as she is wild and unpredictable. After a dispute with Zorg's boss they leave and Betty manages to get a job at a restaurant. She persuades Zorg to try and get one of his books published but it is rejected which makes Betty fly into a rage. Suddenly Betty's wild manners starts to get out of control. Zorg sees the woman he loves slowly going insane. Can his love prevail even if it comes to the worst? A tragic love story about Zorg and Betty, who from the moment they met are passionately in love.  When she discovers the manuscripts that he has written, she becomes obsessed not only with him, but with his dream to be a writer. Her obsessions lead to madness, and eventually Zorg does have his novel published, after Zorg resolves himself to "put an end to Betty's misery."

This love story is of an absolutely modern sensibility, but with the tragic proportions of centuries-old dramas. The aesthetic is the same super-cool style Beineix mastered in Diva.  Betty and Zorg have been called examples of the lost youth of the 1980s: intensely passionate with no focus, they end up self-destructing.  Or they can be seen as victims of the wild vicissitudes of art. Even for those who find the love story too melodramatic, Beineix's film is a visual and musical pleasure, making the tragic end that much harder to bear. André Sarris believed it was "the most explicite erotic movie ever nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and not for every taste." The film opens with a torrid love scene, a long take, tracking-in shot of Betty and Zorg, naked, making love under the smile of a Mona Lisa painting with a voice-over of Zorg saying: "From the moment I knew Betty, we made love every night."

One Film Review

"She is neurotically generous. She is neurotically needy. We all know about people like Betty Blue : in movie, though not necessarily in life, they come to a bad end. Indeed, much of the suspense in this high-fevered melodrama resolves around whether that end will arrive sooner ot later, and just how painful it will be.

Yet one ends up caring about Betty, because Writer-Director J.- J. Beineix keeps coiling the story of her last months tighter and tighter until the tension is unbearable. Also, Béatrice Dalle as Betty and Jean-Hughes Anglade as Zorg, her bewitched and befuddled lover, bring mesmerizing intensity to their work.

The movie begins under false, bright colors at a beach colony where Zorg is the caretaker, and glad enough to have an attractive girl come into his life. The sex here is very naked and bluntly erotic - a few minutes of careless sex unmediated by commitment or guilt. For a while the movie seems like another study of love along what is left of the hippy margin. But no, it moves toward ever darker, more claustrophobic interiors as Betty realizes that the lackadaisical Zorg cannot absorb all of her energies.  She discovers that he once wrote, and abandoned, a novel.  She will type out the manuscript and get the masterpiece off to publishers. When the rejections pile up, she focuses her hopes on motherhood. When her pregnancy proves to be false, the only place to turn is inward, toward self-destruction. It is a fine irony that Zorg achieves a passion to answer hers only when he must help her complete her boched suicide.

            Another Point of view  By Marcia Pally - Beineix Blue - An interview with Beineix

Jean-Jacques Beineix, director of Diva and this year's French entry  to the Oscars, Betty Blue, is on the phone with a journalist who couldn't make it to interview him in person because he couldn't find a taxi. The subject of the talk is "Life in America." It's a bowl of cherries, Beineix tells the reporter who can't be bothered with plebe transportation. Never been grander. Never been richer. "What do I think about American cars?" Beineix doesn't miss a beat. "It's stupid to buy a car that goes 140 mph to drive 35 mph.  I have a car that goes 140 mph, but," straining to keep his voice down, "I drive it that fast in France."

He also climbs mountains and made it up the Matterhom.  He sails his 35-foot boat in the Atlantic. The storm that followed him to the Azores and blew him to Portugal didn't stop him from going out again. But, Beineix concedes, he had a "boring child-hood." He studied philosophy in college and got highest scores in the baccalaureate exam, except in math, where he got a zero. "Since I was so good in math, I decided to become a doctor." He studied medicine for a year but, bored, took a job in TV ostensibly to race around in production vehicles.

Now 60, [he was born in 1946], Beineix apprenticed as an assistant director on a dozen or so films by René Clement, by  both Jean-Louis and Nadine Trintignant, Claude Berri, and by Claude Zidi. He worked with Jerry Lewis on The Day the Clown Cried and with Moshe Mizrachi on Madame Rosa. Beineix shot his first short, "Mr. Michels'Dog," in 1977. It was nominated for a Caesar. Two years and one more AD job later, producer Irène Silberman asked him to write and direct an adaptation of Delacorta's roman noir, Diva. That film claimed  four Caesars.

Beineix still isn't sure where he belongs. Small and boyish, he squirms around on his palmy hotel couch in a black T-shirt, black pants, and a scraggly week-old beard that fails to give him authority.  "I'm not part of this business," he shrugs. "I'm between cultures not quite bourgeois, not a worker. I'm part adventurer but too shy to be a real one. I've been on the ocean, mountains, motorcycles, horseback. But in a strange city I'm afraid to go out because I don't know where I'm going."

Beineix asks me what I'm wearing to a reception later in the evening. "I'm, asking because I want to know how I should dress. I like to be as visible as possible, but I don't want to be stared at with hostility. Unless I'm with a group of friends and we're all being crazy together, I'm a conformist." Beineix smiles, shrugs, pouts, and considers the ceiling.

"I've traveled, met people, had lots of women. But I haven't been able to hold on to one. I have no children. I think I would like a child, but I know after a year or two I will move, go away. My only home is film, but this is not a roof; it is fights with bad businessmen and decadent capitalists who want profit without risk.

"I have been a lot of things, but I'm still looking for a little harmony. There are moments on the boat when I am in perfect balance with the waves. I steer through them with just two fingers on the wheel. I can sit there, riding, for 17 hours. Sometimes the camera, after an extraordinary amount of work and technique, finds the smile of a woman in just a certain way, and I see this harmony. For a day it helps me accept my fears that I will age or become stupid and pretend that I know everything and stifle the next generation. I don't ever want to do that. That's why I have to keep climbing. I have to put everything at stake every time. But it's hard. This is the great contradiction: do I keep pushing, driving myself for a glimpse of those moments? There are so few of them."

Maybe. But it's the only game in town. The rest is complacency. Beineix finds his peace making movies that run wild. While the rest of his countrymen film the ennui and charms of the bourgeoisie, Beineix looks for loose screws. His characters bound on springs that are about to pop and vault into the corners of their obsessions.

In Diva, a young mailman lusts after an opera singer who refuses to record her performances. He dreams of stealing her voice, and for months he plots to pirate a tapeó his pianissimo pornography. Beineix shot Diva in neon-bright primary colors that float in a velvety black no man's land. One scene flies off the tangent of another, and the story careens with the abandon of our hero's delivery truck. The critics hailed
it as a stylistic splash. In his second film, Moon in the Gutter (based on the novel by David Goodis), the images are just as smashing and the  plot as rude. The film takes you for a ride through a port city slum where a stevedore (Gérard Depardieu) dreams of a pristine woman (Natassia Kinski) and the clean, cool life of the rich. The critics panned it as ponderous.

Adapted from Philippe Djian's 37º2 le Matin, Betty Blue,in Beineix's most vivid work to date, tells of a young man named Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade). He meets up with an unruly siren, Betty (Béatrice Dalle), and falls in love. Without manners, inhibitions, fear of failure, she sets his  life spinning. She makes him believe in himself and in his novel. But the force that propels her is all faith and desire. Like the genius that
spurs both art and madness, it cannot accept the world:  Betty goes very crazy. The critics split. Some were transported by Beineix's mad Magdalene; others yawned.

Beineix's theme repeats itself: In each film, an ordinary fellow meets his muse, compelling and uncompromising as air. She literally brings him life. In Betty, however, she also brings her own point of view. Unlike the Aphrodites of Diva and Gutter, Betty is flesh and blood, opinionated, stubborn, and available. And unlike the heroes of Diva and Gutter, Zorg achieves his dreams. Despite Beineix's doubts about belonging in the business, his success is showing.

Beineix both is his uncompromising Bettyóas wild and driving and wants to have one all his own. But he'd also like a reprieve from her insistent inspiration. He wants both muse; - and mother, or mother of his child which comes to the same thing. Unfortunately for him, divas rarely settle down.

"The rich have the means to protect themselves," Beineix says, explaining his interest in the little guy who reaches beyond his grasp. "I  prefer les gens populaires. They are closer to their own weaknesses and their own grandeur." Gutter,  he continues, is about "fake" or the false promises of advertising and movies. Diva is about the chimera of theater.

"In Betty I tried to escape from 'fake' and look at how people can really inspire each other, especially men and women. I wanted to talk about passion and sexuality, about all the things men and women share. And about the details that suddenly make life full of beauty and intensity. I'm bored with archetypes and speeches and long descriptions of love. I leave this bullshit for the soap operas. I like the quality of
the unsaid, like the lovers' argument in Betty that is reconciled by a few notes on the piano."

Not only are the relationships in Betty more down to earth than in his earlier work, the storyline is more continuous and traditional. "I can't commit suicide every time I make a movie. Even if I think of myself as subversive or rebellious, I know I have to give the audience a chance  to understand what I do. Young directors sometimes go too far. It's a quality of youth and also the limitation. I think Gutter is a masterpiece,
but it's also pretentious. I thought the images would be strong enough to mesmerize audiences. They weren't.
 

 "The critics were very good to remind me that there are rules. For ten years working in film I learned about those rules. And when I finally overcame the guilt of not following them, they wanted to stop me. They were successful. In Betty I'm trying to be effective but more pragmatic. So I reinforced the structure, the chronology."

Is Betty a compromise?

"Yes. But a good one because the spirit is intact.... I'm still attacked by committees for the defense of the old régime who claim my work is empty, all surface images, and that I don't consider dramaturgy or the actors. But they are old fashioned. They are like the academies of the 19th-century dealing with Impressionism. They think cinema should serve reality in a literal sense. They ask where the message is, but they don't see that the image is the message. They don't understand the theories of Toffler or McLuhan, which are not new. They don't see that we can use reality and give it another dimension in film. The image that begins with reality is open. We play with it.

"There's a gap between the audience and some critics. There are a few who try to revise their codes, but others use cinema to promote themselves and their ethical patterns. They cheat themselves and the audience. When the writer from Vanity Fair says Betty Blue has 'fruit-salad brains' or that the film is pointless except for the sex, it means he's interested not only in a traditional treatment of narrative but in conservative messages and morals. [...]

Like his l5th-century mentor, Louis XI, Beineix is a consummate strategist. When bad reviews come in, he gets angry and plots out the next step. When good reviews come in, he plots out the next step. He explains to me what interests him about playing film politics, pitting agents against studios and dancing with the press.

 "There are four rules: dramatize every move you make; advertise every move; make every success seem twice as big as it is; and make every failure work fo you. I love these games. It is all such bullshit."

It turns you on?

 "On one level. But I also hate it. I do it to avoid the void. I hate that it is so hard to make films. I also despair.

 "I have fantasies about returning to commercial films. There I am a director for hire. You want to make a film about chocolate or cars? No problem. I ask for a lot of money. I am cold, mercenary. Commercial directing improves your technique. It's quick, exciting, and over. It's a way to keep moving and not see that you are aging."

A call comes in from France. Beineix  rails about film deals in the U.S. "Already there are rumors in Europe," he growls, "that I am in exile in America ; and am making a big movie here." I suggest it fits the loner image he's been painting.

"Perhaps this image is not the result only of choice. Perhaps it is because I can't do any better. I don't feel I fit in with the standard of French culture. The French lack challenge, ambition. They have pretensions but no pragmatism. So I try to challenge. We have to  improve the rules all the time. But this attempt at subversion would be directed at America if I lived here. I try to keep being alien."

Sounds seductive. What's this problem with women you mentioned before?

 "I have never been with one more than two years. I'm reckless and restless. I am always looking for something new, for something else. But maybe it's just that my process of maturation is slow. Maybe I need to change pace."

 Out of the blue, Beineix says, "Excuse me. May I ask you if you are a dancer?" He mumbles something about long necks and the Russian school. "I was with a dancer who studied in Russia. We were together for two years, but I left at the end of Betty. You don't like - the question. But don't be angry. It's just that I canít see you. You are hiding behind your scarf."

I don't have to be angry. Print is my revenge.

"I don't think you'll take your revenge this way."

  On Divas, Bettys, and ballerinas.

  Béatrice Dalle, dubbed "the new Bardot" by Parisian tastemakers, has doe eyes, black hair, and the most curvaceous body I've seen since Twiggy flattened tits'n' ass. Her most lubricious feature is her sizable mouth, which, a colleague informed me, drives men mad thinking about what it could do. Brought up in Le Mans, Dalle bolted to Paris, where she took up the punk scene around Les Halles. A photographer spotted her hanging around Place de la République, took a few shots, and landed her on the cover of Photo Revue. Helmut Newton grabbed  her for a photo spread in Vanity Fair, and Beineix signed her on as Betty. "She imposes herself," he has told a thousand reporters. "You cannot invent a character like that." But not all viewers are as impressed. One man told me her mouth looks like the grill of a Pontiac. Moreproblematic is Dalle's character. Her temper tantrums are a self-indulgent pain in the ass.

What's the appeal for Zorg?

"He loves her." Beineix seems surprised by the question,  "She gives him what he needs. She says what he deserves; she kicks his ass. She gives him back the passion he forgot."

 Would you stay with her?

  "Would you stay with General Patton? But it is still an interesting picture. If people are asking themselves "Would I stay with her?" the film is provoking them. But Béatrice gets all the  attention. No one notices Anglade."

Jean-Hugues Anglade has a chiseled body and naive eyes. They disarm and then arouse, apparently without design. Anglade played the lead in Patrice Chéreau's The Wounded Man, the roller in Subway, and Zorg in Betty Blue [as well as Marco in Besson's La Femme Nikita]. In  my book, he and Gérard Darmon (as Eddie, the owner of a pizza parlor and pal to our doomed duo) steal the picture.

"Anglade acts with great technique. It is sizzled, precise, elegant. He never overdoes it. It is a very high level of work. But in this business, people don't talk about technique. They don't understand the difference between text and context, subject and treatment, or between what i created by the script, the camerawork, and the acting."

Perhaps not, but they do notice male nudity. Much of the attention Anglade has purloined from Dalle can be blamed on his frontal  frankness.

"I felt ashamed of the way women are treated in movies," Beineix explains. "This doesn't mean I don't like the bodies of women and looking at the bodies of women. I do very much. But if the woman is nude, the man must be nude, too. If he is not, then it means there is something shameful about men's bodies or there is something shameful about being nude. Neither is good. On one hand, if nudity is  shameful and men show women nude, there's a problem between men and women. That's bad for relations between men and women and that ends up being bad for me. On the other hand, if men are ashamed of their bodies, how can they deal with the body of the other? How can they be sexual?

 "So there is a lot of nudity in Betty. Perhaps I was relieving some personal inhibitions. I know there are some people who say I shouldn't do that in public. But I think there are some others who are a little like me, so I relieve their fears, too.

 "I don't support censorship of any kind, but I wonder how people can criticize nudity in film and not violence. You can put brains on the floor, cut throats, and show rapes, but you get an X because of nudity. There are sex scenes in Betty [jettisoning shame at the outset, it opens with a long, slow zoom into Betty and Zorg fucking] but these are love scenes. They are even in the missionary position.

  "I didn't get any official trouble about them, but everyone asks me about the sex. In France, Betty is rated 'No one under 13';  in England, 'No one under 18.' It has no rating here because it's an independent. I think the studios didn't pick Betty up so that they didn't have to put it through the [MPAA] board and get an X."

 While Anglade is an accomplished actor, Dalle is new to the field. ...    "To discover new people," Beineix says, "is the interesting part of this job."

I never got an answer to my question. "Would you stay with Betty?"   "I have stayed with much worse."

Marcia Pally

Assignment #3 (due on Tuesday, July 25): Taking as a point of departure Beineix's comments in his interview with Marcia Pally, write your own reaction to Betty Blue.

Film 5: The Closet (2000) - A film by Francis Veber

From the "People" Archives:
INTERVIEW: Francis Veber Goes into "The Closet"
by Brandon Judell

(indieWIRE/ 06.27.01) -- Director/writer Francis Veber, 63, who scripted "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe" (1972), "The Toy" (1976), "Le cage aux folles" (1978), and "The Goat" (1981), plus wrote and directed last year's hilarious "The Dinner Game," (the American remake's planned title is "Dinner for Shmucks") has returned with what might turn out to be the funniest film of the year.

The hero of "The Closet" is an excessively humdrum accountant, Francois Pignon (Daniel Auteuil), who has worked many years for a company producing condoms, going largely unnoticed. But one day, he is noticed and not favorably. While seated in a bathroom stall, he overhears he's to be fired. Oh, no! Distraught, he sluggishly returns home to dwell upon his uniformly faltering existence. His ex-wife doesn't return his calls. His son ignores him. And now his only remaining purpose in life, his job, is about to ditch him, too. What's left? Suicide!

But before he can achieve eternal peacefulness by jumping off his terrace, his new neighbor, a Monsieur Belone (Michel Aumont), barges into his life with a plan. Make believe you're gay. No one can fire gay people any more without seeming politically incorrect. And a condom company? They wouldn't dare. An unbelieving Pignon agrees hesitantly to the ruse, and before he knows it or can stop it, the ruse takes on a life of its own. The result is a politically astute, first-class farce that brilliantly displays how society's perception of a man or woman can change drastically once the adjective "gay" is added to their resume.

To find out about the film and its creator, indieWIRE sat down with Veber at the Soho Grand to discuss the difference between French and American films, political correctness, "gay film," and Zoloft.

indieWIRE: Do you find the French deal with the honesty of everyday life better than Americans?
Francis Veber: I think so, but it's hard to make a value judgment about that, you know, because the French have a tendency sometimes to be boring in their films even if they're very interesting. Why? Because they don't mind about pace. They're just thinking of their own pleasure in writing, and not too much of the audience. In America, you have the opposite problem. The films have to be fast-paced all the time. (He snaps his fingers a few times.) You are scared to be boring so you don't give the actors the possibility of performing really because you're going from those quick shots to those quick shots. This is strange because if we could mix the systems, having this intellectual approach that the French have and having this entertaining obligation that the Americans have, the result would be the perfect movie.

iW: Are you looking to be a big success in America? Is that important to you?
Veber: Well, I know because I'm not stupid that we have a limited audience here. If a French movie has sixty screens or a hundred screens, it's a record. You see that "Pearl Harbor" has 3000 screens so we can't compare to that. If I have a fair hit for a foreign movie, I'll be delighted. Films like "Crouching Tiger" or "Life is Beautiful" are exceptions. Miracles.

iW: Why did you choose to write and direct a film about a man pretending to be gay?
Veber: I'm not using "gay" to try to be either funnier or to be more commercial. It's not a choice. Sometimes you have a premise that arrives in your mind, and you say, "Oh, my God! This is interesting." Actually in 'The Closet," I was thinking that being politically correct has started to change a little bit. But not as much as I say in the film. I discovered here that it's a very serious issue. I didn't know that in 38 states in America you can be fired if you are gay or lesbian.

iW: When I say a "gay movie," I don't mean a film for gay people. I mean a film dealing with gay subject matter. But you have to admit that your films are political.
Veber: Yes, I agree.

iW: Also, straight people who might be bigoted can be transformed by your work. Your films have the bigots laughing with the gays as opposed to at the gays.
Veber: I love to hear that. I'll tell you something. "La cage aux folles" gave me a very big lesson. It was 20 years ago, and I discovered that the secret of the success of "La cage aux folles" was that it was a story coming from the heart. Okay, you have this old gay couple with a son. But the fact they decided to look "straight" for one evening just for their son's girlfriend's family was out of love. This was the lesson I learned: you can use gays or straights clowning if you want, but there has to be emotion somewhere, otherwise you don't reach the audience. You'll let people laugh, but they'll laugh at your characters, not with you characters.

iW: In Vito Russo's "Celluloid Closet," he notes that homosexuals in films were always portrayed as committing suicide or they were villains or they were prissy people. And you've helped transform that prejudice.
Veber: That's the best compliment you can make to me.

iW: Do you consider filmmaking in France similar to independent filmmaking in America?
Veber: I think that independent filmmaking here has a liberty of freedom that the studio system doesn't give you. There are very interesting things coming from these independents that remind me of the European tradition. It's a good thing.

iW: Now you've moved to West Hollywood.
Veber: I'm living there at least 7 or 8 months a year.

iW: In England, some folks get mad when Brit talent moves to Hollywood? Does anyone get mad at you in France for going Hollywood?
Veber: No, I'll tell you something. They forget you if you make an American film. Juliette Binoche is a good example of that, because I think she was nominated twice for the Oscars. In France, dead silence about that. They don't care. When she comes back, it's okay. When she comes here, they forget her. I've noticed that. I came back to France with two films: "The Closet" and "The Dinner Game," and so they recognized me again. If I was making a film here that was a huge hit and maybe award nominated, they wouldn't care. The French are very arrogant. What is not French, they're not interested in.

iW: Now you're very fit for a director. Does keeping physically together help you direct?
Veber: Yes.

iW: Because lots of directors are insane and flabby.
Veber: I'll tell you a story about that. I was shooting a film in Brazil on the Amazon River, and because I knew it would be very tough shooting, I brought with me my rowing machine. I was rowing at 5 o'clock in the morning, every morning. And because there were no mosquitoes, I was afraid of malaria, I decided to go on the terrace. My terrace was just on the Amazon River. So there I was, rowing, and an Indian passed by, rowing in a canoe, and he watched this jerk rowing without moving. It was the meeting between two worlds you know. The eyes of this Indian looking at me, and me watching him. He was going to hunt -- and I was perspiring, sweating on this stupid device. It's funny you know. But I had to do that, otherwise you're so tired at the end of the day.

iW: What film was that?
Veber: It was a film called "Le Jaguar" (1996). It didn't open here. It was not very good.

iW: How come some of your films don't open here?
Veber: When I try to make films that look like American films, they're not interesting. I tried that. I tried to make an action movie, and we're not gifted for that. You are better than us in that area.

iW: Now did you make most of your money from the Broadway adaptation of "La cage aux folles"?
Veber: No. It didn't go to me. No. Because you know there was a stage writer of "La cage au folles," and I adapted the stage play to make the movie. The stage writer was a genius. The man was named Jean Poiret, and he was the funniest guy I met. He was very funny but his play was not possible as a movie because he was an actor writing, and what he forgot in his play was the heart side of it. He was just making jokes. He couldn't adapt the play himself. He had a nervous breakdown on the adaptation, and they called me and they asked, "Would you like to try to adapt that thing?" and I adapted it. I worked hard, and I worked with him, and it was delight to work with this guy.

iW: You seem too sane to have a nervous breakdown yourself, but then I've only been talking you for a half hour.
Veber: Ten minutes more and you will see that I have one.

iW: Do you have an insane side?
Veber: I am very depressed since I was born.

iW: Really?
Veber: Really.

iW: I was interviewing Lars von Trier, and he told me he was on Prozac.
Veber: I'm not surprised. I tried Zoloft a few times. I think it's normal. It's very difficult to live, you know, and to write at the same time.

iW: Von Trier said he was so happy, he was having writer's block. He noted that maybe if he continued to have the writer's block, he'd stop the Prozac. Do you find being too happy bad for creativity?
Veber: Well, maybe. It's a terrible debate. If you have to be unhappy to write, what is the best choice? To create or not?

HUMOUR IN HUMILIATION (An interview with Thierry Lhermitte)

Francis Veber finds humour in homophobia and humiliation, but with great sensitivity and humanity, says one of the film’s stars, Thierry Lhermitte, who talks to Andrew L. Urban.

He’s tall, handsome, charming and French, but his English is remarkably good. Good enough to joke about feeling insecure when seeing himself dubbed into a foreign language in Francis Veber’s hilarious The Closet. "It can be weird, you know, watching yourself speaking in someone else’s voice and in another language. But the film is so good it works the same way ? which make you wonder about yourself as an actor! Maybe I’m not needed…." He laughs into his mobile phone, finishing breakfast in Paris. I’m finishing an early evening coffee in Sydney.

Lhermitte is something of a Veber regular now, having played the physically difficult role of a mean publisher Pierre Brochant in The Dinner Game, and now the easier role of a mean company executive in The Closet. In this comedy, Francois Pignon (Daniel Auteuil) is an accountant at a condom factory and about to be fired by the macho head of personnel, Félix Santioni (Gerard Depardieu). Seen as a boring zero by all, including advertising executive Guillaume (Lhermitte), he has been pining for his wife who left him two years earlier with their son Franck.  His new neighbour, Belone devises a plan: Pignon will be revealed to be gay, averting the sack for fear of negative customer reaction ? for apparent gay discrimination. The plan succeeds, but it has numerous unexpected and unintended consequences.

"My character is not evil," says Lhermitte, "but he’s manipulative. He doesn’t really mean any harm. . .he likes to joke at others’ expense."

It’s all very funny, but there are some grounding moments of observation, as L'hermitte points out. "It’s more than just funny, yes. It’s very sensitive in some places, emotional…and it says wonderful things about our differences, about homophobia and about humanity."

There is a scene, for example, in which Belone, François Pignon’s middle aged neighbour reflects on the irony that 20 years earlier, homosexuality revealed would have cost him his job. Now it’s saving his friend’s. The film deals with issues like the genesis of rumour and the influence of perception. How other people perceive you is what you are to them, says writer/director Veber. "Other people decide who you are. Or at the very least, other people’s perceptions can push you either to change your behaviour or to be constrained your whole life."

At the film’s beginning, Veber shows us Pignon’s grim reality as he loses everything; his wife, his son and now he faces the loss of his pitiful job. He seriously contemplates suicide. All good comedies spring from tragedy, says Veber. "It’s not as light a genre as one assumes." This is territory well rehearsed by Veber in The Dinner Game, too.

Daniel Auteuil is remarkably effective as the zero who faces a combination of humiliation and personal trauma. He fashions a character with whom we empathise, even as we recognize his shortcomings. His humiliation is an important part of the film’s comedic structure. L'hermitte loved working with Auteuil; "he’s a legend…"

"He’s an extraordinary man, an extraordinary actor ? a great human being." on Depardieu

But it was working with Gérard Depardieu (who recovered from a heart attack to work on The Closet) that was Lhermitte’s personal highlight. "He’s an extraordinary man, an extraordinary actor ? a great human being. For me it was a great pleasure to finally work with him. Previously we’d only met to shake hands a few times. Now we’ve become friends."  (Published December 20, 2001)

The nerdcage  - Francis Veber brings condom conversion to French comedy

By Peter Keough

For Francis Veber, perennial director of France’s funniest comedies, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp has evolved into François Pignon. That’s the name of the hangdog hero of nearly every one of his low-key, inimitable farces. In his 1997 film The Dinner Party (Le dîner de cons), Pignon is played by the koala-like Jacques Villeret. A hapless nerd who builds models of engineering milestones out of matchsticks, he’s invited to a party of snobs to entertain them with his idiocy, but he sweetly turns the tables.

This is kind of what Veber is doing in film after film — he invites us sadists to laugh at poor Pignon, then reveals that he’s just like us, only better. Pignon is Woody Allen without the wit, the neuroses, or the cultural pretensions. Instead, he has decency, unwitting righteousness, and the long arm of poetic justice on his side.

In The Closet, Pignon is played by Gallic everyman Daniel Auteuil. Last seen in this country in the sublime The Widow of Saint-Pierre, in which he played a tragic hero with austere resignation, Auteuil here plays the comic hero Pignon with austere non-comprehension. A hardworking nondescript accountant in a condom factory, Pignon finds himself squeezed out of the company photo before the film’s credits are even completed. It doesn’t matter, he learns from an overheard conversation in the men’s room, since he’s about to be laid off anyway. What with his wife having left him because he was so boring and his teenage son avoiding him for the same reason, Pignon has little to live for.

Enter the little kitty. Yes, this filmmaker does not shrink from using a cute feline as a plot device, or a cute old man. The latter is Pignon’s new next-door neighbor, Belone (Michel Aumont), who uses the stray cat as a ploy to get into Pignon’s apartment and talk him out of suicide. Belone has a helpful suggestion: why doesn’t Pignon start a rumor that he’s gay? Then his bosses — this is a condom factory, after all — wouldn’t want to incur bad publicity by firing him.

Not only do the rumors save Pignon’s job, they somehow make him more . . . interesting. The genius of Belone’s plan is his insistence that Pignon change absolutely nothing about his appearance or behavior: people’s expectations and prejudices will do the rest. From the titillating gossip exchanged by the two women who work with him in the accounting office to the quandaries of Félix (Gérard Depardieu in a comic tour de force), a homophobic jock now fearing for his job, to the renewed attentions of his estranged wife and son, Pignon’s whole world is upended for the better through the agency of an “anonymously” sent doctored photo. And in the comic aftermath of this lucid chaos (Veber’s direction is so crisp you hardly notice the eloquence of the visuals, the employment of space and setting with the ingenuity of Jacques Tati), the film quietly makes its shrewd points about issues ranging from sexual identity to sexual harassment. It’s a minor breakthrough in the cause of tolerance along the lines of Veber’s La cage aux folles.

All of which could — and at rare moments of weakness in The Closet does — trespass into formulaic platitude. The comedy of reversed expectations, as Veber knows well, works best when its own expectations are reversed, or at least fulfilled in surprising ways. Just as the satire of social stereotypes, of the invidious habit people have of judging by appearances, imparts a special sting when the audience’s proclivity in that direction gets tweaked as well.

Thus Veber arranges for Félix, the film’s least sympathetic character, to be transformed through a cruel ploy conceived by fellow worker Guillaume (Thierry Lhermitte, the arch snob from The Dinner Game), and through the intercession of a pink sweater, into the film’s most touching object of pathos, into a virtual Pignon himself. Less successful is the transformation of Mlle. Bertrand (Michèle Laroque), who goes from suspicious indifference to a display of affection that becomes a big endorsement of the company’s product to a passing tour of Japanese investors. Veber’s comedies remain all-boy affairs; if he really wants to get out of the closet, he needs to realize that Pignon can be a woman, too.

Still in the closet

Francis Veber is looking for the way out. He makes brisk little comedies, under 90 minutes, with sharp dialogue, clever slapstick, pointed social commentary, and exquisite performances — and on tight budgets. So why isn’t this guy making a fortune in Hollywood? One problem is, he’s French. Although he’s lived part-time in Hollywood for some years and has been turning out hits in France since Le jouet (The Toy; 1969), something hasn’t translated into box-office dollars and cents.

It’s not for lack of trying. Who could forget Richard Pryor in the American remake of The Toy (1982), or Veber’s own English remake of his Three Fugitives (1989), or Buddy Buddy (1981), the Hollywood version of his A Pain in the A . . . (1973) directed by no less than Veber’s idol Billy Wilder? Well, Veber would like to. Only his La cage aux folles (1978) and its remake The Birdcage (1996) have earned him the accolades over here that he’s used to in France.

He’s hoping that might change with The Closet. Like La cage aux folles, it’s a comedy about sexual stereotypes and social perceptions. Daniel Auteuil is a meek accountant about to get canned from his job at a condom factory when his neighbor has a brainstorm. If he starts a rumor that he’s gay, his employers won’t dare dump him. Very arch and up-to-date, but where are the fart jokes?

Veber admits he’s at a loss when it comes to the new gross-out aesthetics of American comedies. “I had so much pleasure watching Lubitsch and Capra, Sturges, people like that. Now it doesn’t seem to be the same touch. Someone told me that before, writers were coming from Broadway, and now they are coming from TV; they are looking for punch lines instead of looking for structure. Also, the teenage audience is so big here and you have comedies like Something About Mary. It’s fine, and I haven’t seen Scary Movie, but they love it, too. But I won’t be able to write that kind of thing. The penis in the fly or sperm in Cameron Diaz’s hair, you know? I can’t write that.”

And Hollywood seems at a loss when it comes to Veber. Take his current attempt to remake his last big French hit, Le Dîner de cons, which was released here to little notice as The Dinner Game (1997). A wealthy publisher invites strangers to his dinner parties; what the guest doesn’t know is that he or she is an “idiot” brought in to entertain the rest. Trouble started with DreamWorks’ proposed title, Dinner for Schmucks. “It’s difficult to remake. I’ve discovered through the process how much the comedy has strong cultural roots. There are things here that are very different than in Europe. They asked Milos Forman what was the difference between the Czechoslovakian Forman and the American Forman, and he said, when I was in Czechoslovakia I could write, and now I need the help of an American writer because I arrived too late to pick up the sensibility of the country. I understand that. I arrived too late to become an American. Billy Wilder was helped by [Charles] Brackett; he had great writers with him that were American.”

Of course, some aspects of comedy are universal. With his modest but brilliant comedies and his knack for casting big stars (in addition to Auteuil, The Closet features French topliners Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte), Veber can be compared to Woody Allen. Who, it turns out, is one of Veber’s biggest fans. “I was in Los Angeles and he was showing Sweet and Lowdown. I said how much I liked what he was doing and told him that I was the writer/director of The Dinner Game.’ He said, ‘I was your biggest publicist in New York.’ Then he paid me a magnificent compliment when I arrived back in Los Angeles a couple of months ago. I had a fax from my producer that said Woody Allen wants to be the idiot in The Dinner Game, in the remake, and what do you think of that?”

“I was so enthusiastic that I called DreamWorks, who were producing the film at the time, and they said they were not interested. Because he doesn’t have much box-office clout. And it’s sad because he’s such a genius. But box office is the key word here. — PK © 2002 Phoenix Media Communications Group

Roger Ebert:  [...] The movie is a box office hit in France, not least because it has four top actors in unusual roles. Gerard Depardieu, the most macho of French actors, plays Santini, a homophobe who stops gay-bashing and tries to befriend Pignon. Jean Rochefort is the magisterial boss of the company. And Thierry Lhermitte is the troublemaker who inflames Depardieu's fears by telling him he'll be fired for his political incorrectness. To understand this casting in Hollywood terms, think of Auteuil, Depardieu, Rochefort and Lhermitte as Tom Hanks, Brendan Fraser, Michael Douglas and Kevin Pollak. (Given the success of the Hollywood remake of "La Cage Aux Folles," we may actually be seeing casting like this before long.) At least two of Pignon's co-workers are intrigued by the revelations about his sexuality. Mlle. Bertrand (Michèle Laroque), his superior, found him boring when he was straight but sexy now that he's gay and wants to seduce him. And the rugby-playing Santini, who picked on Pignon when he thought he was a sissy, tries to save his own job by taking the accountant out to lunch and being nice to him--suspiciously nice, some might think.

Assignment # 4 (due on Thursday, July 27) : Taking as a point of departure the remark made by Brandon Judell in his interview of Francis Veber and by Peter Keough in his review of The Closet, please comment on “how society's perception of a man or woman can change drastically once the adjective ‘gay’ is added to their résumé ” (Judell) and on the film’s “shrewd points about issues ranging from sexual identity to sexual harassment.” (Keough)

Film 6 : The Bridge  (Un pont entre deux rives, 1999) -  Directed by Gérard Depardieu and Frédéric Auburtin.

The French have a different way of approaching affairs of the heart, at least onscreen. Forbidden love is tragic yet ennobling, and a woman's desire to escape a "suffocating" marriage isn't filtered through the moralizing lens of a Hollywood drama.

So goes "The Bridge," an engaging domestic drama that was co-directed by Gérard Depardieu, and stars the actor as the blue-collar husband of a philandering wife. Depardieu as a weak, ineffectual cuckold? Well, why not: If an actor can't cast himself against type, then who will?

It's 1962 and we're in a small provincial town where Depardieu lives with Mina (Carole Bouquet), the glamorous woman who had to marry him 15 years before when she bore his child. Clearly her husband's superior, Mina escapes the tedium of her life at the local movie house.

Temptation arrives in Matthias (Charles Berling), an urbane engineer who sits next to Mina at a "West Side Story" matinée and invites her for a drink. Caution melts into passion, and before long there's a raging affair that her son (Stanislas Crevillen) colludes in to hide it from his dad.

Matthias, also married, has come to the provinces to supervise the building of a bridge. But in keeping with the film's central metaphor, he's also erecting a bridge to freedom for the lovely, stifled Nina.

With its ultrasophisticated approach to infidelity, "The Bridge" is guaranteed to make Americans chuckle and say, "That is so French." Mina isn't made to suffer for her defection -- despite her husband's anguish -- and her teenage son, to whom she's unusually close, isn't damaged by the ordeal of covering for her.

Depardieu's direction is light-handed and sensitive, and gives the sad-eyed Bouquet a wonderful showcase for delicate, nuanced acting. The film ends on a blank, inconclusive note, but Bouquet and Berling more than justify our interest with their evocation of a fierce, inexorable love.

Other reviews

a) By Stephen Holden

'The Bridge': There's No Stoppin' Mom's Cheatin' Heart

Nobody does adultery in the movies more knowingly than the French. And although "The Bridge" doesn't contribute anything new to the literature on the subject, it glides down a well-trodden path with hardly a misstep until the very end, when it suddenly bumps into a wall. The film's message is as unsettling as it is familiar: adulterous passion, once aroused, follows its own laws, cannot be reasoned with and often can't be stopped. That's just the way of the flesh.

What's faintly offbeat about "The Bridge" is its sexual role reversal. The cheater who falls in love with a stranger encountered in a movie theater and considers chucking the family and running off happens to be the wife. When we first meet Mina (Carole Bouquet), whose unemployed older husband, Georges (Gérard Depardieu), recently lost his small masonry business, she is leaving a theater showing "Jules and Jim." The story is set in Normandy in the early 1960's, and the film's brisk pace and matter-of-fact attitude distantly echo the rhythms and attitudes of French New Wave movies from the period.

Mina and Georges, who live with their moody 15-year-old son, Tommy, in a simple cottage, are facing financial difficulties. Against her husband's wishes, Mina finds part-time work as a housekeeper in the home of well-to-do friends who live within biking distance. Georges reluctantly takes a menial job at a bridge-building site, which requires him to live in a dormitory on weekdays and commute home on weekends.

But even before Georges leaves, Mina has met Matthias (Charles Berling), a smoldering-eyed stranger who ogles her at a screening of "West Side Story" she is attending with Tommy. Afterward, they strike up a conversation, and Matthias takes the pair to a nightclub, where the romantic spark ignites while Tommy gets drunk. In the film's most original plot turn, Tommy (Stanislas Crevillen), who observes his mother falling in love and realizes exactly what's happening, becomes an increasingly resentful conspirator in her quickly developing affair.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Matthias is a frequent guest in the house where Mina works. He also turns out to be the civil engineer at Georges's bridge-building site, and eventually the two men meet.

"The Bridge," directed by Mr. Depardieu and Frédéric Auburtin, is the kind of movie whose credibility relies entirely on its psychological realism, its eye for social detail and the well-roundedness of its characters. And to its credit, the three main characters are too likable for any of them to be saddled with blame. The screenplay hints that Mina probably wouldn't have married Georges 15 years earlier had she not become pregnant. The dashing, wealthy and mysterious Matthias is the knight in shining armor she has unconsciously been waiting for all these years.

From the moment they meet, it's clear that there's no contest. Mr. Depardieu, in one of his roughneck- with-a-heart-of-gold roles, emphasizes Georges's gentleness where another actor would play up the melodrama and his latent violence. As helpless and pathetic as he becomes, Mr. Depardieu's Georges still maintains a few shreds of dignity.

Although Ms. Bouquet's Mina is a woman on a precipice, the actress drastically underplays any high drama in a performance that is light, but far from offhanded. Girlish one minute, care-worn the next, teetering between passion and loyalty, she makes the experience of being swept away almost radically unglamorous.

Unfortunately, "The Bridge," doesn't know how to end. At a certain point, it rushes forward; then almost before you can catch your breath, it simply stops.

b) By Arthur Lazere (Culturevulture.net)

Gérard Depardieu, the actor, is well served by Gérard Depardieu, the director, in The Bridge, a sophisticated and quietly surprising film about what happens in a marriage that one partner has outgrown.

Even behind the main titles, Depardieu begins addressing his theme. The camera lingers on a plain, contemporary building before pulling back to show the theater across the street, "Le Royale"-- an ordinary, nondescript building contrasted with the fantasy world of the movie palace, the place where escape from the commonplace is found. The audience is dispersing after seeing Jules et Jim, François Truffaut's brilliant 1962 film about a woman involved with two men. "Good movies make me feel good," says Mina (Carole Bouquet), who attends with her fifteen year old son, Tommy.

Depardieu is her husband, George, whose masonry business has failed, leaving him unemployed. When Mina takes a job as a domestic in a grand home, George objects. He finds it demeaning and it conflicts with what he has worked hard to build--a business, a home, a middle-class family. He then takes a laborer's job building a bridge some distance from their town; it's too far to commute so he stays in the laborer's dormitory during the week. "What's this bridge for?" he asks a tad obtusely, but connecting is not George's strong point.

At another film show, this time West Side Story, Mina finds herself crying along with a stranger in the next seat who turns out to be Matthias, a civil engineer also working on the bridge. There's chemistry between them. Mina's initial reaction is to remain faithful to her husband, to protect the status quo of her family. But when Matthias persists at a chance later meeting, she lets herself go. While it is clear that Mina and George love one another, George's limited horizons and lack of imagination have left Mina vaguely unfulfilled. Matthias, although himself married, offers both passion and the broadened horizons of upward mobility.

Step by small step the affair develops and is inevitably found out. Depardieu, credited as co-director with Frédéric Auburtin, draws performances from himself and his talented cast that catch the often unarticulated subtleties of feelings and the complications of the family relationships. Their responses to the changing situation are supported by carefully developed motivations. With a gently bittersweet tone, the film takes a nonjudgmental stance; its convincingly real people in real circumstances lend a sense of inevitability to the outcome.

The Bridge, based on a novel by Alain Leblanc, builds its effect in part by skillful observation of telling details. When Matthias and Mina make love, they acknowledge that they know nothing about one another. That they are virtually strangers to one another adds fuel to their mutual passion; the initial rush of their affair is ecstatic. And Mathias continues to court Mina, to offer her the attention that George seems now only to offer to his vegetable garden. When Mina realizes that she will have to make a choice, she escapes once more to the movies. But she can't avoid the pain that her decision will cause; while the audience laughs at the comedy, she once again sheds tears. The difference is that this time the tears are for her own circumstances, not for a fiction on the silver screen. It is painful, but she is re-engaged.

Stylistically, The Bridge, a straightforward narrative, could have been made in the early 1960's, the time in which it is placed. The skill of its storytelling, its perceptive observation and character building, and its disciplined refusal to be tainted with sentimentality add up to a thoughtful and wise film.

c)  By Dennis Schwartz  ("Ozus' World Movie Reviews")

Nobody does an adultery film quite the way the French do it. This melodrama is no exception. In this sophisticated and realistic story a married woman, Mina (Bouquet), falls in love with a married man and must decide if she wishes to leave her older husband. The co-director Gérard Depardieu is also one of the film's stars, and does a credible job in both roles.

This film is set in the small town of Yvet where Georges (Depardieu) finds himself unemployed as his small masonry business couldn't generate enough business and he is out of necessity forced to take a construction job building a bridge in the town of Tancanville, which is just far enough away so he can't commute. He stays in the workplace dorm for the week, but returns home to his wife Mina and their 15-year-old scholarly son Tommy (Crevillen) every weekend.

The film opens as Mina and Tommy come out of the movie theater, "Le Royale," after seeing Truffaut's 1962 film "Jules and Jim" about a woman in love with two men. There's nothing much to do in town, so Mina is a frequent movie-goer. Films give her a chance to escape reality, as she excitedly tells Tommy: "Good movies make me feel good." Also coming out of the theater is a wealthy woman she knows, Claire Daboval (Reymont), and her pretty teenage daughter Lisbeth (Laurent). On the spur of the moment, Claire offers Mina a job as a maid in her mansion. She takes the part-time job, which is a bike ride away from her house, even though Georges disapproves of her working. He feels it's a slap in his face.

While taking in a matinée of West Side Story, Mina sits next to a man who is crying when the song Maria is sung (a little too corny for my taste). She meets him outside the theater after the movie and finds out he's named Matthias and is an engineer on the same bridge construction as her husband. It's love at first sight for the both of them, and when Tommy comes along they all go out together to a nightclub where she gets drunk and giddy with laughter. She hasn't laughed with this intensity in a long time and when she dances with him a strange feeling of joy comes over her. Georges is a nice man, but there seems to be no magic in their relationship and she has grown weary of it. Georges is a decent man who loves her with all his heart, which makes her feel confused as this new relationship develops despite her first impulse to resist it. It is able to flourish because Matthias is a relation of the Dabovals and is staying there as a frequent guest until the bridge will be completed in three years, and by chance they meet there. Complications arise when Tommy resents what she is doing and finds himself lying to his father, which is something he can't forgive himself for doing. Tommy has to come to terms with this crisis in his parents' marriage while he's having a teenage relationship with Lisbeth that might be serious.

The film builds to its climax as Mina's passion, once opened up, can't be stopped. She has tasted a sense of freedom and can't be denied her chance to live out a more fantasy filled life. Her decision to leave the limited Georges is a painful one for him and for Tommy, as well as a suffocating one for her. It is intelligently handled, but somehow I did not find the film compelling. Perhaps it was because Georges was painted as a dull man whose strength was in his hands and in his decency, but who had no interest in fantasy. In the last scene at the gas station, a bad imitation of the scene Jacques Demy brilliantly did in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Georges and Mina meet while filling up and are going off in different directions. It now seems as if they were never meant to be together. Georges' only change is that he bought a TV and doesn't plant tomatoes anymore, while she just returned from skiing in the Alps and is living an exciting upscale life. The scene had no real feeling to it, as it felt forced. It seemed to crudely hammer out its point that adultery is a way of escaping a boring marriage, and it seemed more interested in wrapping up the film than in engaging the story with more life.

The film looks at this adultery from the view of the woman, which makes it different from the way most films are done. It takes no stand on the adultery, but what it does very well is catch the subtleties and complications that occur in a very believable way. There is a lot of hurt to go around, which makes it a bittersweet love story.

The Bridge is adapted from a book by Alain Leblanc. It relates how Mina who got pregnant 15 years ago by a man she didn't love and by chance now meets an exciting man she always dreamed about, but to do that she has to break the rules of her middle-class life and go with him. What the film best points out is the psychology of what such a tormented woman must go through to make such a decision, because it will tear her family apart and make her think of herself as a whore. The film is set in the Normandy region of the 1960s; it might not seem as relevant today, as its old-fashioned story and French New Wave flavor of the 1960s loses a lot of the psychological impact for today's viewers. What it savors, is the subtle performances of Bouquet, Depardieu, and Berling. Though, without the middle-aged Carole Bouquet's touching characterization, this would have been an impossible bridge to cross. REVIEWED ON 7/20/2001

Assignment # 5 (due on August 1): Compare and contrast Blier's Too Beautiful For You and Depardieu & Aubertin's The Bridge, taking into account the following comment by Dennis Schwartz: “The film looks at this adultery from the view of the woman, which makes it different from the way most films are done. It takes no stand on the adultery, but what it does very well is catch the subtleties and complications that occur in a very believable way. There is a lot of hurt to go around, which makes it a bittersweet love story.”
 

Film 7: The Piano Teacher (La pianiste, 2001) - A film by Michael Haneke - Based on the novel Die Klavierspielerin by Elfriede Jelinek

Addendum: An interview with Isabelle Huppert (in English)

Synopsis: Pushing 40 and unmarried, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatoire and is often hard on her pupils. She lives in a relationship of mutual dependence with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot), who wanted her to be a concert pianist; her father is dying in a mental hospital. After hours, while her mother waits for her to come home, Erika visits porno shops and cruises a drive-in cinema to spy on couples having sex in their cars; alone in her bathroom, she mutilates her genitals with a razor blade.

Pushing 30, pianist and ice-hockey enthusiast Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) sets his heart on Erika after seeing her play at a private salon. Despite her hostility, he is accepted as a student in the Conservatoire. When Erika runs to the toilet after maiming the hands of hated pupil Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch) by concealing broken glass in her coat pocket, Walter follows her and comes close to raping her. Asserting control, Erika says that they can have a relationship if he obeys the instructions she will give him in a letter.

Soon after, Walter follows Erika home and barges into her bedroom. Erika forces him to read her letter, which contains a list of extreme masochistic demands, and Walter leaves in disgust. Erika tries to apologise by throwing herself at him after an ice-hockey game; he insults and abuses her. He turns up at her flat, locks her mother in the bedroom and batters and rapes Erika. Next day Erika takes a kitchen knife to a concert by Conservatoire students (where she is to stand in for Anna). After seeing Walter with friends, she stabs herself in one shoulder and, unnoticed, leaves.

Filn Reviews:

a) By Tony Rayn, Sight & Sound

Elfriede Jelinek's grimly brilliant novel Die Klavierspielerin was published in 1983, long before Jörg Haider's rise in Austrian politics. Narrated in short, urgent sentences in the present tense, the book explores the neuroses of a deeply repressed middle-aged woman on a fast ride to self-destruction. Explores, but declines to explain. According to Michael Haneke, it was precisely the absence of psychological justification that drew him to the book.

Many of the specifics of protagonist Erika Kohut's plight (the specialisation in Schubert and Schumann, the cruel treatment of pupils, the invasion of the men-only porno subculture, the inculcated lack of self-esteem, the underlying need to be wounded) suggest the book should be read as feminist: it's an extremist vision of what it means to lack social, sexual and cultural power. But by making the character a Conservatoire teacher and relating her agony to her feelings for great composers, Jelinek broadens her attack to Austria itself. Using the structures of the 'high culture' industry as a cipher for the state, the novel sees Kohut's masochism as the product of a clearly fascistic system.

Haneke has filmed the text with near-total fidelity, streamlining the sequence of events here, transposing a location there. (The scene in which Kohut urinates in excitement while spying on a copulating couple has been moved from the Prater park to a drive-in cinema, for no obvious reason.) The director prides himself on his objectivity, and so it's a little surprising that some of his aesthetic choices point towards editorial comment. The interpolated top-shots of male hands on the piano keyboard (first in the credits sequence, then later when Kohut delivers her letter of sexual demands to an admirer) insist portentously on a metaphorical dimension. And the audio overlaps of classical music at the beginning and end of Kohut's first visit to the sex shop work too hard to link culture and pornography - unless, of course, they're just reaching for a facile irony. Mostly, though, Haneke is happy to maintain his usual studiously neutral stylistic equanimity in the face of all the bourgeois horror.

To make such an ultra-faithful adaptation of the book in 2001 implies an intention to skewer Haider's Austria, but the film has almost none of the impact of Jelinek's novel - largely because it stars Isabelle Huppert. This is no reflection on Huppert's thespian talents; her aptitude for playing defeated women in Euro art movies has not been in doubt since The Lacemaker (1977), and here she certainly manages to get inside Kohut's self-destructive neuroses, even if her put-downs of hapless pupils have something of the Anne Robinson about them. But her presence makes it impossible to suspend disbelief: it turns what should be a harrowing journey to the end of the night into a parade of perversities which seems increasingly gratuitous and absurd, like some chilly, intellectual rethink of a Ken Russell biopic. To watch Huppert slice her (unseen) labia with a razor blade, sniff used tissues from the bin in a porno-video booth and perform fellatio interruptus in a public toilet has less to do with understanding Kohut than it does with being invited to applaud an actress for her 'daring'. (The performance was duly rewarded by a Cannes jury, itself heavy with 'great actresses'.)

Set in a Vienna where everyone speaks French, this is as much a quintessential Euro art movie as the average Hollywood movie is a commercial entertainment - which perhaps explains why it's too 'nasty' in exactly the same way as, say, Almost Famous is too 'nice'. The conspicuously humourless Haneke started working with stars only in Code Unknown, one film ago, and hasn't yet found a credible way to reconcile his determinedly dark-side view of humanity with his new-found need to attract the mass arthouse audience. He scores in the pairing of Huppert with Annie Girardot as her monstrous mother (their early scenes together sketch a frighteningly plausible symbiotic relationship), but cannot solve the script problem which requires her admirer Klemmer to turn from a promising Schoenberg virtuoso into a woman-battering rapist virtually overnight. And he's defeated by the challenge of making the broken glass/hand-maiming incident convincing physically, never mind psychologically. Overall, the film misses the brilliance of Jelinek's novel by some way. It settles for being merely grim. (November 2001 issue of  Sight & Sound).

b) By Stephen Holden, NYT Film Review

"Kinky and Cruel Goings-On in the Conservatory"

Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel are a tortured couple in "The Piano Teacher."

Stiff-backed and unsmiling, her dark eyes as opaque as cough drops, the French actress Isabelle Huppert gives one of her greatest screen performances as Erika Kohut, a haughty, sexually repressed priestess of high culture in Michael Haneke's powerfully disquieting film, "The Piano Teacher."

The largely unsympathetic role of an imperious music instructor who gives master classes at a Viennese conservatory won Ms. Huppert a best-actress award at last year's Cannes International Film Festival, and it requires her to plunge into dangerous territory that only the most courageous actors would dare to inhabit.

This is not the first time Ms. Huppert, an icon of Gallic severity and self-containment, has portrayed an imperious woman flashing furious messages from behind a forbidding mask. She has relayed similar signals in Olivier Assayas's "Destinées," Benoît Jacquot's "School of Flesh" and Claude Chabrol's "Ceremony," to name only three relatively recent films.

The biggest difference between this role and the others is her character's extreme sexual kinkiness. Erika is a compulsive voyeur who frequents pornographic bookstores and prowls drive-in movies to spy on couples having sex in cars. At home, behind closed bathroom doors, she practices genital self-mutilation while her bossy, meddlesome mother (Annie Girardot), with whom she lives, prepares dinner.

That mother-daughter relationship is embattled, suffocating and incestuous in all but deed. The women sleep side by side on twin beds pushed together, and during their frequent squabbles, they slap each other's faces. In an unsettling subplot of "The Piano Teacher," Erika sadistically torments a female student who also has a domineering mother.

The floodgates open when Erika unexpectedly finds herself ardently pursued by a handsome, worshipful younger student, Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), who idolizes her musicianship and imagines he is in love. But when he declares his passion in the conservatory's bathroom, Erika refuses to have sex. The two embark on an erotic journey to which Erika, in her infinite perversity, applies the same perfectionist standards she brings to her teaching of Schubert. That composer's dynamics, she asserts, range (like her own temperament) from "scream to whisper, not loud to soft."

Brought to the chaotic realm of sexuality, the rigid rules that help forge a great musician seem ludicrous. Erika is unable to give herself to Walter in any conventional fashion, and her adamant refusal to play the game of love in any ordinary way infuriates and disgusts him. Yet he remains infatuated (or maybe just curious) enough to keep playing along. Erika insists Walter study and follow to the letter a long and detailed set of instructions in which he is to subject her to bondage, pain and humiliation. Ideally, these rituals should be acted out in a situation where her mother overhears, but is powerless to intervene.

In the film's ugly, climactic scene, Erika's wishes are granted. But her experience is far different from what she had imagined, and the scene graphically illustrates the difference between ritualized sadomasochism and violent anger.

Since he began directing films in the late 1980's, Mr. Haneke, also a well-regarded German playwright, has shown himself to be a rigorous moral theorist obsessed with the voyeuristic aspect of movies and the dehumanizing effects of television. He has a streak of sadism himself. Watching "The Piano Teacher," adapted from Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 novel, you can sense the relish with which he punishes the audience for its prurient anticipation.

Far from being a titillating sex show, "The Piano Teacher" has the feel of a clinical case study elevated into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse. Visually, Mr. Haneke is a cool, meticulous formalist who favors elegant shots in which the camera remains stationary. The icy authority with which the film manipulates our expectations recalls his notorious 1997 film, "Funny Games," a hair-raising, almost unwatchable essay on screen violence that follows a pair of killers who invade a couple's comfortable vacation home and methodically torture and kill them and their child. The cruel joke of "Funny Games" is that the actual violence all takes place off screen.

More recently, in "Code Unknown," he investigated the role of spectator, placing the viewer in the excruciatingly uncomfortable shoes of people confronting violence and injustice in public situations where it would be easy for them not to intervene.

When Erika gets what she thought she wanted and emerges emotionally as well as physically battered, you sense the director thumbing his nose and asking us the same question the movie poses to Erika: "Is this really what you wanted?" In our case, it is a vicarious kinky thrill. The major weakness of the movie is that the day-by-day emotional choreography of Erika's and Walter's tango doesn't track, mostly because Walter's changes of heart are too abrupt and seem determined by the plot rather than driven by character.

But the issue of voyeurism is only one layer of this film, which is also a glum, post-Freudian meditation on sex, power, repression and Western high culture and the relationship between high art and sexuality.

As you listen to Erika's brilliant, mathematical, note-by-note analysis of a piece of music's emotional component, she displays the impassioned insight of an artistic genius. She approvingly describes a Schumann piece as embodying the loss of reason. And there you have the film's underlying conundrum. Erika is so immersed in the world of art that she imagines that the transcendent paradox of great Romantic music — it maintains a magisterial control even while losing its mind — applies to life as well as art. The saddest message of this almost-great film may be that art and life are not the same and should not be confused. © NYT, March 29, 2002

c)  by J. Hoberman

Shot in the Heart; Panic Room

The Piano Teacher's study in lurid sexual pathology occasions a tour de force by Isabelle Huppert as the title character—a four-alarm lunatic with a heart consecrated to Schubert (1797-1828) and a head churning up fantasies to make Leopold Sacher-Masoch blush. There's hardly another actress in movies who could inhabit this Viennese specimen without seeming ludicrous—and there may not be another who would care to.

Smoothly oscillating between the imperious and the abject, dampening her eyes or clouding her vision at will, the preternaturally poised Huppert combines an animal absence of expression with the sudden spasms of a feverish inner life. Of course, it is a calculated performance (one awarded a prize at the last Cannes Film Festival). Michael Haneke, who orchestrates Elfriede Jelinek's supple, sardonic novel with his usual heavy hand, keeps Huppert on-screen for virtually the movie's entire 140 minutes, as well he might.

Most simply put, The Piano Teacher is the tale of a former musical prodigy and her monstrously controlling mother. The women are locked in a relationship so symbiotic that they share the same bed and so oppressive that the fortyish daughter, Professor Erika Kohut, punishes her unruly desires even more severely than she governs her students. The movie is a series of violent shocks, typically administered in confined spaces. Returning home late from lessons, the piano teacher opens the door to confront, yet again, her domineering mother (Annie Girardot, tough and leathery, with a sharp insinuating croak). Erika's purchase of a new dress precipitates a row—not unevocative of Anthony Perkins's quarrels with himself in Psycho—that soon escalates into hair-pulling warfare.

One more gloss on Civilization and Its Discontents, The Piano Teacher parodies the idea of classical music as the ultimate cultural expression—the application of intelligence, technique, and discipline to the sublimation of passion. The cool appraisal with which Erika reduces her pupils to tears is suggestive of the movie's own brisk, opaque surface—until the ice is pulverized by a giddy jolt of hardcore porn that no amount of Schubert can completely assuage. Such is the piano teacher's inner life. Erika not only frequents sordid peep shows (protected in a raincoat and fastidiously wearing gloves) but ecstatically buries her face in the used tissues she finds there. Then she returns home, locks herself in the toilet, and while mother puts dinner on the table, delicately applies a razor blade to the flesh between her naked thighs. Erika's "hobby," as Jelinek drily puts it, "is cutting her own body."

Haneke specializes in modernist, cerebral horror films, but The Piano Teacher's French cast (in Viennese locations) produces an odd linguistic disjunction—softening the authoritarian ambience that would have inevitably attached itself to a German-language version. The movie is not as punitive as Haneke's Benny's Video or Funny Games. Nor is it as restrained as his masochistically faithful adaptation of Kafka's The Castle. Where Jelinek's backloaded novel maps a force field of sexual repression, Haneke rationalizes its flow, proceeding from one outrageous set piece to the next. Ultimately he reaches the point of diminished returns, most spectacularly when too strenuously promoting the Melanie Klein nightmare of overstimulated Erika's attempt to merge with the maternal body. (Hilariously, Mom attributes this behavior to Erika's pre-performance jitters.)

In part because Huppert is too demanding an actress to ever appear lost (the only compulsion she can truly dramatize is precisely the compulsion to dramatize), her Erika is far sterner and less vulnerable than Jelinek's poignant monster. In the novel, Erika is pleasurably confused by the fatal attentions of a bumbling young seducer. The movie Erika is a more formidably chic creature whose complex of bizarre symptoms is a dragon to be slain by her forward student, Walter (handsome Benoît Magimel). Walter's admiration has unforeseen effects, but as Erika grows increasingly psychotic, he is correspondingly emboldened. Their first tryst, in a concert-hall women's room, immediately after Erika has punished her most talented student by—well, you'll see—is an explosion of pent-up eros. The scene, which feels like a single take, is a triumph for the filmmaker—the sequence in which his drive to control most closely approaches that of his protagonist.

After directing ardent Walter through the proceedings (and thoroughly frustrating his desire), the newly awakened Erika assures him that he will receive her subsequent "instructions." This weighty missive, which Walter reads only after following Erika home and helping to barricade her bedroom door against Mother, goes on for pages—a score worthy of the Marquis de Sade and equally unplayable. Like de Sade, Erika is writing from within her prison walls; unlike the marquis, she's cloaking her desire in an additional hair shirt of shame.

Haneke's fortissimo method overwhelms much of Jelinek's feminist critique. (It's no coincidence that the novelist was singled out by Jörg Haider's Freedom Party as a maker of "degenerate art.") Nothing in the movie can match the subtlety of Huppert's hopeful anticipation as her putative lover reads the disgusting letter aloud. Given the movie's literary antecedents, it's fitting that its greatest transgression would be the articulation of a written scenario.

d) by Harvey Karten

Sex and violence have been the two major themes of mythology, theater, literature and later movies even before Aeschylus described the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra for the former's dalliance with a clairvoyant. Murder is obviously a perverse way of dealing with feelings of envy and vindictiveness, but what causes some people to resort to perverse forms of sexual expression, spefically sadism and masochism? Michael Haneke, who directed "The Piano Teacher," is a filmmaker, not a psychologist, and he doesn't even try to give us the whole answer in this painful and absorbing tale of a woman obsessed with s&m. In fact at times you get the impression that he's thumbing his nose at American- style melodramas, which try to motivate every action and provide neat solutions at the conclusion to make the audience feel a sense of closure. But he does open for us a window on the perversion and could not have chosen a better person to portray a person approaching the borders of insanity than Isabelle Huppert. Not even the American actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who regularly plays bitter and cynical women, has Ms. Huppert's emotional range.

While "The Piano Teacher" uses two extraordinary French performers, Ms. Huppert and Annie Girardot, the story under the direction of the Munich-born Haneke and based on Elfriede Jelinkek's novel of two decades ago--takes place in and around a conservatory in Vienna. The title character, Professor Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), is in her early forties, and is a demanding and highly respected keyboard teacher, but she is frustrated. Her mother (Annie Girardot) with whom she is not only still living but sharing a bedroom as well, is overprotective, all over her daughter in fact, and has made Erika feel her disappointment about her daughter's being less than a concert pianist. Erika feels no compunction in barking at her students for allegedly lacking feeling for the music of Schubert, Schumann, Bach and Beethoven, even causing young Anna (Anna Sigalevitch) to burst into tears. When she hears the young and handsome Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel) play, perverse feelings of both domination and submission tear loose. Taking advantage of the young man's infatuation with her, she begins to play the most disturbing sexual games with him, diversions which drive Walter up the wall with frustration and cause Erika to project her own distaste for sex in disgusting physical ways.

Haneke takes his time to develop Erika's character and in doing so treats us to some delightful segments of music from Bach to Rachmaninov, music not heard to such an extent since films like Milos Forman's "Amadeus" and which could make some in the audience who have seen Geoffrey Rush perform in "Shine" consider that there is a relationship between creativity and mental imbalance. I don't believe that Haneke or Jelinek want to imply as much, nor are they giving us clues to why a woman in her forties who is a successful and admired teacher is so emotionally dependent on her bitchy mother. One thing's for sure: Haneke is going to lose some in the audience who have weak stomachs because this is no escapist lark about mentally disabled people such as "I Am Sam" or "Rain Man," but a gripping (if occasionally repetitive) drama about a woman whose repressed sexuality explodes in a flurry of brutal behavior toward others and a consequent turning in of hostility on herself. (film critic@computerserve.com)

e) by Dennis Schwartz

German-born director/writer Michael Haneke (The Castle/Funny Games/Code Unknown) sets his provocative study of 'madness without mercy' in Vienna, as the dialogue is in French and the principle actors are all French. The film is adapted from the ironical 1983 novel of some repute, "Die Klavierspielerin," by Elfriede Jelinek (the author like the film's protagonist had a father who died in a mental asylum), and is accomplished with the director's usual shock techniques and heavy mannerisms. This makes his film a safe bet not to be played at your local Multiplex. He keeps Isabelle Huppert on-screen for almost the entire film, as she offers a daring performance that is amazingly close to the edge but always seems credible. There's lots of close ups of her looking intense but at the same time her freckled face seems to have no visible emotions, though she sometimes twitches from inner pain and sometimes looks bemused at her cravings for sadomasochism--her look is always odd and unforgettable. She is one of only a few modern actresses who could have pulled such a demanding role off without falling on her kisser and being laughed off the set because of how ludicrous her character's behavior was. She's actually quite good here, playing it for all the fervor she can gather in one cold emotional tone and never leaving the probably stunned viewer bored for a moment at seeing her neuroses hang out in the open and her tragic humiliating situations develop in such a calculated manner.

"The Piano Teacher" won three awards at Cannes 2001 (best actress-Huppert, actor- Benoît Magimel, and film). Among the laundry list of things played out in "The Piano Teacher" are: sexual repression, madness, loneliness, career jealousy, depression, obsessive behavior, and kinky sex.

Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert ) is a smug and severe 40-ish professor at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory, who still not only lives at home with her overbearing mother (Annie Girardot) in a symbiotic love-hate relationship but sleeps in the same twin bed. At work she's respected as a strict piano teacher, whose love for both Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann remains unquestioned.

When Erika isn't berating one of her piano students and bringing them to near tears or slapping her mom over a dress she bought that her mom thinks is a foolish expense, she usually likes to spend time parading around in porn shops dressed in a raincoat (I thought only cartoonish lowlife guys wore those raincoats to see porn). At one peep show, she sniffs the previous voyeurs' used tissue covered with semen. At a drive-in she urinates while spying by the car window of a couple making love. At home in her bathtub, she puts a razor to her genitals in an act of self-mutilation as mom prepares dinner. The film stays clear of pyschological explanations for her behavior, but it might be that the filmmaker wants to show that she's going mad and realizes it but still can't prevent it.

Her bitter mother wanted her musical prodigy daughter to be a concert pianist and rails at her every opportunity she gets in the disappointment that she's only a professor; also, the father she never mentions is dying in a mental hospital. The piano teacher emulates her stifled home relationship with her bullied pupils. Yet she's clever and knowledgeable enough to tell one pupil that it is better to miss one note than to render a bad interpretation of the composer's work.

Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) is probably in his late twenties and has decided to switch at this late age from his engineer studies to study piano under Erika. He's confident, handsome, appealing and multi-talented. Besides his gift for the keyboards, he's an ice-hockey enthusiast. Walter ignores the suggestive stares of some attractive female students who are close to his age and sets his sights only on Erika, after seeing her play a Bach piece at his aunt's (Kondgen) private salon. Despite her hostility toward him, he is accepted as a student in the Conservatory and is assigned to work with her.

Erika retreats to the toilet after breaking a bottle and concealing the glass in the coat pocket of a student she thinks little of, Anna Schober (Anna Sigalevitch), who is performing at a school rehearsal. This results in the unfortunate maiming of her hand, and forces her to cancel playing in a school concert. It might be of interest to note that Schubert's roommate when he left home was a music student named Schober. It also might be interesting to speculate as to why Erika took out her hatred on the poor girl, someone whom she shows no outward sympathy for even though the girl also has a domineering mom to contend with. The best spin to put on it, is that she recognizes the girl isn't fit to be a concert pianist and is being brutalized by her overbearing mother who insists she perform, anyway. But even if she did it for that reason, isn't there a better way to help the girl? In any case, after that incident it is hard to have any sympathy for her.

After the maiming incident, Walter follows her into the Conservatory toilet and comes onto her sexually. Erika keeps control by ordering him to do only certain things to her and threatens to leave if he doesn't obey, as she tries to jerk him off as he cries out for intercourse. She intimates that they can have a relationship that will satisfy both, but only on her terms and if he completely obeys the instructions she will give him in a letter.

The utterly kinky relationship that suddenly develops from this incident loses me in disbelief and the film begins to unravel after a marvelous atmospheric look at the concert milieu, where every character flaw Erika shows seemed real and possible. It seems incredible that this regular guy would have a streak of pathos in him the equal of hers, and continue to love her after she reveals she's not the person he fell for. This sudden change of character in him never convinced me. To believe he would still be curious about this much older woman who was now shown to be severely mentally troubled, would be possible only if they were cut from the same cloth. That seemed unlikely, as the film went on and on trying desperately to convince us that was so. What it convinced me, was the story now turned out to be about a power fight over who had control. This relationship was similar to the one she had with mom and her pupils, the only difference was that I didn't see Walter having a reason to play this game.

Haneke is almost completely devoid of humor, as this grim tale is only enlivened by the stupendous music it surrounds itself with---the music scenes were stunningly beautiful and the musical atmosphere created was sparked with excitement. The film's one humorous moment comes when the TV that is usually on in her mother's drab household is playing a program about cowboys in North America. Yeah, that's the kind of program that would entrance this austere Austrian lady who has no life and feelings for anyone (it was subversive humor meant to call attention to the dehumanizing influences of television)!

To get at the root psychology of this film would require many sessions on the couch of Dr. Freud. Despite its lapses into the never, never land of madness through a series of violent outbursts (one in such a vulgar place as a ice hockey rink as a contrast to the high-brow Conservatory) -- Erika finally gets the beating and sex she wants but never had in her mother's apartment with mom present and emerges physically and emotionally battered. She's now ready for the insane asylum. The filmmaker seems to be asking, do we really want what we are asking for? Will it be what we expected? There seemed to be no soft landing in sight and thankfully no hope for a conventional Hollywood ending.

Haneke's film both disappointed and pleased. It disappointed in the coldly clinical and academic way it presented the sick woman's tale, as if it was doing a case study of a mentally ill person; but, it resounded in triumph at its ability to shock the senses and make you think rather than be told what you saw. I 'think' I saw a radical film that says art cannot be safe or else it is not art (as the film parodies the secure classical musical world for its snobby belief that it holds all the answers in high culture). It also says that madness is the ultimate price the seeker of art might be asked to pay, and the seeker has no choice once he or she goes so far but to keep going. Erika's exploratory but unexplained story is told from behind the walls of her apartment, which has been turned into an asylum without any possible escape. It's a place where porn and Schubert fuse together and one cannot beat out the other in her twisted mind, as she plays the piano by the rules she wholly believes but is nevertheless on the road to self-destruction. She will in the end stab herself near the heart for some kind of perverted martyrdom to prove her love of music. Why she can't relate to people but by some set of rules, is just one of her many problems. But it is this problem that leads her on to a point where she loses track of where art and life take separate roads, and she's left only with madness. Her music rules can't help her in real life, as they also couldn't help either Schubert or Schumann.  (REVIEWED ON 7/18/2001 - GRADE: B) "

The Piano Teacher

Michael Haneke's La pianiste (The Piano Teacher) became something of a cause célèbre earlier in the year when Susan Sontag, in her column for Artforum, placed the film among her Ten Best for 2001, and openly questioned the New York Film Festival's decision to snub the film despite its having won the Best Actor, Best Actress, and Grand Prix awards at Cannes.  While there's something to the argument that the work of a major filmmaker like Haneke (who tends in general to be better received in European critical circles than here) ought to have its exposure at the NYFF and that audiences be allowed the opportunity to debate themselves over the merits of the film, it's also not hard to see, on the evidence of La pianiste, why Haneke has not been a regular presence at the festival and the reasons for which a number of critics (the present writer included) still find dubious the claim that he is among the top flight of filmmakers working in world cinema today.

A glum diagnostician of social malaise, Haneke built his reputation over the last decade on a number of serious if rather generalized critiques of contemporary European upper middle-class existence.  Films like The Seventh Continent, Funny Games, and Code Inconnu present themselves as clinical, grotesque studies of the dehumanizing effects of affluence, material well-being, and class-bound insularity and complacence, often focused on the causes of and socially-conditioned responses to violence.  The seriousness (some might say "importance") of Haneke's project and the chilliness of his rigorously-controlled filmmaking command attention, but the inclination to avoid any form of observation but instead work from the top down with grand statements that are illustrated with abstracted characters and conceptualized contrivances results in works that, thanks also in part to Haneke's straight-faced solemnity, feel calculated, predictable, and not a little airless.

In one significant respect, La pianiste  differs from these earlier works: Isabelle Huppert's involvement provides the first genuine star-turn in a Haneke movie (the presence of the now seemingly unavoidably iconographic Juliette Binoche in Code Inconnu only gave Haneke further opportunities to reduce his characters to mere ciphers), and it is Huppert's triumph that her character comes across as recognizably human.  Her performance invests the many scenes of humiliation and desperation in La pianiste with a pathos that has hitherto eluded Haneke and his brand of knee-jerk subversive, shock tactics filmmaking.  But Huppert aside (and despite the fact that the film is adapted from a novel), we're still very much deep in Haneke territory.  The caricatured use of classical music and its perceived world of perfection, order, civility, and endless practice as a metaphor for social and sexual discipline is quintessential Haneke, and close to self-parody.  The script might drop references to Adorno and Schubert, but the high concept of Haneke's conceit and his inability to create a convincing milieu for his characters means that the film ends up rehearsing and trading in the same clichés about classical music as such less interesting and mediocre movies as Madame Sousatzka or Shine - the same overbearing parents, the same episodes of stage fright and nervous jitters, the same laughable, mock-insider gibberish parading as musical insight ("In Beethoven, it's better to hit a wrong note than a wrong interpretation.")

Amusingly, the film's thesis of socially-conditioned emotions and sexual impulses occasions a field-day for Haneke to illustrate for dummies basic Freudian and Foucauldian notions of corporeal control and regulation.  Aside from the central, S&M antics, he inserts such piquant details as a pianist in tears who, reeling from a brutal audition session, sniffs a large blob of snot back into her nose.  Another episode finds Haneke making clear to the audience the annoyance of Huppert's fastidious, anal Erika when her student, tearful and distressed, complains of diarrhea.  If nothing else, Haneke manages the near-impossible feat of beating Tsai Ming-Liang in the bodily fluids sweepstakes: his own control-freak obsession with the idea means that La pianiste is overflowing with blood, semen, urine, vomit, and tears, alternately withheld and released in a cycle of repression and transgression.

I saw La pianiste with a typically ironic New York crowd who laughed through half the film, and it's hard to deny anyone's mirth when it comes to Erika's overbearing mother, a risible invention few can take seriously besides Erika and Haneke.  But Huppert's at once tightly wound, pathetic, vulnerable, assertive, poignantly mad Erika is a formidable creature to behold, and it would be unfair to deny Haneke's craft in deftly staging a number of the key scenes in breathtaking, unostentatious long-takes (the near-absolute confinement of any graphic sexuality to off-screen space is a cerebral maneuver typical of Haneke; that it doesn't come across as ham-fistedly obvious as similar attempts in, say, Funny Games at a self-consciously moralistic style is tribute once again to the intensity of Huppert's performance).

Does Haneke belong in the company of those other high-profile, recent NYFF casualties, Béla Tarr and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose Werckmeister Harmonies and Millennium Mambo respectively were denied the opportunity to make their U.S. bows at the prestigious festival?  I'm still not convinced that Haneke is anywhere near as great a filmmaker as Hou, but La pianiste  does represent an attempt at departure, away from the cardboard cutouts of his more schematic and deliberate films to something more human and three-dimensional, and the achievement suggests that someday, perhaps, he might come close.  For the sake of Haneke, and the contemporary European mindscape he clearly cares so much about, we keep our fingers crossed.   © 2002 by Derek Lam

Encore on The Piano Teacher

About Elfriede Jelinek (Austria b. 1946)

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2004 "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power".

Follows part of an interview with Elfriede Jelinek after the announcement of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, October 7, 2004. Reporter was Anders Lindqvist, SVT, the Swedish public service broadcaster. Translated from Swedish/German.

 Elfriede Jelinek is an amiable but frail person who lives in seclusion. She has more or less withdrawn from public appearances and will not be coming to Stockholm to personally accept the Prize.

?I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people. I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead.

She had a difficult childhood, both her parents were ill, and for sometime now she has been critical of Austrian society.

 The government has once again made the right socially acceptable. That was when I finally parted ways with Austria. I forbade them to perform my plays in the state theaters, and I took all of them back because it does not give anything.

She is no longer a Marxist but definitely describes herself as a left-wing feminist.

I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist. The system that judges the worth of women, the system that judges a woman's worth through her youthful body and looks and not for what she does. Men are defined through what they do, women through their looks.

She is both a dramatist and prose writer, but above all a writer who experiments and breaks borders. [..] ...© the Swedish public service broadcaster, 2004

Critique d’Écran noir: Justify my love

"Ce désir de prendre des coups, je l'ai depuis des années..."  = For years I've been wanting to be hit ...

Haneke semble, par définition, apprécier la controverse, banalisant la violence ou exorcisant le malaise de nos sociétés. Cliniquement. Cela a donné le perturbateur Funny Gammes ou le plus consensuel Code Inconnu. La Pianiste est un croisement des deux, faisant le grand écart entre la vie apparente d'une professeur de piano, très académique, et ses démons intérieurs, beaucoup plus sordides. Le contraste est parfois trop simpliste (les beaux appartements contre la ville moderne), mais Haneke mène le spectateur là où il le désire : un choc final; un état de choc qui glace le temps d'arriver au générique.

Il prend son temps pour en arriver là - étirant son film par quelques longueurs. Il dépeint une relation bizarre entre une mère ultra possessive et sa progéniture, une vieille fille aux fantasmes inavouables, sèche comme le bois du piano. Girardot ravagée est magnifique, et Huppert géniale. Les deux femmes partagent la même chambre, la même folie, un amour dévorant, et des peurs semblables. Le père est bien mort à l'Asile...

Les deux femmes ne sont pas seulement détraquées, elles sont démodées. Les touches du piano, leurs mélodies, ne font qu'accentuer ce lien avec une période révolue, un Vienne oublié. En revanche, sous la laque et au delà des sonates, se terrent une sexualité forcément déviée : SM, fétichiste, voyeuriste. Huppert renifle un kleenex plein de sperme laissé par un masturbateur inconnu dans une cabine où elle visionne un film X. Elle pisse à côté d'un couple baisant dans une voiture, parquée dans un drive-in. Et caetera. Jusqu'à simuler les règles en se coupant la chair avec une lame de rasoir. La dominatrice n'est en fait qu'une soumise schyzophrène, confodant les sentiments, luttant entre ses pulsions et la raison. C'est finement observé., intelligemment joué, jamais jugé. Et surtout ça n'est pas à mettre devant tous les regards. L'actrice chabrolienne joue une variation sadique sur le même thème que Merci Pour le Chocolat.

Haneke n'a pas de pudeur. Les scènes de cul montrent peu mais il y introduit quand même une fellation explicite, et une masturbation un peu douloureuse, tout en nous épargnant la chair du couple Magimel/Huppert. L'acteur - heureusement l'un des plus cinégéniques du cinéma frenchy - est éblouissant de candeur et d'incompréhensivité. Malgré un personnage mal construit, parfois incohérent dans son évolution psychologique, il irradie et apporte la détermination et la virilité nécessaire pour bousculer Huppert. Ce jeu d'attirance et de rejet sera fatal et sanglant. Quand elle lui ouvre finalement son coeur (et son corps), il la repousse de dégoût car elle le répugne. C'est lui qui désormais la domine. Mais en la trahissant, en écrasant ses secrets avec leurs révélations (physiques), il la blesse définitivement. La destruction est d'abord mentale, atroce, puis cela se conclura avec un coeur béant, saignant.

Ames prudes s'abstenir. Haneke aurait pu contourner certaines lenteurs, oublier quelques répétitions musicales, éviter certains écueils scénaristiques. Mais il atteint son objectif en réalisant avec justesse un malaise profond qui peut atteindre les esprits les plus intelligents. Il y a de la décadence dans son analyse chirurgicale et freudienne de notre société.   Vincy-

or in translation

Haneke does not have any shame. The sex scenes do not show much except for an explicit act of fellatio and some rather painful masturbation, while saving us from putting on display the flesh of the couple Magimel/ Huppert. Magimel,  fortunately one of the most cinegenic of the French cinema, is dazzling with candor and incomprehensibility. In spite of an ill-constructed, at times incoherent character in terms of his psychological evolution, he irradiates and demonstrates the manliness and determination necessary to crush Huppert. This game of attraction and rejection will be both fatal and bloody. When Erika finally opens her heart (and her body) to Walter, he pushes her away with disgust because she has now become repulsive to him. It is he who, from that moment on, dominates her. However by betraying her, destroying her inner secrets with their (physical) revelations, he wounds her definitively. The destruction, which is at first cerebral and atrocious, ends with Erika’s bleeding and gaping heart.

Not for the prudes. Haneke could have avoided some slow scenes, forgotten some musical repetitions, avoided some pitfalls of the scenario.  However he is able to reach his goal, accurately depicting a deep and profound malaise that can affect the most gifted minds. There is indeed decadency in his dissected and Freudian analysis of our society.

Assignment # 6 (due on Thursday, August 3: Your personal reaction to the film based on the above comments [my translation] from L’Écran noir focusing on what the film critic termed the filmmaker’s depiction of a deep and profound malaise that can affect the most gifted minds.
 

Film 8 : My Life in Pink (Ma vie en rose, 1997) - A film by Alain Berliner

Ludovic is a seven-year-old boy who dresses, acts like and is convinced he's a girl, and wants to marry his next door neighbor and best friend Jerome--who also happens to be the son of his father's boss. For Ludovic, nothing is more natural than to change his gender, and he truly believes a miracle will happen. But as the innocent Ludovic tries to set things right, he must deal with the gay phobias, fears and prejudices of the adult world. With a wonderful, self-possessed performance by 11-year-old Georges du Fresne. Winner of The Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. "Deft and wildly colorful" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).

Review by Alan A. Stone - Seeing Pink

A film with no romance, no aliens, and no famous stars provides a new understanding of human sexuality.

Ma Vie en Rose  is, to my knowledge, the first cinematic exploration of gender identity in young children. It is about Ludovic, a seven year old French boy who is convinced he is meant to be a girl. The Belgian-born director, Alain Berliner, was present to introduce the film at its Boston Film Festival premiere. He modestly informed us that this was his first full-length feature, as it was for all of the other principals on the production side. And then, with a sense of moral urgency unusual in filmmakers, he said that he had concluded that a film like this needed to be made. Many in Hollywood might share his sentiments, but it is unlikely that such a film could have been made in our bottom-line America.

Producer Carole Scotta selected the story (by Chris Vander Stappens) and chose Berliner to direct it because she saw "son audace et sa poésie" as indispensable for realizing the story's fragile nature. By film industry standards, Scotta's audacity in producing the film is even more impressive. Ma Vie en Rose  has no action, no violence, no romance, no aliens, no natural disasters--not even a recognizable star. It is certainly no comedy and, though it is a film about children, many conventional parents will not want their children to see it. In sum, it has no targeted audience. Yet in a world that genuinely prized and did not just tolerate difference, this film would have been made by Disney. It marks a new, truthful departure in cinematic understanding of difference in human sexuality and gender identity in children.

Gay and lesbian themes are now commonplace in films and audiences seem to take them in stride. It is difficult to know what to make of this. Are we now more tolerant, more empathic, more able to respond emotionally to the gay and lesbian erotic? Or is it, as I believe, that audiences--though more tolerant--have also become as inured to these images as they have to violence? Film has the capacity to deepen and purify the emotions or deaden the sensibilities. The outcome depends on both the filmmaker and his audience. Gay issues pose problems for both.

Edouard Molinaro's La Cage aux Folles  was the first big box-office film in which an enduring homosexual relationship was presented as neither tragic nor sordid. When it was made in the 1970s, homosexuality, not homophobia, was still thought to be the sickness. Straight men, even if not homophobic, still kept their anxious distance from queer love. Through a combination of wit, humor, and French sexual sophistication, La Cage aux Folles, based on a play by Poiret, helped overcome these fixed emotional reactions. The film's homosexual couple are faced with a standard bourgeois domestic predicament--the initial visit of the prospective in-laws. One of the gay partners has a son, the result of a heterosexual fling in his youth. Now grown up, the son is about to get married and his fiance's conventional parents want to look over his family. The art of this storyline is that it allows the conventional audience to identify with the gay couple as they worry about how the conventional in-laws (the audience in fact) will react to them. And the gay couple are so stereotypical in their gender roles (one sensible, the other hysterical) that the audience can see them through the prism of the traditional middle class family. La Cage aux Folles  was nominated for the Academy Award as best foreign film in 1978. It did not win, but it earned so much money that Molinaro made a sequel, La Cage aux Folles II, and of course it spun off the Broadway musical. Although it was a farcical situation comedy, La Cage aux Folles was a step forward in human tolerance and reconciliation. The film made it possible for audiences to welcome the "gay couple" into the family of humanity and to do it with pleasure. But unlike subsequent films, La Cage never threatened the audience by confronting them with the homosexual erotic.

Last year, when Robin Williams did Bird Cage, his remake of La Cage aux Folles, it fell flat. The farcical solutions seemed stale and condescending to a more tolerant public with greater sympathy for tragic gay and lesbian characters. But open-mindedness is not quite empathy --  an identification that permits a vicarious and transformative experience.

Only seven years after La Cage aux Folles, Pauline Kael reviewed in the New Yorker a "startlingly fresh movie from England," My Beautiful Launderette. What was "startling" about this Stephen Frears film was its explicit depiction of a teenage homosexual romance. It was a modern-day Romeo and Juliet--West Side Story set in South London--with two male lovers: a Pakistani, Omar, and a skinhead, Johnny. Kael, ever sophisticated, described it brilliantly as a "joyride of teenage sex" and emphasized the true "tenderness of their love affair," without batting an emotional eyelash over the fact that this was a "homosexual romance." But the mule-kick emotional impact of this storyline comes precisely from its direct confrontation with the homosexual erotic. Kael's worldliness about all matters sexual may explain her seeming imperviousness. But ordinary filmgoers--especially the straight men in the audience--cannot escape so easily. My Beautiful Launderette plunged into the depths of everyman's unconscious sexual feelings and demanded a human response. Omar and Johnny (played with unrestrained passion by Daniel Day Lewis) enact the homophilic impulses which are so often suppressed under the macho of teenage gangs. Gay men could go to this film and feel aroused and straight men could, if they allowed themselves, understand how this was possible.

Ma Vie en Rose will never rival La Cage at the box office, nor is it as challenging as My Beautiful Launderette. Still, it is a major achievement. Ludovic is a girl-boy with the innocence of every other seven-year-old child. It is impossible for a straight filmgoer not to empathize with him.

Ludovic is the youngest of four children in a French family that has finally begun to solve its financial problems. They have just moved into the French equivalent of Levittown and are preparing for a house warming. As the story unfolds we learn that Ludovic's father, Pierre, has become friendly with his boss (and neighbor) who has personally assured him that even in the face of downsizing, Pierre's good job will be secure because of their friendship. After years of skimping, Ludovic's parents, Pierre and Hanna, are in a celebratory mood as they prepare to greet their new neighbors. No one in the film has a last name, but in the spirit of the story it would be appropriate to call Ludovic's family the Roses.

The camera gives us a sense of the Roses' new middle-class neighborhood and glimpses of the tension and grief that lie behind the neighbors' ranch-house doors. Pierre's boss and his wife have lost one of their two children. The mother has preserved her daughter's room as a shrine to her inconsolable loss. Her husband and son must bear the weight of this burden of grief; it is the wound at the center of their shared lives. Berliner wants us to see from the start that every family and not just the Roses has its knots and tangles.

As we meet the neighbors, we are also shown a long-haired child primping in front of a mirror. The child puts on large dangling earrings and daubs on lipstick. One thinks of a little girl playing dress-up with her mother's clothing. But this is Ludovic innocently preparing to impress his new neighbors with his girlish beauty. The neighborhood housewarming is to be Ludovic's "coming out."

Although there is nothing amateurish in Berliner's filmmaking, there is something ingenuous about it. He describes the film as "halfway between dream and reality," but there are more dimensions than that. At times his exploration of families has the sophistication of Ken Loach, a director he admires. At other moments he shows us children's programs on French television and segments that look like commercials. Then there are Ludovic's fantasies: a mix of television and fairy tale created out of computer graphics. Finally, there is a world of children, filmed at the eye-level of a child. Rather than imposing a directorial will on this material, Berliner finds his way in it.

The film's title Ma Vie en Rose suggests Edith Piaf's "La Vie en Rose"--a song about how life is rose-colored when one is in love. Sung by the wistful gamine Piaf, the song suggests that her "Vie en Rose" will be all too brief. But rose or pink is also the color for girls as blue is for boys. Ludovic lives in a fantasy world of pink. Berliner, who with writer Vander Stappen adapted the screenplay, makes full use of the title's meanings. From its first moments, the cinematography picks up various shades of pink, including the pinks of the nursery and those supposedly flesh-color plastic pinks of children's dolls. Ludovic's French television fairy godmother comes on in a haze of computerized pink, her ample pink bosom barely contained in its pink dcolletage. She moves from cartoon figure to real person before our eyes in imaginatively constructed cinematography.

But girl-boys like Ludovic are not just imaginative constructions. The "effeminate boy," as he is known in the psychiatric literature, is one of the most persuasive demonstrations that gender identity is biologically given. The girl-boy, to use Ludovic's term, has the gait, habitus, and gender-distinctive mannerisms of the girl-girl, and it all seems to be innate rather than acquired. Ludovic's own imaginative theory is that when his chromosomes came down the chimney one of his X's accidentally got knocked off. Whatever the explanation, girl-boys, like Ludovic in the film, are a source of humiliation to their parents, are tormented by their peers, and retreat into a fantasy world for consolation. As this film poignantly suggests, neither the child nor his parents can be blamed. And girl-boys like Ludovic, confounding all our stereotypes, may grow up with a preference for heterosexual intercourse. Their innate gender behavior is something like being born left-handed. Think of all the "sinister" stereotypes that have traditionally been associated with left-handedness, and the unnecessary discipline and punishments we visited on left-handed children. We may someday come to think about children like Ludovic in much the same way. Ma Vie en Rose is an enlightened beginning of that process.

Ludovic's "coming out" predictably shocks the neighbors, though Pierre adroitly covers it up by declaring after Ludovic's grand entrance that his youngest son is a great joker. But Ludovic's conviction that he is meant to be a girl is no joke. A determined transvestite, he puts his short pants on with the fly in the back. He is fearful and awkward at soccer. Worst of all, he picks the son of Pierre's boss to be his boyfriend, and, violating the shrine of the dead daughter, puts on her communion dress and stages a make-believe wedding to the boss's son. The grieving mother notices the ceremony through a door left ajar and is devastated by the sacrilege. The boss and the neighbors turn on Ludovic and his family. The bewildered child is derided as a "tapette," French slang for "faggot." One sign of Ludovic's innocence is that he understands only the word's literal meaning, and asks his parents why people are calling him a fly-swatter.

Pierre and Hanna are in turn ashamed and indignant. They try everything. They consult a child psychologist, who wonders whether they may have wanted a girl. The psychologist's question makes Ludovic's mother feel guilty enough to cut his hair, but her mothering is obviously not enough to explain his behavior. Eventually the child psychologist gives up, acknowledging that the therapy is useless particularly since her patient has no interest in being cured. By then, Ludovic has been thrown out of grade school and the seven-year-old is the moral leper of the neighborhood. He is also the cause of conflict and resentment in his family as his parents quarrel and blame each other. The bottom falls out when the boss downsizes and Pierre loses his job, their friendship having long since turned to enmity because of Ludovic's sacrilege. Even worse, the boss worries that his son is fond of Ludovic and has been corrupted by the tapette.

At the moment of total disaster, Ludovic's family rallies round him: whatever he is, he is their child. Still they want him back in the closet. Escaping suburbia, they move to the French backwaters of Clermont-Ferrand, hoping that Ludovic will be able to suppress his girl-boy nature and allow them all to make a fresh start as a "normal family." Though it makes him unhappy, Ludovic makes an effort to act like a boy. One day as the friendless child is mooning around by himself, he is set upon by a bully who wants him to play, and retreats into his fantasy world. Across the highway is a billboard bearing the likeness of his television fairy godmother; Ludovic notices that workers have left a beckoning ladder leading up to it. While Alain Berliner described Ma Vie en Rose  as "midway between dream and reality," here it is all dream world, as we see Ludovic climb up the ladder and escape, in a Through The Looking Glass moment, into his happy pink fantasy world. His worried mother goes looking for him. Some insight tells her to follow up the ladder and join her son. This dream-world sequence suggests that mother and son will be united by sharing Ludovic's imaginative world. Who can doubt the wisdom of this unity? More than a few of our greatest artists are in reality like Ludovic and they share with us the gift of their imaginative world.

Berliner might have ended his story inside the billboard, but Ma Vie en Rose continues until it finds a kind of solution in the real world. The young bully who picked on Ludovic and wanted him to play turns out to be a tomgirl. And as Berliner rightly recognizes, tomboys or boy-girls are much less shocking in our patriarchal world than girl-boys like Ludovic. The bully's mother comes to invite Ludovic and his family to the tomboy's dress-up birthday party. Since the seven-year-old Ludovic is "back in the closet" he is to wear a manly costume. The tomboy, miserable in her princess costume, soon gets Ludovic into a shed, overcomes his desperate resistance, and changes costumes with him. When the bedraggled Ludovic shows up in the princess dress his outraged parents are ready to set upon him. This time, however, the tomgirl's mother intervenes and the bully confesses that it was all her fault. Ludovic and his family are saved from social exile. Clermont-Ferrand is it seems more tolerant of gender-bending than suburbia was--the boy-girl has saved the girl-boy.

This moment of symmetry is not a happy ending: we do not expect Ludovic's life to be a happy one. And yet perhaps, like Piaf, his artistic talent will permit him and us to find community in what he creates. One understands at the end why Berliner and Scotta were willing to stake their creative ambitions on this project. And one can even hope that twenty years from now a remake of Ma Vie en Rose will fall flat because audiences so much better understand this kind of difference.

 Alan A. Stone is Toureff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard Law School. Originally published in the December 1997/ January 1998 issue of Boston Review

"Gender trouble in MA VIE EN ROSE"  by Lucille Cairns

Ma Vie en rose: reception and analysis of success

First released on 28 May 1997, the Franco-Belgian co-production Ma Vie en rose was directed and co-scripted by Belgian director Alain Berliner. Berliner's début feature has proved to be a phenomenal international success. It has been sold in no less than 33 countries since its projection in Cannes, where it was reportedly, 'one of the most popular and, in fact, longest applauded films', (1) and in Los Angeles. For a first full-length film, this is some achievement. (2)

Predictably, it has not received unalloyed praise from the critics, but, by a slight majority, reviews which have appeared in the French press have tended towards reasonably positive appraisal. Of the ten French reviews of the film included in the bibliography, a rough typology may be established: three were very laudatory, two were fairly  so, three mixed praise and reservations, and two were negative. The two negative reviews came from L’Humanité and Cahiers du cinéma, which slam the film for, respectively, its perceived puerility (A little story for television to be watched at teatime on Wednesday afternoons [when the children are off school]') (3) and superficiality ('Ma Vie en rose doesn’t say anything, it sounds out everyone in an educational, consensual fashion and from time to time watches a benevolent, promotional fairy flying above the block of houses. You come out from it both dulled and appalled, as you would from a meeting of flat-mates' ).(4) As will be argued, the  perception of such alleged weaknesses is simply the negative obverse of the film’s strategically Indic and  conspicuously postmodern style, a style which has, on the whole, elicited positive responses in  other, not always populist, fora.

A number of reasons might be advanced for the film’s huge commercial success. Firstly, we should acknowledge the sheer hard work of Berliner in response to  the perfectionist demands of his producer, Carole Scotta, 'who insisted on thirteen successive  drafts of the screenplay before the current version.' (5)  Yet mere diligence does not, of course, guarantee success. What other factors might have contributed to Berliner's coup? Most obviously, there is the exceptional talent and uncontrived charm of his central actor, Georges du Fresne, who plays seven-year-old Ludo with consummate skill. (6) Then there is the novelty value of the subject-matter within the context of Francophone film, signaled explicitly by at least two reviews: ... The story of the little boy who wanted to be a girl", rather an original theme in cinema; (7)  'the doubtful sexual identity of a child is something society talks about but is rarely treated in cinema (8). The fact that there is as yet no satisfactory means in French of translating the English-language distinction between gender and sex (the single word 'le sexe' serving, inadequately, to designate the two different concepts) highlights just how relatively fresh the key theme of Ma Vie en rose still is in the French context.

Other reasons for the film's success may include its self-consciously postmodern attunement to popular culture. The meaning of the term 'postmodernism' is diffuse and labile; I use it here to refer to a late twentieth-century reversal of traditional aesthetic values, a revelling in surface as opposed to depth, in low as opposed to high culture, in the fragmentary and the unstable as opposed to the coherent and the stable. (9) Before the action even  begins, French pop-star Zazie is appealing to a youth audience in the theme song 'Rose'. (10)  From a poststructuralist perspective, which questions authorial authority and emphasizes the instability, plurality and the deferral of meanings, (11) 'Rose' provides an ironic self-reflection on the film,  which invites - and not infrequently gets - a superficial interpretation. Ma Vie en rose is, after an, eminently susceptible to being read like one of the 'sentimental novels" (12) referred to in the song's opening fines: the film is structured by fantasy (Ludo's literal fantasies, but also  the fantasy which is gender), and two of the song's subsequent lines, 'I'm neurotically obsessed by happiness', (13) could almost have been spoken by an older, more self-aware version of Ludo. Berliner's revelling in the low-culture icons of Barbie and Ken dolls (here presented as Pam and Ben), together with the film's saturated, almost psychedelic colours in its fantastical scenes portraying the parallel universe into which Ludo periodically escapes, all richly conveyed by extravagant  special effects, generate a gloriously kitsch-camp atmosphere. Such an atmosphere can appeal  to a wide range of viewers, from the child, to the passive consumer of escapist fiction, to  the hip postmodernist critic. Yet the overall tenor of the film is far from tacky; rather, it  conveys a wistfully whimsical, child-like vision, which belies the highly politicised interpretations to which the text is open.

Central themes

Whatever the factors explaining the films popularity - and only the most obvious have been mentioned - its huge popularity among a mainstream audience may also be regarded as something of a paradox. Notwithstanding all the aforementioned features  selling it to the consumer of entertainment artefacts, Ma Vie en rose can in fact be said to  constitute an implicit assault on one of the basic structures of sociality as the Western world  (along with most other parts of the world) knows it: conventional binarised gender. Popular belief  would have it that Berliner's film is a film about homosexuality. Despite the obvious gay connotations of the colour pink, which is foregrounded in  both the film's title and the opening song of its soundtrack, such a belief is flawed. Ma Vie en rose deals less with homosexuality than with heteronormativity. Most crucially, it is a film about gender, about the transgression of a quasi-sacred equation of biological sex - male  or female - with one, and only one, of the two culturally sanctioned gender identities:  masculinity and femininity. The force of this cultural imperative, the ideological and material viciousness with which it polices the frontiers between masculinity and femininity, is powerfully  conveyed in this narrative of a seemingly model French family's ostracisation by, and eventual  elimination from, a community of other apparently model French families. (14)

Opening

Ma Vie en rose opens on a deceptive idyll, presenting three heterosexual couples celebrating the virtues of conjugality either in enjoyable flirtation or in dignified solidarity. Soon afterwards, the camera focus widens out and its angle rises in an establishing shot, giving us a bird's-eye view of the community setting and its cultural specificity. This  is typical petit bourgeois suburbia, a relatively new, squeaky-clean, and green residential development  for that basic foundation of our heteronormative society, the nuclear family. Yet even while this  illusion is being constructed its subtle subversion is beginning. This ostensibly ideal,  family-friendly neighborhood ? praised by one of its residents, Albert, as a 'fantastic area', (15) and by  another, Thierry, as a theft-free zone - into which Ludo's family has recently moved, just outside Paris, (16) has just been flippantly critiqued by unconventional grandmother Elisabeth, who stresses its conformity and uniformity by implying that all the houses are (boringly) interchangeable.  Far from an idyll, this neighborhood is, as one reviewer has remarked, a 'spick-and-span  suburb where each house spies on the other'. (17)

Initially, the Fabre family, comprising mother Hanna, father Pierre, eldest son Tom, middle son Jean, daughter Zoé and youngest son Ludo (Ludovic), is also  configured as admirably consonant with nuclear-family norms. It is lauded by Pierre's  boss Albert as a 'fantastic [family].  They've got four children, (18)  a comment reflecting the extraordinarily high value placed by France for over a century, and for a variety of reasons (chiefly military, demographic and political), upon the large, traditional family. Yet very soon into the  action, this illusion of familial exemplarity is undermined, and, as the film progresses, the whole  myth of the heterosexual family unit as a matrix of compassion, unconditional love, and  unity is to be demolished. The catalyst of this demolition is, curiously, an eminently endearing, gentle, and objectively inoffensive child, who is constructed by the prevailing ideology of this family community as an undesirable freak because, quite simply, he deviates from hegemonic rules of gender. In this context, hegemony is the mobilization of the consent of the dominated to the social order in which they are dominated, as opposed to more  brutal and direct forms of coercion (see McLenan, Held and Hall 1984). Unlike the use of the term by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who is most widely associated with theorization of hegemony, in this instance gender, rather than social class, is alluded to as the basis of domination.

Gender play

Ludo's entrance onto the scene immediately challenges popular concepts of gender as a natural, transparent and stable property. Our first full vision of him is  of a girl, elaborately dressed in his 'princess's dress' ('robe de princesse'), as he puts it, and  applauded for his prettiness by the beguiled crowd of neighbors. The narrative sets up the conditions for this telling misapprehension through preceding his entrance by a series of close-up frames  which desist from fully revealing the child's face, and artfully generate an expectation in the  spectator that s/he is about to see a girl - Zoé, Ludo's sister, whom the mother had called to come  down just before the camera zoomed into these close-ups. When Ludo finally makes his entrance, his  attire and make-up, enhanced by the striking androgyny of his face, are so convincingly feminine  that the gathered families, with the obvious exception of Ludo's own, are all completely taken in. Thus, the families of the diegesis (that is, of the spatio-temporal universe constructed by  the narrative) and the 'real-fife' spectators are very early on given an ideological jolt. The confounding of their uninformed, thus unbiased perception - what a sweet little girl! - subtly incites the inference that gender is not an innate, immediately recognizable given, but rather a performative  spectacle, a series of signs inscribed on the mutable surface of a body.

The model of gender as performance rather than as a substantive property is now well established in (largely Anglophone) theoretical discourses, but its original and most cogent exposition in the work of Judith Butler (1990: 24-5) should be acknowledged:

Gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and  compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative - that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not'a doing by a subject  who might be said to pre-exist the deed ... There is no gender identity behind the espressions of gender .... identity is performatively tively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.

The title of the present chapter pays a form of theoretical homage to the inspiring, if in more recent years slightly modified, theory of gender propounded by  Butler. The inference that gender is not an innate, immediately recognizable given, but rather a performative spectacle, a series of signs inscribed on the mutable surface of a body, is unintentionally supported by the embarrassed response of Ludo's father, who introduces the youngest member of  his 'tribe' (tribu) to the new neighbors as 'the joker' ('le fort en farce'). While the  father's remark is meant to render his son's flouting of appropriate gender behavior innocuous by passing it off as a harmless joke, the polysemy of language (that is, its capacity to generate a  plurality of meanings), the non-unicity  (correspondingly, the lack of a single meaning) of the signifier 'farce ', also promote the interpretation of gender identities as a form of performance. It is even worth considering the connotations of play, of acting, in the etymology of Ludo's name: was this name chosen to signify ludicity? On the question of language, its central role in the inculcation of gender norms is clearly established at this early point. When Ludo explains his cross-dressing for the garden party by saying that he wanted to look 'beautiful' ('belle'),  even the one slightly unconventional adult in the diegesis, Elizabeth, calls him gently to order, decreeing that at his age one says 'handsome' ('beau'), not 'beautiful', of a boy.

However, Ludo will have none of it, for he very clearly identifies with the feminine side of the sacred binary division. This identification is almost instantly  established by the camera's extreme close-up shots lingering on his careful application of  make-up, by the soundtrack's evidence, through his humming, of his contentment in being  dressed in women's shoes and
earrings and a girl's fancy dress, and most of all by his transparent pleasure in both the whole stylisation process and his convincing the new neighbors that he  is indeed a girl. He appears to have formed a concept of gender as nomadic, for although he knows  he is currently a boy, he believes he will later become a girl ('when I'm no longer a  boy'). (19)  The norm of gender unicity (namely, that a human subject is always only one gender) has not  yet disciplined him, and he later defines himself as 'a boy-girl' ('un garçon-fille'). He  consciously eschews masculinity: when his mother tries to coerce him into having his hair cut by asking if he doesn't want to look like his father and brothers - that is, masculine - he answers firmly in the negative. Granted, after his first visit to a psychologist, Ludo obediently tries to adopt  conventional traits of masculinity, as toughness and aggression. Yet his discomfort in this imposed gender identity is painfully obvious, and correspondingly invites pity on the part of the spectator - even if such a response is very likely to be in tension with anxiety about just what Ludo's exemption from conscription to masculinity might mean.

Ludo is not the only character to question the normative view of gender as a fixed, pre-determined essence. The randomness of gender, its non-essential character, is also adumbrated in his sister Zoé's pedagogy: 'XY youre a boy, and XX you're a girl. It's like playing poker.' (20) This provokes Ludo's whimsical fantasy of his other X chromosome, the one which would have made him a girl, having mistakenly fallen into the trash can when God  threw them down from the heavens. 'Instead a Y slipped itself in. Scientific error! (21)  Yet Ludo is confident that God wil fix the mistake by sending him his missing X chromosome, and that he will then be able to marry Jérôme. And Jérôme is not entirely resistant to this (homoerotic?)  scenario, saying 'Depends what kind of girl you turn out to be' (22)

Gender war

If Ludo's first cross-dressing initiative is met with bemused tolerance, his second foments marked hostility. Wearing a pink dress belonging to Jérôme's sister, Ludo  stages a wedding scene with himself as bride, Jérôme as groom, and, to considerable comic effect, a teddy bear as the priest administering the fantasized marriage sacrament. When Jérôme's mother Lisette sees them, she faints through the shock of what is presumably perceived as a  vision of her daughter, who, unbeknownst to Ludo, is in fact dead. This incident creates severe problems for Ludo's father, who, being professionally subordinate to the dead girl's father, Albert, is in a highly delicate position. His sense of professional vulnerability is thoroughly  understandable. What is less so is the aggression of his response to the news that his son has  been dressing as a girl: he shouts violently at Ludo, 'It's bad, what you did, very bad! (23) And for  him, this is the main point in the whole scandal, rather than the offending of a bereaved parent's  sentiments: when Ludo defends himself by saying he didn't know Jérôme's sister was dead, Pierre replies curtly, 'But that's not the point. And for a start why don't we cut this kid's hair? (24)  As  for Albert, while we may indeed expect him to have been offended as a bereaved parent, the film supplies no evidence of this. What appears to revolt him is Ludo's perceived travesty of a sacred Christian and heterosexual rite, and, by implication, the homoeroticization of his son Jérôme, for Albert is clearly the source of Jérôme's sudden fear that he will go to hell if he continues to sit next to Ludo at school.

After this incident, Ludo's gender aspirations are pathologized: his parents take him to a psychologist in the hope of having him 'cured', as if crossing gender boundaries constituted mental illness. The normativizing prejudice to which he is  subject manifests itself in many other guises. One of its milder forms is his father's effort to erase his son's gentle, pacific disposition and to launch him into a harrowing apprenticeship of masculinity:  getting the little boy to play rough competitive sports, urging a shorter haircut on him against his  obvious wishes, and so on. Another, more traumatizing, guise is ostracism at school, when, as mentioned above, his erstwhile friend Jérôme asks if he can move away from his seat next to Ludo, explaining that he does not want to be damned. Through the child's bluntness, the  viewer is made aware of the ideological uses and abuses of religion, which are here  responsible, through the agency of the Catholic father Albert, for transforming cross-dressing and, by dubious association, homosexuality, into a sin. Cross-dressing and homosexuality, two  quite distinct phenomena, are here erroneously conflated. Other equally, if not more,  disturbing guises of this normativizing prejudice are teasing, emotional and physical bullying, expulsion from school due to a petition signed by all the other parents, and being labeled a 'poof ' [a fag]  ('tapette') in one of the most humiliating and distressing ways possible (seeing graffiti  demanding 'Poofs out' ('Dehors tapette') scrawled over his family's garage door).

The entire community is mediated as at least nominally Christian: references are made by Pierre and Albert to God; the children have a crucifix in their  bedroom. But it is also exposed as being fully complicit with the policing of bodies and minds in the interests of binarized gender, and as hypocritical to boot. (25)  Even the sympathetic character of  the young, attractive, and caring primary-school teacher ('institutrice') defends gender norms in  taking for granted, when Ludo produces Ben and Pam dolls, that he wants to be like the male doll and thus that he aspires to masculinity, from which assumption he shows his dissent by shaking his head. Minutes earlier the same normativizing reaction had occurred when, after Jérôme had produced an earring (the one Ludo had lost at the party in the opening sequences), she had said prescriptively that he would be giving it back to his mother, as if an anatomically male child could have no possible use or desire for a feminine-connoted accessory. To give her her due, it  should be observed that the young teacher does later try to help Ludo by pleading for tolerance of difference, saying to the children who have been mocking him for effeminacy: 'In any case  you're all different and you have to learn to accept everyone, whatever they do, and to  respect your friends'. (26) However, hers is rather a lone voice in the wilderness, where difference is  precisely what this community cannot accept: in the succinct terms of one reviewer, Ma Vie en rose is a 'terrifying film about the rejection of difference'. (27). It is a voice considerably weakened by its inconsistency with her earlier inculcation in the same children of conventional constructs of gender.

The workings of moral cowardice and of hypocrisy are more tellingly exposed in two other forms. Firstly, there is the skilful juxtaposition of two scenes,  the contrast between which reveals the gap between social etiquette and private, individual ethics.  The first of these scenes is a big neighborhood party at which, after an initial appalled silence, the revelers had  appeared to welcome Ludo dressed in a skirt - and only a kilt at that; perhaps this was the biggest concession his parents could stomach, given the kilt's association with men, albeit foreign men. A camera wipe brings us to a deceptively similar,  mediating scene of Ludo dancing and general enjoyment amongst the Fabre children, which is abruptly curtailed when Pierre rolls in drunk and delivers a bombshell. He has bee fired, despite Albert's earlier reassurances that his job is safe. Thus, the narrative gives us to understand that the neighborhood's earlier embrace of Ludo and family at the party  had been a hollow sham serving purely to avoid embarrassment, and that Albert's hypocrisy can no longer be in  any doubt. Hanna later emphasizes and renders graphic Albert's duplicity in adopting the moral high ground: when she kisses him seductively in full view of his wife Lisette, he does not exactly recoil.

Trans-genter-heteronormativity and homophobia

Let us return to the conflation of trans-gender and homosexuality. As we have seen, and as is often the case outside the diegesis of this film, the two are confused, being seen at the  very least as mutually entwined. The feeling that one's sexual genitalia and socially-assigned gender do not correspond to one' inner sense of gender is, self-evidently, something different from a feeling that one is erotically attracted to  members of one's own sex. However, such a discontinuity has only gradually been acknowledged in the twentieth century, after many decades of intellectual enthralment to the nineteenth-century theory of homosexuality as spiritual hermaphroditism. This model of homosexuality, known as the 'man-woman' or the 'Zwischenstufen' theory, is thought to have originated in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's Memnon (1868), where the male homosexual character is defined as 'the soul of a woman enclosed in the body of a man', and the female homosexual character as the converse. Ulrichs's theory-cum-fiction widely influenced sexologists and the lay public,  including such prestigious and subtle-minded thinkers as Marcel Proust, who presented homosexuals as accursed men-women ('homme-femmes') in his celebrated cycle A la Recherche du temps perdu. In more recent times, it has become obvious that gays may well be entirely comfortable with, and even celebrate, their sex: witness, for example, the hyper- femininity of the lesbian constellation centered around Natalie Clifford Barney in early twentieth-century Paris, or, in the late twentieth-century Western world, the cult of muscularity,  leather, and at least aesthetic machismo among some gay men who plainly make no identification at all with the feminine.

However, having established this, let us briefly consider whether it is at all possible to locate homosexuality in MaVie en rose. Is it in any sense plausible t posit sexual attraction between Ludo and Jérôme? Is there any sexual significance in the fact that when Sophie invites Jérôme to play, he brusquely rebuffs her in favour of Ludo? Or in the fact that when Ludo talks about their getting married, Jérôme does not so much resist as pose conditions? But if Jérôme is envisaging marriage to a girl, as he evidently is, in what sense can one be dealing with homosexuality? With respect to such young children, it may be more appropriate to speak of homoerotic attraction, rather than homosexuality. To follow the reasoning of (often misinformed) disciples of Freud, it is by no means indisputable that children of such a  young age 'possess' a sexuality at an, or, to adopt a constructivist view of sexuality, that any one possesses a sexuality, if sexuality is conceptualized as some kind of innate and fixed essence. While Ma Vie en rose provides material which gives rise to these questions, it would not appear to provide sufficient evidence to support a cogent 'gay' reading.

However, three points at least are plain: the film does encode the popular conflation of trans-gender and homosexuality, it does expose both the mindlessness and the  viciousness of homophobia, and it does reflect the stranglehold of heteronormativity in which France, as much as any Western country, is caught. The first point needs no further illustration. As for the second, we need only refer to the distressing inscription of homophobic graffiti, or to the scene of heated exchange between Albert and neighbor Thierry, and to that which follows it. Albert is angry because Sophie, Thierry's daughter, has called Jérôme a tapette, presumably because of his closeness to Ludo. Having overheard the two men talking, Ludo guilelessly asks his parents what a tapette  is; the degree of homophobia present in his father is amply evinced by the father's explosive rage at the thought that his own son has been slandered as a tapette. For substantiation of the third point, it is tempting simply to give the reference passim; but let us take just one example amongst the numerous available. At school, an institution meant  to instruct rather than indoctrinate, heteronormative codes are assiduously foregrounded by the apparently liberal teacher's scripting of a romance between Ludo and Sophie  ('Sophie and you, you could make a nice little couple!'). (28)

To summarize: the combined and interdependent forces of homophobia and transsexphobia produce a form of communal, organised hostility towards both the little boy, with the whole community signing a petition calling for Ludo's transference to a different school and a group of schoolboys beating him up, and towards his family, with the father's boss Albert eventually laying him off, contrary to previous promises,  and each member being humiliated by the offensive graffiti (at seeing the message, brother Tom exclaims in horror 'Oh the shame!'). Blaming Ludo for the latter, discursive aggression, Hanna decides to expunge the offending feminine traits from her son, and cuts his hair in a symbolic shearing scene. This scene is likely to have a special cultural resonance for the French, whose collective historical memory may well correlate it with the humiliation inflicted at the Liberation upon female 'collaborators' during  France's German occupation during World War Two. And if this seems like a far-fetched analogy, it  should be noted that the cutting of Ludo's hair is contrived as, precisely, a retributive  spectacle, with all the family looking on, and, significantly, shame being invested in Ludo's role through  the mother's cold words jus before she begins shaving him: 'A poof is ... a boy who likes  boys. Like you. (29)  Just what is she punishing him for? For his assumption of femininity, or for his having been the medium of her family's defilement by association with a tapette ? Certainly  the poignancy of the scene invites the interpretation that such shearing is a deeply upsetting  ordeal for its subject, with aural and visual images combining to signify marked distress: the  (non-diegetic) mournful music on the soundtrack, the close shot revealing Ludo's discreet tears.

After this forced physical masculinisation, Ludo becomes depressed and withdrawn, alienated from the identity imposed upon him against his nature, as he sees it. In the safety of his own mind, however, he re-runs the fantasy of his wedding with Jérôme.  And after the family's move to Clermont-Ferrand, he meets a child similarly resistant to the gender role assigned to her according to her anatomy: Christine, alias 'Chris', who looks  just as much a boy as Ludo had a girl before his parents intervened, and who is manifestly unhappy  in the girly frock she is obliged to wear at her own birthday party.

It is Chris's determination to appropriate Ludo's masculine clothing which triggers the climax of the film, its uneasy catharsis and, finally, a fragile reconciliation. Chris forces Ludo to exchange his masculine clothes with her feminine ones. Wrongly  assuming that Ludo's frock signifies his persistence in cross-dressing, Hanna lashes out violently, causing him to flee in fear; she follows him in panic, momentarily and oneirically enters into his Pam and Ben universe, and then awakens surrounded by her anxious family. It is unclear whether this fantastical. flight from the social order is intended to be read literally or as a hallucination/dream on Hanna's part. While a literal reading may  appear an absurd proposition,  the elliptical narrative provides no account of precisely what has happened to Hanna. What is clear, however, is that the figure of the flight serves a particular moral function. It 'teaches' Hanna to understand something of her child's inner world, and, most importantly, to accept and love him for what he is. In a gratifying but rather implausible happy ending, the two parents finally express their love for Ludo as their child, regardless of  gender. This does wonders for the viewer's mood, restoring faith in the milk of human kindness and so on, but it somewhat fudges the important issues Berliner's film has powerfully raised and intelligently explored. With respect to Ludo's future as a social subject, as opposed to his  reintegration within the bosom of his family, this happy ending leaves the probing viewer somewhat  frustrated. As one reviewer objects, there is an absence of 'any concrete  questioning of Ludovic's real future (will he be a closet homo, a straight queen, a trendy gay, a transvestite, a transsexual, or "cured"?! (30)

Conclusions

Ma Vie en rose exposes the discursive forces working to reify gender, a cultural, ultimately immaterial, construct, into a natural property inherent in human beings and determined by their genitalia. Ludo is anatomically male but 'feels' feminine, and this contradiction of the normative sex-gender  equation alienates and antagonizes his community to the point where it is prepared to eliminate the transgressor, perceived as sinful and sick Oust as were, and in some discourses still are, homosexuals). The director brings out the injustice of  such prejudices by showing their damaging effects on a young and extremely sympathetic child and on his family, who suffer both from their own internalization of such gender norms and from society's alienation of the family unit, perceived as responsible for Ludo's putative aberration. The most telling of all the dialogues is that between Ludo and his grandmother Elizabeth apropos his behavior and his parents:

Ludo: It's true I don't want to change, but ... I do want them to love me.
Elizabeth: It's for your own good.
Ludo: It's not true that it's for my own good!"

Ma Vie en rose also exposes the notorious conflation of transsexualism and homosexuality: those in his neighborhood make no distinction between an anatomically male subject's identification with the feminine gender role on the one hand, and homosexuality on the other. Thus a 1990s community is seen to  have preserved intact Ulrich's fanciful nineteenth century fiction of the 'Zwischenstufen'. Nil progress, at least  on some social levels, in 130 years.

Notes
1. 'L'un des films les plus courus et, finalement, longuement ovationné.' 'Entre drame et comédie', in Télérama, 28 May 1997.
2. Berliner's previous cinematic work had heen confined to scriptwriting and to the 'court-métrage' (short film). See Agnès Brunet and Michel Pascal, 'Cinéma français: le réveil', in Le Point, 2 June  1997: 102-6; Brigitte Baudii, Alain Berliner: vive la différence', Le Figaro, 29 May 1997.
3. 'Un Petit Conte pour la télévision à regarder  au moment du goûter, le mercredi après-midi.' Pierre Barbancey, L’Humanité, 13 May 1997.
4.  'Ma Vie en rose ne raconte rien, fait son tour de table pédagogique consensuel et regarde voler de temps en temps une fée publicitaire bienveillante au-dessus du pâté de maisons. On en sort à la fois assoupi et révolté, comme d'une réunion de colocataires. - 'Ma Vie en rose', in Cahiers du cinéma, 514, June 1997, 80.
5. qui a exigé treize moutures successives du scénario avant la version actuelle.' Brunet and Pascal, op. cit., 104.
6. Michel Temple, extolling du Fregnes 'extraordinary performance', goes so far as to claim that 'without Du Fresne at the centre, none of it would work'. (Michael Temple, 'Ma Vie en rose', Sight and Sound, November  1997, 48.)
7. "L'histoire du petit garçon qui voulait être une fille", thème plutôt in édit au cinéma.' Olivier Séguret, 'Ludovic, sept ans et  toutes ses robes', in Libération, 22 May 1997.
8. 'l'identité sexuelle incertaine d'un enfant est un sujet de société peu traité au cinéma'
9. For fuller discussions of postmodernism, see Lyotard (1987); McHale (1984).
10. Rose was written by Alain Berliner and Dominique Dalcon, and performed by Zazie.
11. The term 'poststructuralism' designates an intellectual approach which emerged partly from within, but represented a reaction against, French structuralism in the 1960s, rejecting the latter's claims to objectivity and comprehensiveness. Poststructuralism embraces various particular strands of thought, including the philosophical deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, the later work of Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, the historical critiques of Michel Foucault, and the  politico-cultural analyses of Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.
12. 'romans à l'eau de rose'
13. 'Le bonheur m'obsède à la névrose'
14.  The contestatory nature of Ma Vie en rose is evidenced in Berliner's own comments to a journalist: ... I was won over by the originality and the tone of Chris Vander Stappen’s screenplay," explains Alain Berliner. "She raises existential and social issues that particularly interest me, like the right to difference ... I make films in order to tell fundamentally human stories that lead to a questioning. This is what happens with Ma Vie en rose. I receive many personal accounts from peoplewho've seen the film. They feel the need to confide and to enter into dialogue as if all of a sudden they could free themselves from a taboo.  That's precisely the function of cinema for me"'. ('J'ai été  séduit par l'originalité et le ton du scénario de Chris Vander Stappen, explique Alain Berliner. Elle soulève des questions existentielles et  sociales qui m'intéressent particulièrement, comme le droit à la  différence ... Je fais du cinéma pour raconter des histoires foncièrement humaines qui débouchent sur une interrogation. C'est ce qui se passe pour Ma Vie en rose. Je reçois beaucoup de témoignages de gens qui ont vu le film. Ils  prouvent le besoin de se confier et de dialoguer comme si tout à  coup ils pouvaient se libérer d'un interdit. Voilà bien pour moi la fonction du cinéma.') (Brigitte Baudii, op. cit., 48)
15. ' quartier formidable'
16. In or near Mennecy, the administrative centre of l’Essonne, part of the Paris region, created in 1964.
17. 'banlieue proprette ou chaque pavillon épie l'autre' M.R, 'Ma Vie en rose', in Le Point, 2 June 1997, 120.
18. '[famille] formidable. Ils ont quatre enfants'
19.  'quandje ne serai plus un garçon'
20. 'XY c'est que t'es un garçon, et XX c'est que t'es une fille. C'est comme un poker, quoi'
21. 'A la place il y a un Y qui s'y est mis. Erreur scientifique!'
22. 'Faut voir ce que tu seras comme genre de fille'
23. 'C'est mal, ce que tu as fait, c'est très mal'
24. 'Mais la question n'est pas là. Et d'abord pourquoi qu'on ne lui coupe pas les cheveux à ce gosse?'
25. This is a point remarked upon in several reviews of Ma Vie en rose. For instance, Cahiers du cinéma refers to 'the neighbors, ghastly and incredible pharisees' ('les voisins, affreux et pharisiens à souhait') (514, june 1997,80); Positif gives a lapidary definition  of the film as a 'fable on the hypocrisy of supposedly advanced societies' (fable sur l'hypocrisie des sociétés dites évoluées') ('Ma Vie en rose', in Positif, 437-8, July/August 1997, 132).
26 'De toute façon vous êtes tous différents et il faut apprendre à accepter tout le monde, quoi qu'il fasse, à respecter ses copains.'
27 'Film terrifiant sur le rejet de la différence'.Ma Vie en rose', in Jeune cinéma, 244, Summer 1997,50.
28 'Sophie et toi, vous pourriez faire un joli couple tous les deux'
29 'Une tapette c'est un garçon qui aime les garçons. Comme toi'
30. toute interrogation concrète sur le devenir réel de Ludovic (sera-t-il homoplanqué, hétérofolle, gay dans le vent, travesti, transsexuel, ou "guéri"?!)' Olivier Séguret, op. cit.
31. Ludo: C'est vrai que je ne veux pas changer, mais ... je veux qu'ils m'aiment quand même. - Elizabeth: C'est pour ton bien. -  Ludo: C'est pas vrai que c'est pour mon bien.

Assignment #7 (due also on Thursday, August 3) on Ma vie en rose (My life in pink)

Choice of a reaction paper based on the following:

In what sense can it be argued with Alan Stone that My Life in Pink marks a new, truthful departure in cinematic understanding of difference in human sexuality and gender identity in children ?

Or answering the following questions based on Alan Stone’s “Seeing Pink”

1. Why do you think Stone states that “though it is a film about children, many conventional parents will not want their children to see it?”
2. Which example did Berliner utilize to show us “from the start that every family - and not just the Fabres (the “Roses” for Stone) - has its knots and tangles”?
3. In what sense is the film more than “halfway between dream and reality”? What examples can you provide to illustrate, as Stone suggests, “it is more than that”?
4. Do you agree with Stone that the innate gender of ‘girl-boys’ like Ludovic is comparable to being born left-handed with all the “sinister” (Latin for left - gauche in French) stereotypes associated with left-handedness? Explain.
5. About the ‘tapette’ thing (and what is ‘lost in translation’): Why is it a sign of Ludovic’s innocence?
6. How do you interpret the psychologist’s role? Why do you think she failed?
7. What is Stone suggesting when he states that “more than a few of our greatest artists are in reality like Ludovic and they share with us the gift of their imaginative world”? Can you offer some examples, in fashion or in entertainment?
8. Why do you think that tomboys - or boy-girls - are much less shocking in our patriarchal world than “girl-boys” like Ludovic?
9. Strangely, in this country, this film is rated “R”. Do you think it is just for one single F word uttered by Hanna - less vulgar in the original than in the subtitle - or can you think of other reasons?
 

Film 9. Jeanne and the Perfect Guy  (1998) - A film by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau

Made in the spirit of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, this "bittersweet and ultimately irresistible Parisian confection" (Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com) boldly adds a measure of social realism to the musical form. Viginie Ledoyen (A Single Girl) plays a sexually adventurous young woman who, despite her love for the wild life, is a true romantic at heart, waiting to find Mr. Wonderful. She thinks she has found him when she meets Olivier, played by none other than Demy's son, Mathieu. However the love affair has a stumbling block...Olivier is HIV-positive. Through the songs of Philippe Miller and co-writer/co-director Jacques Martineau, the film makes this unusual blend of the whimsical and harsh reality work.

Reviews
a) by James Berardinelli

Over the past 15 years, there have been a number of dramas about AIDS - everything from the searing Savage Nights to the mainstream Philadelphia. These films have come in all flavors, from gritty independent features to high-profile Hollywood weepers, but this is the first time the subject matter has been used as the foundation of a musical. Jeanne and the Perfect Guy takes this unlikely premise and transforms it into the fuel for an irreverent, enjoyable, and completely unexpected motion picture experience that uses a throwback genre to tackle contemporary issues.

At first glance, Jeanne and the Perfect Guy appears to be a relatively traditional French melodrama - well acted and intelligently written, but nothing special. Then a group of janitors breaks into song and the cinematic landscape has changed. Approximately 50% of this movie is told through its music, with a significant portion of the dialogue being presented in the lyrics. There are no big production numbers (although there are scenes when the characters stop what they're doing to engage in a little choreographed dancing). Rather, the approach is largely understated and recalls Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in spirit if not in subject matter or tone. (The presence of Demy's son, Mathieu, as one of the leads underscores the connection.)

Jeanne (Virginie Ledoyen) is a sexually promiscuous young woman. By days, she toils as a receptionist at a travel agency; by nights, she plays musical beds with her many lovers, one of which is a supervisor at work (portrayed as a self-centered cad by Frédéric Gorny). Even her sister, Sophie (Valérie Bonneton), thinks she's a slut. But Jeanne is simply looking for Mr. Right - someone she's not sure really exists. Then, one Sunday morning on a train, she locks eyes with Olivier (Mathieu Demy), and it's love at first sight. The two are so drawn to each other that, once the car has emptied, they have sex there and then. Jeanne has found her perfect man, but there's a problem: Olivier is HIV+ (acquired from his days as a heroin user), and the AIDS virus is already taking its toll on his health. By entering into a relationship with him, Jeanne risks the inevitable pain of a permanent separation - but she is powerless to control her feelings for Olivier. And, although he feels terrible guilt for subjecting her to such an unfair ordeal, he cannot deny the strength of the attraction.

Presenting Jeanne and the Perfect Guy  as a musical gives the film a fresh perspective (the story alone certainly isn't unique). Co-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, making their motion picture debuts, sail smoothly through potentially treacherous waters. Done incorrectly, this movie could have turned into an awkward experience, but Ducastel and Martineau are in control of the material. The movie is also characterized by genuine emotional depth and the refreshingly open attitude that the French have towards sexuality. One of the best scenes features a naked Jeanne and Olivier in bed, singing heartfelt (and somewhat bittersweet) endearments to each other.

Demy is a perfectly capable actor, but he is outshone by Virginie Ledoyen, whose screen presence is blindingly intense. Not only is Ledoyen easily one of the most sensual and beautiful women in today's acting profession, but she is extraordinarily talented. As in her breakthrough role - the lead in Benoit Jacquot's A Single Girl - she emotes with her features and body language as well as through her dialogue. Even though her singing voice is dubbed, she fares well in a musical setting. Few performers working in the '90s can come close to matching Ledoyen for star wattage.

Jeanne and the Perfect Guy  is not a perfect movie. The final cut is a little unpolished, but the compensation for this is a raw, infectious energy, and, as offbeat fare, it's difficult to beat. In addition to its obvious attractions of Ledoyen and the musical framework, the production also avoids the staples of Hollywood versions of this story - mawkish sentimentality and a tearful finale. In fact, the last scene in Jeanne and the Perfect Guy  is peerless in its insight into human nature. Even for those who don't consider themselves to be fans of musicals, there's plenty about this movie to applaud.  © 1999 James Berardinelli

b) By Stephen Holden - Songs and Tears (if No Umbrellas) on the Streets of Paris

Only France could have produced a charmingly eccentric bonbon like "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy," a bittersweet movie musical that suggests an unlikely collision of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Rent."

Giddily romantic one moment, gawkily militant the next, this emotional seesaw of a movie switches back and forth between dreamy love scenes and Act-Up demonstrations without its feet ever touching the ground.

The score by Philippe Miller, with lyrics by Jacques Martineau (who directed with Olivier Ducastel), has many contemporary flourishes but is still rooted in the unabashedly lachrymose Gallic pop tradition of Michel Legrand. Although the movie deals directly with the AIDS crisis, the only thing that really matters in its scheme of things is true love: finding it, keeping it, losing it, enshrining it.

When Jeanne (the enchanting Virginie Ledoyen), a free-spirited young receptionist for a travel agency who has had many lovers, meets Olivier (Mathieu Demy) in a Paris subway car, she instantly knows he is the man of her dreams. Once the car has emptied of passengers, the two make love right then and there. At this point they would probably run off and live happily ever after except for one tragic complication.

On their second date, Olivier tells Jeanne he is HIV-positive from his days as a heroin addict. (He has since recovered.) Olivier's health deteriorates rapidly, and after collapsing in his apartment, he is rushed to the hospital.

One day when Jeanne goes to visit him, she discovers he has been discharged under the care of his parents. The hospital refuses to disclose the family's address. Will Jeanne be able to track him down for a last weepy farewell? Don't count on it.

Wispy subplots follow Jeanne's breakup with a casual lover who won't take no for an answer. She also reunites with an old friend, François (Jacques Bonnaffe) who is gay and has recently lost a lover to AIDS. Unbeknownst to Jeanne, François is Olivier's mentor in the Parisian division of Act-Up.

The film tries to stir up pathos in Jeanne's and François' never realizing their shared connection to Olivier, despite their friendship.

In its heart and soul, "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" ("Jeanne et le Garçon Formidable"), which opens Friday in Manhattan, is a direct descendant of Jacques Demy's candy-colored musical sorbets, "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort," films whose bubbly head-in-the-clouds romanticism make the airiest Hollywood musicals seem almost cynical.

The casting of Demy's son Mathieu as Olivier underscores the lineage. He is adequate as a kind of male Camille around whom everyone flutters anxiously, but he is no match for Ms. Ledoyen, whose dark beauty, casual sensuality and amazing self-possession radiates pure screen charisma.

Although "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" has a lot more spoken dialogue than Jacques Demy's sentimental classics, its cloud-nine atmosphere is very similar. So is the technique of the film, whose characters crudely lip-sync their numbers to lush recorded tracks. As Jeanne floats through the streets of Paris, male dancers glide into step for quick dreamy pas de deux.

One thing that distinguishes "Jeanne" from its Gallic forerunners is its sexual candor. The sight of young lovers unself-consciously cuddling in bed and singing sweet nothings to each other au naturel gives the movie a jolt of romantic heat. © NYT Film Review, April 16, 1999

c) by Andrew O'Hehir

April 23, 1999 |This bittersweet and ultimately irresistible Parisian confection has an oddly displaced, almost timeless quality. At first I thought that directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau were being deliberately vague, or that perhaps the film was set in 1988 -- given its "this is pop" oversaturated palette, the summery pastels of Virginie Ledoyen's wardrobe and the Act-Up marchers in their black leather jackets. Making a musical comedy at all in the late '90s implies a commitment to fantasy and a kind of willful, old-fashioned eccentricity. But I think the real explanation is simpler: It's French. The rest of the capitalist world from Vancouver to Budapest may become a cheerful infoblur of cell phones, baggy jeans and overpriced pasta dishes, but France, for better or worse, will always be peculiar. And as it gingerly walks the line between weightlessness and gravity, between cloying and charming, "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" is nothing if not peculiar.

Though it's not sung all the way through like "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," "Jeanne" is an avowed attempt to bring the winsome, tragicomic sensibility of Jacques Demy's classic to bear on contemporary subject matter. Almond-eyed Mathieu Demy, son of the great director (and the equally important filmmaker Agnès Varda), even plays Olivier, the "perfect guy" who becomes our untamable heroine's first true passion. With her lovely, heart-shaped face, skin the color of eucalyptus honey and luminous smile, Ledoyen is a veritable angel of randy innocence. In the great tradition of French film ingénues, Jeanne splits the difference between feminism and misogyny -- she's an independent young woman fully in charge of her own sexuality, and she's the lithe, athletic nymphet of a million midlife-crisis fantasies.

As with any musical, your reaction to "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" will largely depend on how well you tolerate the songs by composer Philippe Miller (with lyrics by Martineau, who also wrote the script). I was on the fence through the whole movie; Miller's attempts to introduce Afropop, Arabic music and other "exotic" influences -- as in a gratuitous liberal-guilt number sung by the black cleaning crew in Jeanne's office building -- are particularly embarrassing. When he stays closer to the sweet-and-sour French cabaret tradition, however, the results are often affecting and lovely. Early in the film, Jeanne's gay friend François (the lantern-jawed, wry-faced Jacques Bonnaffé) sings a haunting lament for his dead lover and his own pariah status as an AIDS widow. Jeanne doesn't pay much attention, but that song's spirit weaves through the film like a tiny, cold current of melancholy, finally erupting in her heartbreaking, almost Puccini-esque final duet with Olivier. (Most of the actors do their own singing, but Ledoyen is dubbed by Elise Caron.)

If you were pitching this movie to a Hollywood executive, you might tell him you were putting a hornier, less neurotic Ally McBeal in the cast of "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" and sending them to Montmartre with songs by Jacques Brel. Jeanne is a working girl from lower-middle suburbia who spends her days answering the phone in the sterile, modernist lobby of a travel agency, and her nights and weekends auditioning candidates for le garçon formidable (a self-consciously outmoded phrase that might be better translated as "the wonderful fella"). She's bored by the upscale bistros her yuppie beau Jean-Baptiste (Frédéric Gorny) frequents -- though one of them provides the setting for a luscious, crimson-lit tango -- and the hunky, nameless messenger boy (Laurent Arcaro) is no more than a fuckbuddy. But when she accidentally sits on Olivier's lap on a Métro train, the chemistry is more than physical, as she tells her vicariously thrilled sister (Valérie Bonneton) in a giddy song-and-dance number amid the bland Formica of a cheap Chinese restaurant.

When Olivier tells Jeanne, well after their first sexual encounter, that he has a profoundly personal reason for attending Act-Up rallies, Ledoyen perfectly captures the incomprehension of a young person whose life allows no room for gravity or disaster. "That's OK -- we used a condom," she says blankly, trying to flee from understandable rage or grief back into carefree hedonism. As it gradually becomes clear that Olivier is much sicker than he lets on, Jeanne has to balance the unfamiliar idea of irreparable loss against her irrepressible appetite for life. To Ducastel and Martineau's credit, they stay true to the blend of sentimentality and cold realism that made Demy's films so distinctive. Jeanne wants to believe that love is forever, that Olivier is "the perfect guy" and that she can't live without him. What she learns is that, immeasurably painful though it may be, she can.

If the film's narrative structure is unnecessarily operatic -- both lovers confide in François, though he doesn't know they're a couple and neither realizes that the other knows him -- its camerawork and composition are memorably seductive. Full of long, fluid shots of Ledoyen rushing through the Parisian streets like a lascivious wood sprite perennially late for assignations, "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" overflows with so much energy and emotion it'll win you over despite its flaws. The American version has reportedly been edited down to focus on the love affair, which may explain why all the characters except Jeanne, Olivier and François seem irrelevant. This is nonetheless a sad, delightful addition to the improbable '90s renaissance of French cinema -- a single glass of champagne, with an acrid absinthe chaser. © salon.com | April 23, 1999

Assignment #8  (due on Tuesday, August 8): Taking as a possible point of departure the following excerpts from various reviewers, write your own critique of the film

1. Co-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, making their motion picture debuts, sail smoothly through potentially treacherous waters. Done incorrectly, this movie could have turned into an awkward experience, but Ducastel and Martineau are in control of the material. The movie is also characterized by genuine emotional depth and the refreshingly open attitude that the French have towards sexuality. (James Berardinelli)

 2. One thing that distinguishes "Jeanne" from its Gallic forerunners  ["The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort"] is its sexual candor. The sight of young lovers unself-consciously cuddling in bed and singing sweet nothings to each other au naturel gives the movie a jolt of romantic heat. (Stephen Holden)

 3. What the movie does best is duplicate the mid-1960s architecture and space of the Demy films and vintage Jacques Tati, so that in the early reels when passersby and extras begin to glide into step for impromptu musical numbers in the buildings and streets of Paris, the effect is genuinely magical. [...] There are, in fact, some strong connections to Demy’s work. His son Mathieu’s performance as Olivier is touching without being particularly deep, while co-director Olivier Ducastel was the sound editor on Trois places pour le 26 (1989), Demy’s final feature (Jeanne marks the classically trained Jacques Martineau’s first foray into film). "I’m wild about Demy’s films," Ducastel says in this movie’s presskit. "Though I appreciate American musicals, sometimes they bore me a little, perhaps because their primary goal is sheer entertainment. One can sing about tragedy in opera, why not in musicals?"
    "Think before you act," admonishes a pensioner during the course of this eccentric movie, and that throwaway line may sum up the uneasy and ultimately cold reality of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy: in a world capable of producing that deadly virus, the strength to sing and dance in the face of the epidemic takes more energy than some mortals possess.  (Eddie Cockrell)

 3. In the great tradition of French film ingénues, Jeanne splits the difference between feminism and misogyny -- she's an independent young woman fully in charge of her own sexuality, and she's the lithe, athletic nymphet of a million midlife-crisis fantasies. [...] To Ducastel and Martineau's credit, they stay true to the blend of sentimentality and cold realism that made Demy's films so distinctive. Jeanne wants to believe that love is forever, that Olivier is "the perfect guy" and that she can't live without him. What she learns is that, immeasurably painful though it may be, she can  (Andrew O'Hehir)

 4. As the film turns serious -- Jeanne's perfect guy has a dreaded illness -- and the people keep singing, ``Jeanne and the Perfect Guy'' takes on a real poignancy. The filmmakers know what Demy knew and what American musicals usually choose to ignore: Singing is no defense against mortality. It only feels that way. (Mick LaSalle)

5. Begging the obvious comparison to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jeanne is a similarly wispy musical with a fetching female lead, which unfortunately trips over an attempt to inject kitchen-sink detail into a musical format. Instead of a traditional musical, this is a musical set in the real world, without the expected colorful sets or production numbers. The doe-eyed Virginie Ledoyen stars as a love-hungry receptionist whose sexual perambulations lead her to Olivier (Mathieu Demy), a short-haired beauty who mentions after they’ve first slept together that he’s HIV-positive. Just because musicals traditionally deal with emblematic situations doesn’t mean the form can’t be bent to accommodate something as specific as AIDS, but the film’s concern with concrete particulars makes it rather incongruous when the characters burst into song. (And staging an ACT-UP march and not turning it into a dance number? An opportunity wasted.) The songs themselves are fairly tuneless affairs, and not particularly well-sung, even though Ledoyen’s singing voice is dubbed. (Sam Adams)

 6. From the moment a group of janitors started to sing, I was impressed and settled down for an entertaining French musical about young love.. Then I was disappointed by how the story presented itself.  Jeanne, being the promiscuous one, never contemplates the dangers of her lifestyle.  She has a boyfriend in the later stages of a sexually transmitted disease, but the movie misses the opportunity to stress the dangers of sleeping around. Standing in front of her is a person who could make her sick, but that doesn't give her a wake-up call. Virginie Ledoyen is, as always, a pleasure to watch.  An actress of remarkable talent and beauty, Ledoyen can lift a movie that might not be workable and turn it into something special (as in A Single Girl).  In Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, her charm doesn't do the job.  She is burdened by a script that glosses over a serious issue.  By the time the implications of Olivier's condition become threatening, it is too late in the film.  That's unfortunate, since musicals don't come out very often. (Bill’Movie Page Review)

 7. [...] It is a bizarre and unfortunate attempt to update the style of 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,' the 1964 classic directed by Jacques Demy, who just happens to be the father of the actor playing Olivier, Mathieu Demy.  Like 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg', the film counterpoints its tragic tale with lots of rich colours and syrupy songs. But whereas Jacques Demy somehow walked a fine line between irony and schmaltz, his son's film degenerates into inadvertent ridiculousness in the very first scene, and gets progressively more laughable whenever the music starts up and the characters start warbling. The songs are not simply bad, they're astoundingly, Springtime for Hitler bad.
"I blame the government, I blame the jails/ When a junkie croaks, no one weeps and wails," croons Demy Jr. to the tune of Mary Poppins' "Chim Chim Cheree."
"Maybe I'm in the wrong place/ Dancing with the bourgeoisie," chirps class-conscious Jeanne to a tango beat.
Even the janitors get into it: "We spend our time, cleaning for the nobs!/ We suffer in our prime, they never hear our sobs!"
Makes Coppola's One From the Heart seem good by comparison. (TL)

 8. Often they are on unexpected subjects like Tsing-tao Beer or foreign workers singing how they cannot get naturalization papers. - Most of the plot twists are predictable. - Last scene of film very different that what we would have in an American film. (Mark R. Leeper)

Film 10: Fat Girl (À ma soeur!  2001) - A film by Catherine Breillat

Catherine Breillat offers an unflinching dissection of sibling rivalry and female adolescent sexuality in this bold coming-of-age drama. Twelve-year-old Anais (Anais Reboux) is a slightly over-weight girl with the weight of the world on her shoulders, while her beautiful, fifteen-year-old sister, Elena, guides through life. Their love/hate relationship is captured perfectly during a summer vacation where Anais tags along with Elena and witnesses the corruption of her sister's innocence at the hands of an older, Italian college student. "Few movies have so effectively conveyed the alienation of adolescence, and the way children can be driven almost mad by their separation from life and love" (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune).

Addendum: Comments by Catherine Breillat (with English subtitles)

A Film Review by James Berardinelli

With Romance, Catherine Breillat's first motion picture to receive widespread international distribution, the director established herself as someone willing to break taboos in the service of a story. Romance gained notoriety for its hard-core sex scenes, but these were not designed to titillate or to widen the film's appeal. Instead, they were important to the movie's overall theme about female sexual empowerment. Fat Girl, Breillat's latest, also concerns itself with issues of female sexuality, albeit of another sort. Like Romance, the film contains images that will make puritanical viewers gasp aloud (a condom being placed on an erect penis; simulated sex involving a young, fully naked girl), and, as in the director's earlier effort, there is a point to such graphic sexual displays.

Fat Girl  is a story about sisterhood and sexual discovery. The movie, which includes far more talking than it does sex, is not designed as a tool for arousal. Breillat has worked to de-eroticize the sex scenes, allowing them to work as character-building devices and instances to support her thesis. The film does not have a positive view of men (the same was true of Romance). The male lead is presented as a user and manipulator who will say and do anything to complete a conquest. On the other hand, the girls are not exonerated either - they are presented as being as eager and curious about sex as their male counterparts. Fat Girl  also makes a point that beautiful women, who tend to be romantics, may be easier prey for seducers than ugly girls, who tend to have a more pragmatic view of gender interaction.

Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) is the overweight 12-year old sister of beautiful, svelte Elena (Roxane Mesquida). At age 15, Elena is blossoming sexually, and her fantasies are of losing her virginity to a man she loves. Anaïs, on the other hand, believes it is best to have a first sexual experience with someone when love is not involved - that way, there's no possibility of disillusionment. Anaïs and Elena have a fairly typical sibling relationship - warm and affectionate at times, contentious at others. Elena resents her parents' edict that she has to take Anaïs with her whenever she leaves the vacation house where they are staying. This becomes especially problematic when Elena meets Fernando (Libero De Rienzo), an older boy with whom she wants to explore her sexuality. Because of her sister's constant presence, she ends up losing her virginity while Anaïs is in the same room, pretending to be asleep.

Breillat's film explores the intriguing relationship of sisters as they approach sexual maturity. She depicts the solidarity and rivalry, the support and jealousy that are in constant conflict in the interaction between Anaïs and Elena. One particularly telling scene brings this to the forefront. While Elena is having her first sexual experience, Anaïs begins to cry. There are three possible reasons for the tears: (1) sadness that Anaïs' beliefs about the non-romantic nature of sex have been proven correct, (2) jealousy that her sister is experiencing something she desires but has not yet achieved, and/or (3) a sympathetic reaction to Elena's loss of innocence.

Elena's deflowering is presented as being fairly typical of what happens when an attractive girl is enraptured with an older man. Fernando is aware of Elena's feelings and uses these to his advantage. He is a master manipulator, employing all the weapons of manipulation at his disposal: guilt, jealousy, lies, promises, and threats. For her part, Elena recognizes Fernando's manipulation, but allows herself to fall under his spell because she wants there to be romance and love associated with her first time. She is an accomplice in the deception, participating by duping herself into believing that Fernando's motives are less base than they actually are.

Both lead actresses - Anaïs Reboux, making her feature début, and Roxane Mesquida - accomplish superlative jobs. It's never difficult accepting them as individuals or as siblings. Their problems and reactions are entirely credible. Solid support is provided by Libero De Rienzo as Fernando - he imbues his character with enough humanity that we never view him as a completely self-centered bastard. The film also features Arsinée Khanjian (aka Mrs. Atom Egoyan) and Romain Goupil as the sisters' mother and father.

Breillat is clearly a skilled filmmaker. She doesn't rush the sexual encounters between Elena and Fernando, and uses a series of abnormally long, unbroken shots to present these, adding an additional layer of realism. During the movie's final third, as events move towards their conclusion, she develops a burgeoning sense of menace that serves the finale well. Breillat is less certain when it comes to things like foreshadowing - in at least one instance, she is too obvious.

Fat Girl ’s ending, which is steeped in the blackest of ironies, may be unnecessarily sensationalistic. For a movie that is believable for most of its running time, such an over-the-top conclusion seems out of place. Without question, it drives home a point, but the price may not be worth the benefit. Couldn't Breillat have accomplished the same aim without compromising the tone of an otherwise insightful and perfectly-pitched motion picture? Nevertheless, Fat Girl  represents one of the most honest and unvarnished looks at the harsh side of being a teenager since Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse.  ©2001 James Berardinelli

By Stephen Holden

"Adolescent Fantasies, Rough Real Life"

Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), the title character of Catherine Breillat's incisive sexual essay "Fat Girl," is a fiercely intelligent, overweight 12-year-old loner who hides out from the world, absorbing its bitter truths from inside the self-protective envelope of her own billowing flesh. Ms. Reboux's extraordinary performance conveys Anaïs's mixture of precocious insight, animal canniness and vulnerability so powerfully that it ranks among the richest screen portrayals of a child ever filmed. And it provides a disturbing reminder that children's inner lives are as complicated (and their fantasies often as raw) as those of adults.

Much of "Fat Girl" is set at a French seaside resort where Anaïs is spending the summer with her short-tempered mother (Arsinée Khanjian), her workaholic father (Romain Goupil) and her beautiful, boy- crazy older sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida). At 15, Elena is already a sensational beauty (she suggests a much younger, more overtly sensual Parker Posey) who flaunts her sexual magnetism with a reckless bravado that conceals an underlying fear and naïveté.

When Elena meets and begins dating Fernando (Libero de Rienzo), a handsome, older Italian law student, Anaïs sullenly trails around after the couple, observing their nuzzlings, which stimulate her own nascent erotic fantasies. In the movie's funniest and sweetest moment, Anaïs bobs around in a pool improvising a scenario in which she swims back and forth between two imaginary lovers competing for her affection.

At first it seems as if Elena, who enjoys needling Anaïs about her weight, is a sadistic, agonizing thorn in her sister's side. But as the movie digs into their relationship, it shows that their mutual hatred coincides with a powerful love and a mutual understanding deep enough to allow both sisters to talk honestly about their bond and their ambivalence.

Elena trusts Anaïs enough to make her a co-conspirator in a plan to allow Fernando to sneak into the girls' shared bedroom. Anaïs cooperates, even though the sounds of the couple's lovemaking keep her awake, boiling with feelings of intense jealousy and self-loathing.

This is how Anaïs becomes a mute witness to her virginal sister's painful initiation into anal sex (Elena wants to remain a technical virgin) by the smooth-talking Fernando, who wears Elena down with insistent flattery and extravagant avowals of love that she knows are lies. At least they're lies from Elena's socialized view that the words "I love you" mean not just now but years into the future. Fernando is honest enough to emphasize the "now." But when she browbeats him into projecting a tomorrow, his vague assurances sound transparently hollow.

"Fat Girl," which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight and tomorrow at Alice Tully Hall (it opens commercially on Friday), is much more than a perfectly realized vignette about seduction. It is the latest and most powerful dispatch yet from Ms. Breillat, France's most impassioned correspondent covering the war between the sexes.

Two years ago she came up with the notorious "Romance," a portrait of a woman so frustrated by her lover's withholding of sex that she embarks on a series of bold, potentially self-destructive adventures. That film's hard-core scenes created a scandal that obscured its troubling vision of sexual power struggles and conflicting desires for security and sexual autonomy.

But "Fat Girl," which is a bit more discreet in what it shows, has a much clearer idea of what it wants to say. And it says it with a devastating concision and narrative force. Its portrait of sexual gamesmanship and the rites of teasing and coercion leads to what the director has called a "mental rape."

Because Anaïs, who witnesses the event, is an outcast, the film suggests, she has a pariah's clear insight into the true meaning. And because Ms. Mesquida and Mr. de Rienzo are a combustible pair who exude the kind of dangerous heat that you seldom if ever see in Hollywood movies about teenagers, both the pleasure and pain of the couple's two crucial encounters resonate.

"Fat Girl" builds to an abrupt whopper of an ending that it would be unfair to give away, even though the meaning of Ms. Breillat's fable is embodied in what happens in the last 10 minutes. Suffice it to say that the film compares the mental rape to a much more brutal violation, and reaches a surprising conclusion about which of the two was more damaging and why.

The buildup to that ending is a suspenseful highway sequence in which the girls' mother, stewing in a clenched, silent rage over Elena's behavior, drives her daughters home from their vacation. As their car weaves in and out of traffic on a congested highway, the daylight fades, and you have the intimations of a horrendous accident just ahead. But what takes place is no accident.  (October 8, 2001)

Film 11: Brief Crossing a.k.a. Brève Traversée (2001) - Another short film by Catherine Breillat

Plot Summary for Brève traversée

Desire for a subject that functions like a brief fling with no future as such, yet embellished by that very fact. Because something fleeting and futureless is not necessarrily pathetic or trivial. A brief crossing, perhaps an initiatory trip. Filming a guy's "first time", filming him like a girl. Gut level skin deep... Nostalgia for vast ocean liners, for places "beyond the law" where you can venture outside of life, safe within an interlude. Describing a passion while respecting classical tragedy's unity of time and place, setting the stage for the eternal play of Masculine/Feminine. A hot-blooded Latin temperatment versus an apparently cool English one. A ship - one night - Sudden intimacy between an Englishwoman whose complexion is frosted by bitterness and a teenager whose gaze glows like ardent coals (Summary written by Catherine Breillat)

Addendum: Comments by Catherine Breillat (with English subtitles)

Two reviews

a) by Don Willmott

Director Catherine Breillat has made a few very interesting films simply by taking a damaged woman and a damaged man, squeezing them into a weird relationship, letting them indulge in some troubling sex, and then forcing them to talk about it. The best example is her notorious 1999 effort Romance, in which the woman talks to her boyfriend’s naked crotch as often as she talks to his face, but equally interesting is Brief Crossing, a two-character tango that takes place during one night on an English Channel ferry.

French teenager Thomas (Gilles Guillain) boards the British-bound ferry, finds a place to drop his backpack, and then heads for the cafeteria. While sliding his tray down the line, he gallantly helps Alice (Sarah Pratt) with her dishes and silverware. They sit together in the crowded restaurant, and the dance begins.

For a kid who’s only about 17 (he keeps changing his age) but looks more like 14, Thomas is a cocky guy, perfectly comfortable sliding right into flirtation with the much older Alice, who, despite her chattiness, is deeply mysterious. She reveals that she’s returning to England after the dissolution of a long relationship. Thomas smells blood in the water and flirts even harder, but soon Alice is parrying with force, giving all her opinions about men and relationships and sex, mocking Thomas for being a mere child.

The conversation moves to the ship’s bar, where a magic act takes place on stage while Alice throws back brandies and Thomas watches carefully to see if she may be getting just drunk enough. The more world-weary and belligerent Alice gets, the younger Thomas seems, and yet the younger he seems, the more she seems to be attracted to him. It’s a long dance of seduction played out with recriminations, body language, and looks, but it’s clear where this is all going. Just when Thomas’s nerves are stretched to the breaking point, the couple makes their way to Alice’s cabin.

The graphic sex scene that follows is a battle unto itself, with Alice the obvious winner. Like any horny teenager in this situation, Thomas is suddenly totally in love and immediately begins planning for their life together in England. But Alice’s eyes tell a different story.

By the time the ship docks, Alice’s true cruelty is revealed, upending the conventional wisdom about the inherent dishonesty of men and the typical victimhood of women who find themselves used and discarded by men.

It’s quite a boat ride, and it’s a quick one. Coming in at about 80 minutes, Brief Crossing is brief indeed, but it packs several gut punches along the way. Make this a date movie, and you’ll have plenty to talk about when it’s over. © 2004 filmcritic.com

b) By J. Hoberman

“Self-Referential Breillat in a Midwinter Night's Sex Comedy”

Straight to DVD, at least in the U.S., Brief Crossing demonstrates that Catherine Breillat is perfectly capable of directing a conventional narrative. The poet laureate of teenage sex here revels in the hormone-addled tango of a shipboard romance between a diffident French adolescent (Gilles Guillain) and an oddly bitter Englishwoman at least twice his age (Sarah Pratt). He's just a bit clumsy; she's nervously talkative and full of hostile generalizations about male sexual attitudes. This gemlike comedy of manners, composed largely of long behavioral takes—including a textbook-level scene shot in the ship's bar—is a bracingly cynical addition to the current cycle of tadpolian romances. If Brief Crossing were Fat Girl, the movie would end with the boat hitting an iceberg. It's not. Still, Breillat has succeeded in cooking up a brief encounter so captivating that although plenty of evidence is strategically planted, one barely sees the punchline coming. © The Village Voice (October 12th, 2004)

Assignment # 9 (due Thursday, August 10): Compare and contrast Brief Crossing and Fat Girl, taking into account for the latter the following comment by Ed Gonzales: “With the final moments of Fat Girl, Breillat likens sex to the allure of a road accident waiting to happen. The director toys with the sensation of horror, and this brilliantly mounted sequence traffics in sexual initiation. The film’s forceful gaze flirts with imminent danger when monster trucks threaten to destroy Anaïs, Elena, and their crazed mother during a car trip home. A boogeyman appears, windows are shattered (not unlike Elena's virginity), and Breillat's brilliantly and forcibly fulfills a prophecy. The scene is confrontational, for sure, but it’s not a passive act of resistance—it’s a philosophical wish fulfillment and empowerment ritual. Anaïs always knew the first time should never be about love, and so she accepts her faith and continues to author sex completely under her own terms.”

Film 12. Thomas in love (Thomas est amoureux, 2000) - A film by Pierre-Paul Renders

SYNOPSIS: Thomas is a young agoraphobic man; he's afraid of coming to any kind of contact with other people, so he lives totaly isolated in his appartment. The story takes place in the near future where everything can be done through computers, so Thomas hasn't left his appartment for eight straight years. However, although his life seems complete, he misses human contact, so his psychoanalyst consults him to meet a woman through some on-line service. Is it possible for Thomas to fall in love with a woman? And if so, is he going to get out of his appartment for that woman?

Addendum: Comments (with English subtitles) by Pierre-Paul Renders

Reviews

a) By Dave Kehr

"Love in the Time of Computers"

Thomas in Love," a Belgian film directed by Pierre-Paul Renders, is an entertaining stunt: a movie related totally from the perspective of a computer. Mr. Renders simply turns the movie screen into a blown-up image of Thomas's monitor, making the other characters images on that screen. As long as it remains a stunt, the film is sly and amusing, though it takes an unfortunate plunge into pop psychology in its final act.

The computer in question is the property and exclusive lifeline of Thomas Thomas (Benoît Verhaert), a young man so gripped by agoraphobia that he has not left his apartment in nearly nine years. In the not-so-distant future in which the film, which opens today at Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village), takes place, Thomas has most of his needs met by a generous and helpful insurance company. (Things do seem to have evolved significantly in at least that industry), These needs include regular meetings with a psychotherapist (Frédéric Topart).

Thomas conducts his limited interpersonal relationships through the medium of the visiophone, an evolution of the Internet that brings high-quality audio and video of his interlocutors to his computer desktop. With the help of an optional input device that looks like a cross between a Victorian corset and a television antenna, it is possible to enjoy a tactile simulation of sex, an activity that fills many of Thomas's empty hours.

Though Thomas is a dedicated client of a Web site called Sextoons, which provides computer-animated partners who look like airbrushed Alberto Vargas pinups, his therapist has insisted on signing him up with an online dating service, in the hope that he might meet a real woman who could pull him out of his shell.

Though we never see Thomas's face, we hear a lot of his dryly sarcastic voice as he interviews and dismisses numerous potential mates. His interest settles briefly on Melodie (Magali Pinglaut), a spacey innocent who creates video poems about her feet. But after a disastrous attempt at cybersex with her, he drops the dating service and turns instead to an online brothel, where he hopes to find a less demanding relationship.

Instead, he finds Eva (Aylin Yay), a convicted criminal who has been forced into prostitution as an alternative sentence in this compassionate futureworld. When Thomas first sees the blond, fragile Eva, she is crying — a revelation of vulnerability that is enough to make Thomas fall in love with her. They are both prisoners, after all: one physically, one emotionally.

Very pleased with this metaphor, Mr. Renders milks it far beyond its actual value in the film's final third, which finds Thomas deciding to risk his life by venturing into the real world for a real encounter with a real woman. The restricted point of view, so engaging at first, becomes a liability as Mr. Renders strains to develop our sympathy for Thomas, who, as an invisible, intangible and fairly obnoxious figure, stubbornly resists it.

Absent its stylistic dazzle, "Thomas in Love" amounts to little more than another blandly therapeutic relationship drama in which the issue is risk versus reward, and the outcome is never in doubt. But the film is full of ingenious details and effective character sketches (Thomas has a mother who would give Woody Allen the willies) that go a long way toward covering up its conventionalities. © NYT Film Review,  August 3, 2001.

b)  by Steve Rhodes

Thomas in Love (Thomas est amoureux)  is rather like a reality TV version of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," updated for a high bandwidth Internet future. Although it overstays its welcome a bit, it is an intriguing film about an agoraphobic, Thomas Thomas (Benoît Verhaert), who obtains sex and companionship only through his computer. Although he gets both, neither provides a very satisfying substitute for real flesh-and-blood encounters. Thomas hasn't left his apartment in eight years and hasn't let anyone in either. We see only what he sees on his monitor, and it's not clear whether we'll ever see him.

The film, set in some indefinite time in the future, manages to find insightful things to say about everything from the importance of relationships to the need for real sex to the scary consequences of a nanny state. It even skewers insurance companies by pointing out that too much care can sometimes be a bad thing. The film is funny, sad and frequently downright weird with the bizarre facial paint that people in the future wear. Of course, how would metal spikes through someone's nose, lip or eyebrow have been thought of by someone in the nineteenth century? Tastes change and not always for the better.

Although the movie starts as Thomas, in his cybersex suit, has sex in zero gravity with his long-time virtual companion Clara, the movie spends most of the time in conversation mode as Thomas tries to cope with his illness. Clara, a "sextoon," doesn't appear again until late in the picture when he plays her in a game of strip poker. She conveniently deals him four jacks.

Thomas gets everything he needs with his visiophone. Sometimes he is connected to a real person, and other times he reaches a canned video. His psychologist (Frédéric Topart) is authorized by his insurance agency to arrange for him to have a companion from a dating club called Catch-a-Heart. These "dates," however, are really nothing more than prostitutes. The film gives us a glimpse at how the women come to join such a service.

Much like watching "The Dating Game," we keep wondering whether Thomas will choose bachelorette number one, the tearful and mysteriously sad Eva (Aylin Yay), or bachelorette number two, the immature but exuberant Mélodie (Magali Pinglaut). Another possibility is that he might go nuts and blow his brains out before ever coming to a final decision. He might even do something more frightening still. He just might leave his apartment. This much is certain, there's incredible profit to be made if some entrepreneur could just come up with the right product tie-in for the movie.

Assignment #10 (due, Tuesday, August 15): After listening to the young filmmaker’s comments and reading Dave Kher's “Love in the Time of Computers” and Steve Rhodes's comments, write your own review of Thomas in Love

Film 13. Secret Things (Choses secrètes, 2002) - A film by Jean-Claude Brisseau

Tagline: The delectably twisted fable centers on two penniless but shapely young women who set out to better their social station by manipulating men.

SYNOPSIS: Two young women find themselves struggling to survive in Paris, street-wise Nathalie, a stripper, and naïve Sandrine, a barmaid. Together, they discover that sex can be used to their advantage, and pleasure. Both find positions in the office of a large bank, where bored, under-stimulated, prey are easy pickings. After making their way though several layers of executives at the bank, with destructive, and lucrative, results, they approach Christophe, scion to the bank director. What they don't know is that Christophe is a manipulative voyeur, whose last two lovers set themselves on fire when he rejected them. A connoisseur of high-class orgies, Christophe is only interested in new talent to satisfy the appetites of all whom he controls. In Christophe, the girls have found an opponent who knows all their wiles, and will challenge their simple under-class friendship with levels of jealousy and ecstasy that they have never experienced before. Will they survive?

a) Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A feminine version of Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men about hustling your way to the top in the workplace. French writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau's ("Noce Blanche") personal obsession film is a forceful but utterly preposterous erotic fable that misses the mark as an arthouse film but succeeds, I think, as one of beguiling softcore-porn lesbian melodrama, thanks to the wonderful performances by the two erotic actresses who surprisingly for a film like this can also act. Brisseau is a protégé of Eric Rohmer, who despite this film's kinkiness and decadence aims to make it in its more subtle moments (few and far between) a morality tale revolving around class struggle and fear of never expressing one's true desires. It's a well crafted film with a certain amount of intelligence and witty dialogue, but gets submerged in so many other tawdry similar soap opera tales and an overbaked attempt to say something meaningful by saying something ridiculous. Unfortunately the risible story line leads the viewer on in an exploitative manner befitting such a bizarre and trashy concept, until it settles in as a film that has enough of the societal unacceptable and perverse in a relationship to possibly satisfy even the most jaded libertine hedonist with incest, lesbian romance, a ménage à trois in the workplace, a manipulative adultery between a man and a woman, a Devil-inspired orgy and finally a murder.

It's a story about two young chicks with hot bods, the naive Sandrine (Sabrina Seyvecou) and the worldly (Coralie Revel), who get bounced by the pig owner of the strip club for not prostituting themselves for his customers in addition to their regular jobs--Nathalie is the featured naked erotic dancer who gets off when the customers get overexcited while ogling her and Sandrine the barmaid, who looks up to the nihilist philosophizing dancer as a role-model. Sandrine moves into Nathalie's pad after they tell each other that they're not lesbos. Nathalie takes on the role of mentor--teaching her apt pupil how to masturbate and get off, be an exhibitionist who digs the attention as a form of sexual stimulation, fend off men who want a quick bang and how to make suitors want her so much they go crazy as she fakes loving them and when they fall in love how to break their heart by rejecting them for another woman. The bitchy soulmates become passionate lovers and soon extend their private dare games out in the public (they masturbate in the station of the Metro), and then set out to prove that they can use their sexual powers to climb the corporate ladder. They both dress up as yuppie professionals and get secretarial jobs in the same established financial firm with the purpose of getting those in power to fall so much in love with them that they lose their inhibitions and then they will exert power over them by reversing the way men usually use women in the workplace.

Sandrine sets her sights on the workaholic 49-year-old happily married man with two teenage children who never cheated on his wife, the mild mannered CEO Delacroix (Roger Mirmont). He's the trusted second in command to the firm's elderly dying founder, Monsieur Barnay, who proves to be an easy and pitiful mark as she quickly rises to become his personal secretary and lover. Nathalie entertains the top boy, the firm's handsome bad boy and emotionally cold and dangerously manipulative General Director Christophe Barnay (Fabrice Deville), the spoiled hedonist son of the bank founder who will inherit the whole works when his dad dies. He has a younger sister, Charlotte (Blandine Bury), who he treats as his lover. Christophe has a history of scoring many women and then cruelly dumping them, even driving two of them to commit suicide by setting fire to themselves in his presence. But things don't go as Nathalie plans, as she disobeys her rule book on romance and falls in love with the Machiavellian Christophe. When Christophe proves too much for Nathalie, the mousy Sandrine will take over the challenge of the game and transform herself into a daring femme fatale. But because of her real passionate love for Christophe (disobeying what she learned from her mentor) the film will build to a truly bitter unromantic off-the-wall ending that makes it hard for me to believe that anyone can take it seriously, including the filmmaker. I wouldn't entirely dismiss it, but I would be reluctant to say I found too much about it that warmed my heart and appeased my soul.

This titillating erotic fantasy film was named Film of the Year by the reputable Cahiers du Cinéma, proving that sex sells even to hardened critics, especially, when the performers can get you hot.

b) Reviewed by Dave Kehr

"Seduction as Corporate Strategy"

The French cinema, thankfully, still has room for eccentrics, directors whose films compulsively pursue personal obsessions, whether or not they intersect with a wide public.

At the moment there may be no director more eccentric working in France than Jean-Claude Brisseau, a self-taught filmmaker and former public school teacher. Mr. Brisseau's subjects have ranged from the life of children in France's notoriously dysfunctional public-housing projects ("De Bruit et de Fureur," 1988) to adolescents on the run ("Les Savates du Bon Dieu," 2000) [...]

Mr. Brisseau's most obsessive subject is sex, particularly as it exercises its hypnotic influence over members of different generations, older men and younger women, and, more subversively, older women and younger men. "Secret Things," which opens today at the Quad in Greenwich Village, is a frequently overheated, often delirious fantasy about two Parisiennes in their early 20's, the exotic dancer Natalie and the shy ex-suburbanite Sandrine.

Co-workers in a strip club, the women become friends and roommates, and Natalie initiates the conservative, uncertain Sandrine into the pleasures of unbridled female sexuality. But pleasure also becomes business when the two resolve to use their sexual powers to conquer the male-dominated business world, represented by the private bank where Sandrine gets a job as a secretary and begins seducing her way to the top.

Mr. Brisseau is a protégé of the great Eric Rohmer, though it isn't easy to see Mr. Rohmer's elegant touch in Mr. Brisseau's often blunt, pulpy imagery, as when he demonstrates the disdain for mere money of Christophe, the bank's arrogant heir apparent, by having him set fire to a handful of 500-euro bills.

Mr. Brisseau may pay lip service to postfeminist ideas of female empowerment through seduction, but his actual concerns seem to be less intellectual than frankly carnal. As the two friends compete to see who will be the first to conquer and tame the elusive Christophe (a Sadean libertine in his own right), Mr. Brisseau stages some rousingly voyeuristic sex scenes that, while stopping short of hard-core pornography, feature combinations seldom seen outside the oeuvre of Jenna Jameson.

Nathalie and Sandrine inevitably suggest the sex-besotted and violence-crazed heroines of Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trin Thi's 2000 "Baise-Moi," though Mr. Brisseau does not approach the radically disruptive vision of that film, finding a strange comfort in the notion that men are still the most perverse and most ruthless power players on the sexual battleground.

Viewers of "Secret Things" will find it impossible not to allow a snicker to occasionally escape, as the film's lurid plot unfolds into ever more preposterous developments. But there is no denying the force of Mr. Brisseau's bizarre imagination and the personal conviction he brings to it. (Published: February 20, 2003)

c) Reviewed by Daniel Kasman

If Eyes Wide Shut  never quite cashed in on its own potential for humor Jean-Claude Brisseau pays Kubrick a wonderful homage by making his erotic social drama hilariously grandiose.  Opening with a sweaty, sexy Nathalie gyrating to on-again-off again classical music while a menacing spirit hovers in the background, Secret Things  rarely lets up; its overwhelmingly potent mixture of unabashed eroticism, voyeuristic self-awareness, comedic self-awareness, and quasi-operatic power struggles are utterly seductive.

After her glorious exhibitionist performance Nathalie is fired from the erotic club she works at along with her younger, more bashful and inexperienced co-worker Sandrine when they refuse to grant sexual favors to the club’s customers.  Though the line between masturbating to an avid audience and sleeping with a member of that audience seems slim, after Sandrine moves into Nathalie’s apartment the later admits that such exhibitionism turns her on.  Envious, Sandrine comes under the deep, coldy alluring gaze of the more experienced women, who first talks Sandrine through masturbating in front of her, then covertly removing bra and panties in public, masturbating in the subway, and later strutting around the streets wearing nothing but an overcoat.  Initially playful, the jobless girls eventually acquire an agenda-use their new found “daring” to rise through the corporate ladder of dull office work (when Sandrine suggests more interesting careers such as movies or fashion Nathalie, still teaching the youth the ropes, remarks that girls like them are a dime a dozen).  The idea that what they are planning on doing to corporate bosses is only marginally different than the very act they refused to give into at the film’s start seems to go right over the aspiring girls’ heads.  Here Secret Things abruptly switches from a femme Fight Club-like story about the dynamic between the two women as one teaches the other to break social norms to an opportunistic, erotic portrait of the bland corporate world, where the women attract every man they work with.

Inexplicably Nathalie is left aside in the story and the film firmly focuses on Sandrine, who occasionally narrates from sometime in the future.   While remaining the perfect employee-hard working, friendly and highly and unusually ethical-she eventually finds the best target for career climbing in M. Delacroix, a kind, handsone but ordinary family man who is second in charge of the firm.  Sandrine easily ropes in the older man using Nathalie’s techniques of overt sexual play, constant teasing and ridiculous amounts of sexiness, quickly making the charming older man fall for her.  Sandrine, however, feels nothing; she fakes her way through the job and through Delacroix’s love and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the firm’s mysterious CEO, the womanizing Christophe, played with arrogant, hardbodied, smug perfection by Fabrice Deville.  He represents the ultimate goal, not just as the man at the top of the social food chain but also as a man who has a reputation for manipulating countless women the way Nathalie and Sandrine manipulate men.  (He hilariously has the reputation of having several girls light themselves on fire due to the torment of their love for him).

The manipulating femmes become sucked into a world of sexual comeuppance and by the time they think they have risen themselves onto Christophe’s level they find themselves in a parody world straight out of Eyes Wide Shut  - that of the conspiratory, philosophizing rich with their bizarre sexual entwinement and extravagant self-importance.  Coated in ostentatious and overblown selections of Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach we watch Sandrine and Nathalie gorge themselves with the empowerment of their voyeur mind games-just as we are sucked in by Brisseau’s always beautiful, warm camera work and the, er, more primal pleasure of incessantly grinding and exposed beautiful young actresses.  The ethical differences between the women and the incestuous, power-mad, god-like Christophe are not far apart and they are all as wrapped up in their erotic power struggles as we are.  Brisseau knows it as well, and he keeps Secret Things plowing along in its eroticism as it gets more perverse and over the top.  While the typically class-conscious ironic ending is a bit of a let down after such gradual and meticulously paced erotic class-climbing, and points to the film probably being more devilish and exciting than meaningful, as it also is in Brisseau’s 1994 pseudo-noir The Black Angel, the ride was great while it lasts. (Reviewed March 23, 2004)

d) by Roger Ebert

"Secret Things" is a rare item these days: An erotic film made well enough to keep us interested. It's about beautiful people, has a lot of nudity, and the sex is as explicit as possible this side of porno. If you enjoyed "Emmanuelle," you will think this is better. And, like Bertolucci's more considerable film "Dreamers," it will remind you of the days when movies dealt as cheerfully with sex as they do today with action. Of course it is French.

What is amazing is how seriously the French take it. I learn from Film Journal International that "Secret Things" was named Film of the Year by Cahiers du  Cinéma, the magazine that brought Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Rohmer into the world, and became the bible of the auteur theory. But then Cahiers has long been famous for jolting us out of our complacency by advocating the outrageous.

The movie is an erotic thriller that opens with a woman alone on a sofa, doing what such women do on such sofas in such movies. The camera slowly draws back to reveal the location: A strip club. We hear the voice of the narrator, Sandrine, who is a bartender in the club and new to this world; she needed the job. When she seems reluctant to have sex with the customers, the performer, named Nathalie tells her that is her right, and they are both fired.

Sandrine cannot go to her flat because she is behind on the rent. Nathalie invites her to spend the night with her. You see how these situations develop in erotic fiction. They have a tête-à-tête, and vice versa. We hear frank, revealing and well-written dialogue about their sexual feelings. Nathalie is a realist about sex, she says. When it comes to pleasure, she is more interested in herself than in her partners, who are non-participants in the erotic theater of her mind. What turns her on is being watched by strangers, and although Sandrine is shocked at first, in no time at all they are doing things in a Metro station that would get you arrested if you were not in a movie.

"Let's climb the social ladder," Nathalie suggests to Sandrine. They target a small but wealthy company whose co-founder is about to die. His son, a notorious rake and pervert, will inherit. Sandrine gets a job as a secretary and is provocative in just such a way as to attract the attention of the other co-founder, Delacroix . Soon she is his private secretary, and almost immediately his lover; her boldness in seducing him shows a nerve that is almost more interesting than her technique. She has him so completely in her power, she feels sorry for the poor guy.

Sandrine arranges for Nathalie to be hired by the company, and soon they have both fallen into the orbit of Christophe, the son and heir. This is a disturbed man. As a child, he watched his mother die and sat for days beside her body. As an adult, he has been such a cruel lover than not one but two women committed suicide by setting themselves afire in front of him. He has a sister, Charlotte (Blandine Bury), and feels about her as such men do in such movies.

If the film is erotic on the surface, its undercurrent is as hard and cynical as "In the Company of Men." The difference is that, this time, women are planning the cruel jokes and deceptions -- or they would like to think they are. The writer and director, Jean-Claude Brisseau, devises an ingenious plot that involves corporate intrigue and blackmail, double-crossing and sabotage, and sex as the key element in the control of the country.

And all the time, Sandrine's narration adds another element. She is detached, observant and a little sad in her comments on the action; unlike an American narrator, who would try to be steamy, she talks to us like one adult to another, commenting on what she really felt, who she felt sorry for, what she regretting having to do, and who she trusted but shouldn't have. The ending, which resolves all the plotting and intrigue with clockwork precision, is ironic not like a Hitchcock film, but like a French homage to Hitchcock; Truffaut's "The Bride Wore Black," perhaps.

The film is well made, well acted, cleverly written, photographed by Wilfrid Sempé as if he's a conspirer with the sexual schemers. There's an especially effective scene where Nathalie stands behind an open door and drives poor Delacroix frantic as co-workers pass by right outside. The movie understands that even powerful men can be rendered all but helpless by women with sufficient nerve. "Secret Things" is not the Film of the Year, or even of the fortnight, but it is a splendid erotic film with a plot so cynical that we're always kept a little off-balance. (April 30, 2004)

Assignment #11 (due with the take-home final, August 17:   See if you agree or disagree with Roger Ebert’s review of Secret Things:  “Secret Things” is a rare item these days: An erotic film made well enough to keep us interested. It's about beautiful people, has a lot of nudity, and the sex is as explicit as possible this side of porno. If you enjoyed "Emmanuelle," you will think this is better. And, like Bertolucci's more considerable film "Dreamers," it will remind you of the days when movies dealt as cheerfully with sex as they do today with action. Of course it is French.”
 
 

Additional films of interest...

1. Last Tango in Paris  (Bertolucci, 1972))
    While looking for an apartment, Jeanne, a beautiful young Parisienne, encounters Paul, a mysterious American expatriate mourning his wife's recent suicide. Instantly drawn to each other, they have a stormy, passionate affair, in which they do not reveal their names to each other. Their relationship deeply affects their lives, as Paul struggles with his wife's death and Jeanne prepares to marry her fiancé Tom, a film director making a cinema-verite documentary about her
    A lot has been said about the sex in the film; in fact, "Last Tango in Paris" has become notorious because of its sex. There is a lot of sex in this film--more, probably, than in any other legitimate feature film ever made--but the sex isn't the point, it's only the medium of exchange. Paul has somehow been so brutalized by life that there are only a few ways he can still feel.
    Sex is one of them, but only if it is debased and depraved--because he is so filled with guilt and self-hate that he chooses these most intimate of activities to hurt himself beyond all possibilities of mere thoughts and words. It is said in some quarters that the sex in the movie is debasing to the girl, but I don't think it is. She's almost a bystander, a witness at the scene of the accident. She hasn't suffered enough, experienced enough, to more than dimly guess at what Paul is doing to himself with her. But Paul knows, and so does Bertolucci; only an idiot would criticize this movie because the girl is so often naked but Paul never is. That's their relationship. (Roger Ebert)

1 bis. The Dreamers  (Bertolucci, 2003)
     Bertolucci ‘s film, like "Last Tango," takes place largely in a vast Parisian apartment. It is about transgressive sex. Outside the windows, there are riots in the streets, and indeed, in a moment of obvious symbolism, a stone thrown through a window saves the lives of the characters, the revolution interrupting their introverted triangle.
    The three characters are Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American from San Diego who is in Paris to study for a year but actually spends all of his time at the Cinémathèque, and the twins Isabelle (Eva Green) and Théo (Louis Garrel), children of a famous French poet and his British wife. They also spend all of their time at the movies. Almost the first thing Isabelle tells Matthew is, "You're awfully clean for someone who goes to the cinema so much."
    [...]But "The Dreamers" is not Bertolucci's version of Trivial Pursuit. Within the apartment, sex becomes the proving ground and then the battle ground for the revolutionary ideas in the air. Matthew meets the twins at the Cinematheque during a demonstration in favor of Langlois (Bertolucci intercuts newsreel footage of Jean-Pierre Leaud in 1968 with new footage of Leaud today, and we also get glimpses of Truffaut, Godard and Nicholas Ray). They invite him back to their parents' apartment. The parents are going to the seaside for a month, and the twins invite him to stay.
At first it is delightful. "I have at last met some real Parisians!" Matthew writes his parents. Enclosed in the claustrophobic world of the apartment, he finds himself absorbed in the sexual obsessions of the twins. He glimpses one night that they sleep together, naked. Isabelle defeats Theo in a movie quiz and orders him to masturbate (on his knees, in front of a photo of Garbo). Theo wins a quiz and orders Matthew to make love to his sister. Matthew is sometimes a little drunk, sometimes high, sometimes driven by lust, but at the bottom he knows this is wrong, and his more conventional values set up the ending of the film, in which sex and the cinema are engines, but politics is the train.
    The film is extraordinarily beautiful. Bertolucci is one of the great painters of the screen. He has a voluptuous way here of bathing his characters in scenes from great movies, and referring to others. Sometimes his movie references are subtle, and you should look for a lovely one. Matthew looks out a window as rain falls on the glass, and the light through the window makes it seem that the drops are running down his face. (Roger Ebert)

2. La Lectrice [The Reader] (Deville, 1988)
    Constance is in bed with her boyfriend when he asks her to read aloud to him. As she reads, she begins to imagine herself as the heroine of the story. The story Constance reads is about Marie, a young woman who needs employment and takes an ad in the paper, offering to read aloud to people. Marie finds that a surprising number of clients want to take advantage of her services - and, as she reads for them, she begins to enter into their lives.
    This is the elegant, Chinese-box structure of Michel Deville's "La Lectrice," and one of the pleasures of the film is the way Deville moves up and down through the various levels of the story, and then sideways through the sometimes devious motives of the clients who hire the reader. Only someone who loves to read would understand how one person can become another, can enter into the life of a person in a book. That is what happens in this movie.
    Marie is played by Miou-Miou as a solemn woman who comes to care about her clients. There are several, each one with a different problem (and probably with a different "real" reason why he wants to be read aloud to). There is a young boy who has been gravely injured in an accident, and fears for his potency. He wants Marie to read him passionate poetry - and he falls in love with her, identifying her with the poems. An old woman, once filled with fire and conviction, hires Marie to read to her, for one last time, the writers like Tolstoy and Marx who once inspired her. A busy mother hires Marie to read "Alice in Wonderland" to her small daughter. And a rich investor probably wants her to read him pornography, but is reluctant to say so, and so gets respectable erotica instead.
    Each client's book reflects the nature of his or her fantasy, and Marie, of course, understands that immediately. As she reads to them, a curious process begins to take place. She becomes, in a way, the author of the books. The teenager idealizes her as a romantic. The old lady thinks she is an intellectual. The little girl sees her as a mother figure. And the businessman, of course, wants to sleep with her.
    What is intriguing is that Marie starts to identify with the books, and so is almost able to see herself as lover, confidant, mother and prostitute.
    "La Lectrice" is a movie in love with words - deliriously intoxicated by the stories and images in the pages that Marie reads. [...]
    I hope I have not made "La Lectrice" sound too difficult, or dryly intellectual. This is a sensuous film from beginning to end, a film that is all the more seductive because it teases the imagination. As the reader becomes the books she reads, we become the people she reads to.
    And so, in our imaginations, we see her in all of her roles. In some scenes she is sweet, in others thoughtful, in others carnal. The film is a demonstration that we rarely can understand the secret minds of people, so therefore upon their exteriors we project our own fantasies. When the movie was over, I wanted to go out and find the novel by Raymond Jean that the screenplay is based on. I didn't want to read it. I wanted someone to read it to me. (Roger Ebert)

3. Overseas (Outre-mer, 1990 - Brigitte Roüan)
    Overseas is the story of three sisters living in Frenchn Algeria in the period from after World War II until the return of de Gaulle to power (and the imminent withdrawal of the French from Algeria). The story is told three times with each sister as the narrative focus each time. Each sister's reactions to the events around them is recorded: one trapped by her provincialism and Catholicism has her sensuous instincts blocked at every turn, and almost oblivious to the changes happening around her; one is practical, but is pressured into marrying a dreamer when she really wanted a strong man and winds up with one she must protect from financial ruin and assassination; the third and youngest is a volunteer nurse who crosses the line between the "colons" and the Algerian nationalists.
    Roüan as writer and director, ably assisted by cinematographer Chapuis, controls and manipulates the three point-of-view stories deftly and with great clarity, to say nothing of wit. Each time we go through a scene like the initial airplane landing we learn new details, see new textures, understand more deeply what is really going on under the surfaces and off in the shadows on the edges. Roüan and Chapuis mix naturalism with bold touches of near-Greenaway stylizations.
I highly recommend this highly crafted, witty, ironic, and insightful film at full price. I hope you get a chance to see it. (Frank Moloney)

 4. La Femme Nikita (Besson, 1990)
    Nikita's sexual politics are outrageous. Director Luc Besson, makes an amusing fetish of putting huge guns in his heroine's delicate hands. Sometimes, however, the degradation gets all too literal.  In one scene, sheathed in a black mini-dress, Nikita escapes a gang of killers by slithering down a restaurant garbage chute into a trash bin. Weeping, she walks home barefoot in the rain, her high heels in her hands, her stockings artfully laddered and smeared with blood.  Despite the movie's cartoon-like sexism, it is hard not to be dazzled by Besson's technique.  The action scenes are rivetting.  The director's visual  flair makes Nikita the most stylish French thriller since Diva (1981).  And Parillaud performs with startling intensity--even when Besson treats her less like an actress than a model being put through her paces.  Both avenger and victim, Nikita is the latest prototype in France's search for the ultimate femme fatale. Brian D. Johnson.

 5. The Lover (Annaud, 1992)
    The Lover  is director Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras' minimalist 1984 novel, a book translated in 43 languages. Set in French Indochina in 1929, the film explores the erotic charge of forbidden love. Jane March plays a French teenager sent to a Saigon boarding school, while Tony Leung is a 32-year Chinese aristocrat. They look at each and they both see a blinding white flash; it's kismet. He offers her a ride in his limousine and soon they meet in his "bachelor room" where they revel in a wide variety of creative sexual encounters. However, they both realize their love is doomed. She comes from a troubled family that includes a mentally-disturbed mother and drug-addicted brother. It also appears that her family would not approve of an interracial tryst. But then neither would his family, since in order to inherit his father's wealth, he must not break from a traditional Chinese arranged marriage. Lawrence Russell
    This film is about sex, make no mistake. It's about sex and the politics of sex... and politics are in some measure about the manufacturing of lies. Lies only exist when we are afraid of some raw, defining truth. The ease with which the French girl lies to her family is typical of sexual hunger and the need to conceal its ritual. Brother Pierre knows better, of course. When he sees the diamond ring, he knows. Why would this Chinaman give his sister the diamond belonging to his dead mother? Sex. He grabs her discarded panties from her bed, sniffs them, says, "Smells of Chinese..." The humour here slides past in the black absurdity. They fight, as hate is a condition of poverty. His mother can never give him enough money, and now his sister is the provider.

6. Will it Snow For Christmas? (Sandrine Veysset, 1997)
[...] In a sense, Will It Snow for Christmas?  is a pastoral horror film, complete with bogeyman and faintly moralistic sexual subtext (this is a picture in which Mom comforts her little ones by telling them about a dream in which their existence in her life is a punishment meted out by God). Its pleasures, such as they are, tend to be incidental rather than cumulative; Veysset's aesthetic and emotional rigor occasionally gives her tale a plodding quality, and what little narrative there is gradually appears to be building towards an obvious, distressingly fatalistic finale -- it's like Fassbinder's idea of a family film. (Alliteration unintentional.) Happily, the movie doesn't quite get there, but nor does it truly arrive anywhere else -- it has what playwright Christopher Durang calls a "dot dot dot" conclusion, in which it's clear that nothing fundamental has changed, or is likely to do so anytime soon. (If the film were to continue for another hour and a half, I can't imagine that the second half would be demonstrably different from the first.) The lack of closure is entirely redeemed, however, by an exquisite, heartbreaking final shot -- it may amount to nothing more than a respite, but it's achingly beautiful all the same.

7. Nénette & Boni  (Claire Denis, 1997)
    There's an offhand cockiness to the characters in ''Nénette et Boni'' that reminded me of ``Jules and Jim'' and the other early Truffaut films where characters acted tough but were really emotional pushovers. Boni, a dreamy 19-year-old kid in Marseilles, shoots his pellet gun at a neighbor's cat, but has untapped reserves of romanticism and tenderness. It's Nénette, his 15-year-old sister, who's been tempered by life.
    Claire Denis, the gifted French director, tells their story as if we already knew it. There are throwaway details, casual asides, events that are implied rather than shown. This creates a paradoxical feeling: We don't know as much, for sure, as we would in a conventional film, but we somehow feel more familiar with characters because of her approach.
    Nénette and Boni are the survivors of an apparently ugly divorce. After the breakup, Nénette lived with her father, and Boni with his mother. Now Boni lives alone, and one day Nénette turns up, seven months pregnant. She doesn't want the baby, but it's too late for an abortion, and so she accepts approaching motherhood with a grim indifference. Boni, on the other hand, is thrilled; he cares tenderly for the young mother-to-be, and dotes on every detail of the pregnancy.
    They form, if you will, a couple. Not one based on incestuous feelings, but on mutual need and weakness: Boni provides what emotional hope Nenette lacks, and her pregnancy adds a focus and purpose to his own life. It is something real. And reality is what he's been lacking in a love life based largely on his inflamed fantasies about the plump wife of the local baker.
    'Nénette et Boni'' is one of those movies that is saturated with sensuality but not with explicit detail. One of the most extended sex scenes involves Boni kneading pizza dough; what he does to the dough he does, in his imagination, to the baker's wife, and that is going to be one happy pizza.
    Boni is sort of a moody kid, who keeps a pet rabbit and is apt to fall thunderstruck into long reveries of speculation or desire. The approaching childbirth is a reality check for him; we sense it will be one of the positive, defining moments of his life. About Nénette we aren't so optimistic. There are vague, alarming possibilities about the father of her child--the film acts like a family member that knows more than it says--and it may be years before Nénette recovers her emotional health.

8.  Artemisia  (Agnès Merlet, 1997)
    For its first two-thirds, Agnès Merlet's Artemisia is a fine examination of the process of creating art and the inextricable (if sometimes tenuous) link that binds it to sexuality. However, while the movie's final half-hour is adequate as a melodrama, its conformance to certain expectations of the "historical romance" genre robs it of the vitality that characterizes the early portions of the film. As a result, although Artemisia is an engaging and occasionally fascinating motion picture, it is not a landmark cinematic biography.
    Born on July 8, 1593 in Rome, during and era when many professions were forbidden to women, Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the first female painters to make a living as an artist. In the immediate centuries following her death, her work was largely-forgotten, only to be re-discovered in the last forty years. Her best-known painting, "Judith Beheading Holophernes," was completed in 1612, and has often been cited as one of the most passionate and proficient works of art crafted by a woman during the seventeenth century. Today, Artemisia's surviving canvasses are recognized throughout the West, and several of them reside in the Louvre. (James Berardinelli)

9.  The Dreamlife of Angels  (Erick Zonca, 1998)
    The French believe that most of the characters in American movies, no matter what their age, act like teenagers. I believe that the teenagers in most French movies seem old, wise and sad. There is a lesson here, perhaps that most American movies are about plots and most French movies are about people.
"The Dreamlife of Angels" serves as an example. It is about two 20-year-olds who are already marked by the hard edges of life. They meet, they become friends, and then they find themselves pulled apart by sexuality, which one of them sees as a way to escape a lifetime of hourly wages. This is a movie about a world where young people have to work for a living. Most 20-year-old Americans in the movies receive invisible monthly support payments from God.
    We meet Isa, a tough little nut with a scar over one eye and a gift of gab. She's a backpacker who cuts photos out of magazines, pastes them to cardboard squares and peddles them in bars as "tourist views." She doesn't really expect to support herself that way, but it's a device to strike up conversations, and sure enough, she meets a guy who offers her a job--working as a seamstress in a sweatshop.
    At work, she meets Marie. The two become friends, and Isa moves in with Marie. They hang out in malls and on the streets, smoking, kidding, playing at picking up guys. They aren't hookers; that would take a degree of calculation that they lack--and, besides, they still dream of true romance. Isa tells Marie about one guy she met when she was part of a remodeling crew working on his house. They slept together, but when the job was over, she left, and he let her leave. She wonders if maybe she missed a good chance. Unlikely, Marie advises. Marie steals a jacket and is seen by Chris. He owns a club, and asks them to drop in one night. They already know the bouncers, and Marie has slept with one of them. Soon it comes down to this: Chris has money, Marie has none, and although her friendship with Isa is the most important relationship in her life, she is willing to abandon it in order to share Chris' bed and wealth. Isa, who in the beginning looked like a mental lightweight, has the wisdom and insight to see how this choice will eventually hurt Marie. But Marie will not listen.
    The movie understands what few American movies admit: Not everyone can afford the luxury of following their hearts. Marie has already lost the idealism that would let her choose the bouncer (whom she likes) rather than the owner (whom she likes, too, but not for the same reasons). The story is played out against the backdrop of Lille, not the first French city you think of when you think of romance. In this movie it is a city of gray streets and tired people, and there is some kind of symbolism in the fact that Marie is house-sitting her apartment for a girl in a coma. (Roger Ebert)

10. The Housekeeper (Une femme de ménage, 2002  - A film by Claude Berri
From the novel A Cleaning Woman, by Christian Oster

Reviews
a) by Leslie Camhi - It's Not Easy Being Clean French Maid
   For someone living in disarray, a housekeeper can provide more than a simple return to order. When the ashtrays are finally emptied, the bed freshly made with clean sheets, the dishes washed and neatly arranged in the cupboard, who hasn't felt the promise of a new beginning? The Housekeeper, veteran French director Claude Berri's remarkably faithful adaptation of Christian Oster's slyly comic and bitter novel A Cleaning Woman (newly translated by Mark Polizotti for the Other Press), explores that delicate moment of transition when one phase of a man's life has ended, and he's not yet aware that another has begun.
    Jean-Pierre Bacri stars as Jacques, a usually meticulous fifty something Parisian sound engineer who's managed to let the newspapers and dirty socks pile up at home in the months since he was dumped by his longtime live-in girlfriend. One day, responding to an ad in his local bakery, he hires Laura (Emilie Dequenne), an inexperienced young woman, to clean his apartment. They make an odd pair—he likes reading and listens to jazz or classical music, while she sweeps to techno and enjoys sinister television game shows. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, her presence begins to arouse first his curiosity, then something more.
    Berri, whose previous film, La Débandade  (Hard Off), was an autobiographical farce about erectile dysfunction, has an unerring instinct for probing the chinks in masculine armor. In a flawless performance, Bacri lets us glimpse the tender desperation beneath his character's harsh, curmudgeonly exterior. Whether chewing dinner alone in his apartment (like a man eating his last meal and not liking the taste), or hanging onto a pole in the métro as if for dear life, he radiates both toughness and a terrible loneliness. Director of photography Eric Gautier's camera makes the most of Bacri's knife-like presence, framing him repeatedly against vast backgrounds—a shopping mall or a crowded beach—that are studies in alienation.
   Dequenne's tattered charm and sheer joie de vivre (unsuspected from her breakthrough role in the Dardenne brothers' grim Rosetta) shift their balance of power, shattering his brittle reserve. The film's French title, Une Femme de Ménage, carries an erotic connotation—as in ménage à trois. But don't suspect a happy ending. As in Oster's novel, this is a deceptively light story about the emptiness that drives people both into each other's arms, and away from one another. When a long-lost girlfriend finally returns (here director Catherine Breillat, in a surprising cameo), it's almost always too little that's offered, and too late. (July 9 - 15, 2003)

b) by Stephen Holden - A Clean House Leads to Tangled Romance
    "The Housekeeper" Claude Berri's amused comic reflection on middle-aged susceptibility to the sexual power of youth, is not much more than an extended anecdote that culminates in a gently admonitory punch line. But the modesty of this miniature but tasty French soufflé, adapted from a novel by Christian Oster, suits its purposes. The movie, which opens today in New York, fits squarely into a Gallic tradition of wistful, worldly-wise comedies that reflect on the weakness of the flesh. That vulnerability seems to be the guiding theme of this 69-year-old French director's work nowadays. The middle-aged men bumbling through his last film were discovering the joys and limitations of Viagra.
    With its later scenes set on the Brittany coast at the height of summer, "The Housekeeper" plays like a less verbally dexterous homage to Eric Rohmer. Its smooth, effortless performances by Jean-Pierre Bacri as Jacques, a sound engineer for classical and jazz recordings in his 50's, and Émilie Dequenne (from "Rosetta") as Laura, the beautiful but opaque 20-year-old housekeeper who invades his life, capture the clash of middle-aged wariness and youthful impetuousness.
    The romantic tango in which Jacques is caught up inevitably leaves him gasping for breath and unsteady on his feet. If you're over 40 and have been tempted against your better judgment to an April-September fling, "The Housekeeper" should produce a sting of recognition
    As the movie begins, Jacques is still struggling to organize his life months after the stormy departure of his wife, Constance (Catherine Breillat), who still pesters him with anonymous phone calls and shows up at his door one evening in a state of high agitation. Their edgy exchange reveals the complexity of an entanglement that still has enough sparks left in it to be rekindled.
    By this time Laura has barged into Jacques's life and blithely initiated an affair in no time, advancing from once-a-week housekeeper to roommate (one day she announces that she's homeless after breaking up with her boyfriend and begs him to take her in) to weepy, clinging lover. From the beginning of course there are warning glitches, as when Laura dances around the apartment to hip-hop music played at top volume and watches trash television while Jacques tries to relax in the next room with classical and jazz recordings.
    When Jacques tells Laura he's going to visit a friend on the Brittany coast, she insists on accompanying him, and all at once they're a couple. Their zany host, Ralph (Jacques Frantz), is a chicken farmer who paints portraits of the fowl he serves to his dinner guests. As the lovers tour the local nightclubs and beaches, the disparity of their ages quickly begins to take its toll
    The movie's biggest weakness is Laura, who is less a full-blown character than a symbol of youth and its careless ways. She is finally such a blank that her mood swings and changes of heart take on a creepy psychotic undertone that was probably not intended by the filmmaker and that leaves you with a sense of incompletion.

12. Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves, 1992) -  A film by Cyril Collard
Cast: Cyril Collard, Romane Bohringer, Carlos Lopez, Corine Blue

SYNOPSIS: Jean (director Cyril Collard) is young, gay, and promiscuous. Only after he meets one or two women, including Laura (Romane Bohringer) does he come to realize his bisexuality. Jean has to overcome a personal crisis (he is HIV-positive) and a tough choice between Laura and his male lover Samy (Carlos Lopez).

A Film Review by James Berardinelli

"AIDS, like tuberculosis in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, is just a backdrop [in Savage Nights]. Jean's struggle with the illness is also a struggle with stupidity, with all sorts of racism, with tyranny... Jean acts as though nothing were different in his daily life. He continues to drink, laugh, and drive fast. In his own way, he is shattering the taboos. He doesn't let himself get locked into the status of being HIV-positive, like some people for whom the illness becomes a sort of identity card."  - Cyril Collard, writer/director/actor, Savage Nights

French filmmaker Cyril Collard published Les Nuits Fauves, his autobiographical novel, in 1989. It relates events in the life of Jean (Collard), a 30-year old Parisian who, in 1986, is diagnosed as being HIV-positive. Unwilling to acknowledge that the virus has made him different, Jean continues his promiscuous bisexual life, pursuing a male lover by the name of Samy (Carlos Lopez), and falling in love with seventeen-year old Laura (Romane Bohringer).

In 1992, Collard (together with longtime companion Corine Blue) brought the book to the screen. Released in October of that year, Savage Nights caused an immediate stir across France. It went on to take four Cesars (Best Film, Best First Film, Best Film Editing, and Best Female Newcomer - Romane Bohringer) in March 1993 -- three days after its writer/director/star died of AIDS.

As was Collard's intention, this film is about the relationship between Jean and Laura, with AIDS serving as a vital backdrop for their interactions. Theirs is a twisted, dysfunctional affair, with jealousy and co-dependence working to destroy them. As a love story, this is dark and tempestuous, filled with searing arguments that become progressively more violent.

The most refreshing facet of Savage Nights is its willingness to flout political correctness. After learning of his condition, Jean does nothing to curb his sexual appetites, nor does he attempt to practice safe sex. And, when Jean eventually confides in Laura, her reaction (after initially being horrified) is to toss away the condom he proposes to use. Unlike in Philadelphia, AIDS here does not equate to near-nobility.

Giving a stunning performance in her debut is Romane Bohringer, the talented daughter of actor Richard Bohringer. The part of Laura, which not only earned Bohringer a Cesar, but also the role of the title character in The Accompanist, demands an extreme output of energy and emotion, and there is no instance when the actress isn't up to the task. Her scenes with co-star Cyril Collard crackle with intensity.

Speaking of Collard, he wasn't his own first choice for Jean, but he took the role when no other French actor was willing to risk playing a character so closely identified with AIDS and bisexuality. In retrospect, the ultimate casting of Jean is perfect, leaving us this legacy of Collard's skills as an actor.

Savage Nights  is not without problems. The erratic pacing is amplified by a series of jarring cuts which can make the viewing experience similar to reading a book without transitions. Also, there are times when it's difficult (if not impossible) to sympathize with the film's protagonist because he's such a self-centered jerk. This, in part, leads to a rather unsatisfying final scene.

Passionate and unrelentingly grim in its portrayal of life on the edge of death, Savage Nights  is a film that refuses to compromise. This may lead to an uncomfortable movie-going experience; this motion picture is neither traditionally entertaining nor escapist in nature. However, for those who want a grittier portrayal of the effects of AIDS than the one presented in Jonathan Demme's recent Philadelphia, Savage Nights offers the option. Few will leave this film unaffected - one way or another.  © 1994 James Berardinelli

13. A Heart in Winter (Un coeur en hiver,1993) -  A film by Claude Sautet

Claude Sautet's Un Coeur en Hiver is a story about rejecting love and - in the end - acknowledging its claims.

A Post-Modern Romance?

by Alan A. Stone

Un Coeur en Hiver, written and directed by Claude Sautet, is the negation of a love story and in our post-modern world negation can have the deepest power of instruction. Not that this marvelous film is didactic or ponderous. Like the fragile violins that Stéphane (the protagonist) repairs, the movie is delicate and beautifully crafted. It is also an uncompromisingly sophisticated work that never condescends to its audience.

Many moviegoers will want to see this film as an old fashioned psychological study of character - to explain Stéphane's refusal of love as the natural outcome of his neurotic hang-ups. Sautet has invited such speculation by making a film which is like one of those figures in elementary psychology textbooks. Viewed one way you see a vase, viewed another way you see two witches; it is virtually impossible to see witches and vase at the same time. If you want to see both, you must go back and forth between them.

Sautet has put together a modern psychological drama and a medieval morality play and you need to go back and forth to capture the sophisticated aesthetics of his film. His "double vision" narrative takes us beyond determinist psychology and into the moral adventure of life. Except for Stéphane, all of his characters are recognizable personalities; if we cannot predict their behavior, we can certainly understand it after the fact. They all belong in the psychological drama. But Stéphane's personality is an unsolvable mystery and one cannot say about him that his psychology is his destiny. His character undercuts and challenges settled conventions of thought and gives this movie its post-modern spin. It does not, however, spin into radical relativism or nihilism. Sautet has rediscovered the possibility of love by negating it.

Stéphane (Daniel Auteuil) and Maxime (André Dussollier) are partners in the violin business. Maxime - sophisticated, worldly, ingratiating, sensitive to the moods of others - has all the small-talk that reduces social tension. The enigmatic Stéphane has mysterious depth and social insensitivity, and his qualities are highlighted by the way Sautet plays the characters off against each other. Stéphane is less than handsome, but his face is intriguing and Sautet's prolonged close ups make the most of its many surprising possibilities.

The partners buy, sell, repair, and construct the finest stringed instruments for a carriage trade of musicians. Maxime is the classic outside man: expansive, engaging, and expert at dealing with the temperamental artists who need to be reassured about their treasured instruments. Stéphane is the classic inside man: the master craftsman who can find and repair the slightest flaws because he fully understands the music as well as the instruments.

The French can make waiting on tables a high art form and, more than any other people, seem to have preserved the tradition of dignified artisanry. Stéphane, once a serious student violinist, is obviously a master craftsman. But only Sautet's French imagination would allow us to recognize and celebrate the heroic qualities of a man in his vocation.

There is something definitely monachal about Stéphane's life. His immaculate button down shirts are his clerical collar. Unmarried, he lives in rooms behind the shop, apparently desiring no pleasures beyond the satisfactions of his work. Most important, Stéphane seems to have no need for other people and no dreams of love. Music is his only dream. Maxime by contrast is a sybarite who happily mixes business with the pleasures of the flesh. From the outset, the audience can see that the partnership between these men is a perfect fit.

The film begins with the meticulous Stéphane gluing the top of a violin in place. He utters Maxime's name. Maxime, needing no instruction, arrives from the front office at the correct moment to screw the wooden vises in place. The partners work together, play racquetball together, and seem to have an enviable friendship. But not, as we shall learn, by Stéphane's standards. He does not reciprocate Maxime's apparent affection.

Maxime is living in the fast track: married, having affairs, travelling all over Europe, hobnobbing with concert artists. But now, as he tells Stephane over dinner in a restaurant, something important has happened - he is in love.

Many of the scenes in Sautet's movie take place in this same restaurant. If home and family are the center of ordinary people's lives, Sautet's characters have no center. No one seems to have children or to be bound by family obligation. The restaurant is their public place for private conversations.

At such dinners in the past, Maxime had no compunction about describing his extra-marital affairs. But for him this is a different kind of conversation. He has kept this affair secret, even from Stéphane, because he wanted to protect the beautiful and talented Camille (Emmanuelle Béart) - a young concert violinist. Maxime has been touched by grace; he admires as well as loves Camille and has now decided to leave his wife for her. Stéphane is less than gracious in his response to these revelations.

A standard psychoanalytic take on his reaction might see Stéphane as a jilted lover - a woman has come between two men with a latent homosexual attachment. Sautet has written the screenplay to permit such ideas to surface. Thus, Stéphane looks across the restaurant at the beautiful Camille, the new love who is sitting with her agent, Régine, a woman of mannish appearance. Stéphane pointedly asks Maxime whether he has broken up a couple. Whatever the latent or actual erotic nature of these male and female relationships, both will be fractured by the new love affair.

Each of the intimate relationships in this film presents a variation on the theme of non-reciprocal love. The musical metaphor is worth stressing because this film is not only about making music; it seems to have been conceived and constructed as a musical composition. For example, the theme of couples overheard quarreling is played out again and again in variations among the major and minor characters.

If Stéphane's question about breaking up the couple is less than gracious, Maxime quickly defuses the tension by insisting that the agent, Regine, is the best friend of Camille's mother. Stéphane borders on rudeness as he presses Maxime about how his wife is dealing with this new turn of events. But Maxime refuses to be offended. With worldly wisdom he declares that in relationships someone always gets hurt. What Maxime does not imagine as he prepares to move in with Camille, is that he will be the one to get hurt - by Stéphane.

If in relationships someone has to have the dominant hand, Maxime seems to have it over Stéphane. He wins their racquet ball games and has dismissed Stéphane as a possible competitor in the game of love. Stéphane, though previously willing to take a back seat to Maxime, somehow cannot accept the new arrangement. The most striking aspect of this situation is that the beautiful Camille is a promising concert violinist. She is a high priestess in the temple of music where the monastic Stéphane worships. Indeed each of the characters in this movie worships in that same temple where art is God and music is prayer. Maxime, in possessing Camille, has found a place closer to the altar and perhaps, for the first time, the devout Stéphane envies the less virtuous man.

The relationship between Camille and Régine is another variation on the theme of non-reciprocal love. Régine, the strong older woman, has taken Camille, the young artist, under her wing, cultivated her talent, promoted her career, and lovingly fed her ego. But the relationship which once nourished Camille now suffocates her. She wants to break out and assert her independence. Although Maxime gives her more freedom than Régine had, she has found in him an older man who will care for her in much the same parenting way. It is change without growth and we soon see that it too is a non-reciprocal love that has not fully engaged her.

Régine knows that she has been rejected. She rankles with resentment and shows her feelings of hurt and betrayal. Whether or not Régine was (as Sautet suggests) Camille's lover, Régine certainly behaves as if she has been jilted. Stéphane, seemingly insensitive and unaware of himself, may have similar feelings but takes a different course.

It would be wrong to say that he purposefully sets out to seduce Camille. Stéphane never acts with obvious, identifiable, motives. He is like Camus's existential protagonist in The Stranger who kills for no reason. So Stéphane makes this beautiful woman love him for no reason, rejects her for no reason, and then has every reason to suffer for his actions. But the subtle Sautet stops far short of Camus. His hero, Stéphane, has reasons and motives. They just do not seem sufficient to explain his actions and in that insufficiency Sautet creates the moral space that gives his fragile movie its profundity.

Emmanuelle Béart was splendidly naked in her recent film La Belle Noiseuse. But Sautet keeps Camille's body covered and his discipline makes her expressive face seem even more beautiful. Camille, as it turns out, had studied as a child with the same violin teacher as both Maxime and Stéphane. Scenes at that violin teacher's home in the French countryside are interwoven like musical passages with long stretches of urban scenes in Paris. But the home, beautiful in its setting of trees, is no conventional family residence. When the main characters gather there for a dinner party and discussion of art, it seems that the elderly teacher's middle-aged companion is his cook and nurse but not his wife. It is another non-reciprocal relationship and Stéphane will overhear their desperate quarrels. Later sequences show the country house filled with children, one of whom is somehow related to the woman. We might wonder if the child is their bastard. Sautet seems to delight in such ambiguity. But the children are in his movie more for decorative purposes and to lighten the mood than because they belong.

This teacher is the one person whom Stéphane seems to admire. He is a man of intellect, faithful to the church of music, and exacting in his judgment. The teacher, who once taught Camille, describes to Stéphane the young girl he had known as hard and smooth with a considerable temperament behind the hardness. No longer a student, Camille is at a critical moment in her career. She is preparing to record the Ravel Sonata and trio. Though her technical excellence is not in doubt, Camille has yet to prove that she can go beyond hard and smooth to artistry.

Maxime brings her to the shop so that Stéphane can find and fix the flaw in her violin. It is impossible not to sense the instant electricity between Stéphane and Camille. She is intrigued by his intensity, his exacting standards, his emotional unavailability. He fixes her instrument and then attends her rehearsal to listen. His presence seems to disturb her concentration. He leaves but returns of his own accord at a later time and with a subtle adjustment the master craftsman further improves the violin's tone. Camille quickly becomes dependent on his presence. Stéphane has become the mechanical and spiritual catalyst for her artistry. Having made himself necessary, he absents himself - and she is hooked, like a woman who falls in love with her psychiatrist. She needs him, loves him, must have him. We begin to glimpse the temperament that will boil over in the scenes to come. Sautet's sophisticated taste and subtlety are present everywhere in this movie, and it surely was inspiration to cast Auteuil and Béart, husband and wife [at the time], in the roles of Stéphane and Camille.

Camille reveals her love for Stéphane to Maxime who, though incredulous, remains a man of the world in the best sense. He is prepared to step aside, at least temporarily. Indeed, knowing Camille's intense feelings, he asks Stéphane to attend the Ravel recording. Camille, inspired by her passion and believing it to be fully reciprocated by the seemingly worshipful Stéphane, plays Ravel's ecstatic music as never before; it is a triumph and everyone at the recording knows it. Filled with confidence, Camille wants to consummate her love. But in her moment of glory, when she surrenders herself body and soul to Stéphane, he refuses her.

For many people love holds the only promise of transcendence. And romantic (yes sexual) love is the closest most of us come to realizing the fulfillment of that promise. So when Stéphane rejects Camille's offer of love Sautet surprises and defeats our expectations. The knee-jerk psychological reaction is that Stéphane has to be crazy. Our dismay must be allayed by denying his sanity. But in the morality play, to which he belongs, his mysterious negation of love can illuminate our own hopes and fears as would-be lovers.

Stéphane does not refuse out of loyalty to his friend, Maxime. He had told Camille in an earlier conversation that Maxime was not his friend - only his partner. Nor does the refusal grow out of his love for some other woman, as Camille imagines. He has given his only woman friend no promise of love. Deep in their heart of hearts some people wonder if they are even capable of love. Stéphane might be one of them. But in the end, neither Stéphane's character nor the web of relationships in which he and Camille are involved is sufficient to explain his refusal of this proud and beautiful woman. Like obstinate men who refuse to pray because they do not believe in God, Stéphane refuses Camille because he does not believe in love. He is a man of rectitude, but without faith. He has therefore lost an opportunity in the moral adventure of his life - and one that we are made to feel may have been his best and only chance.

The desolate Camille goes on a drunken binge and the next day confronts Stéphane in one of Sautet's restaurant scenes. There the high temperament we glimpsed earlier explodes in a public display of angry confrontation. This is the ultimate overheard quarrel. Everyone in the restaurant is forced to be a party to Camille's crescendo. After shaming herself and humiliating Stéphane, she leaves the restaurant. Maxime replaces her and, standing over Stéphane like an outraged husband, slaps him in the face and sends him crashing to the floor.

Auteuil plays the perfect bewildered victim in this public scene - and it is slightly bewildering. After all, Maxime is furious with Stéphane because he did not sleep with the woman Maxime loves - and, of course, under the circumstances Maxime is right to be furious. Sautet has created one of those rare moments when comedy and tragedy converge.

Stéphane's rejection of Camille ends his partnership with Maxime. His other woman friend who has been his only companion announces that she has found a man who cares for her. Stephane goes on with his vocation but he is almost alone in the world. Does he understand what has happened?

Stéphane openly acknowledges all of his possible psychological motives to Camille - from sexual hang-ups to deviousness - but only to demonstrate that they are insufficient. He goes to the wise old violin teacher who raises all the other more existential reasons - from a need to demystify love to the possibility that Stéphane might have felt inadequate. But those reasons too are insufficient and the teacher and his former student do not solve the mystery of the insufficiency. Indeed, Sautet wants to preserve the notion that there is no complete explanation - what he has left open is moral choice and lost opportunity. If Stéphane is not "neurotic," then Un Coeur en Hiver  raises questions about how the rest of us make our choices in the moral adventure of life.

Sautet shows his audience early in the movie that Stéphane's relationship with the teacher is of great significance to him - a son's admiring love for the ideal father. Toward the end of the movie Stéphane is called back to the teacher's country home. The man is dying a painful death. Neither the woman who cares for him, nor Maxime who had already arrived, has the will to put him out of his misery. Stéphane, the man without sentiments, does what is necessary. He enters the room and no words are spoken. The dying man looks at Stéphane and then looks to the bedside table where the medications are. Stéphane, the ultimate craftsman, approaches the task at hand and completes it with the practiced skill of a surgeon.

One might think that this death scene - a Doctor Kevorkian moment - is gratuitous, not really connected to the central dynamic of the film. It is also quite implausible that Stéphane would be adept with an intravenous syringe. Yet, thematically, it ties everything together and prepares for the coda. The death of a loved one reminds us all of our mortality, of missed opportunities for the expression of love, of what is most precious in the moral adventure of life. In Stéphane's decisive action, we see the power of a will unmoved by sentiment and for that very reason lacking some human quality. Kant thought that passion was a disease of reason but Sautet shows us through Stéphane that the absence of passion is a disease of human nature.

The final question that Sautet asks is whether Stéphane has been changed by these experiences. The answer is so subtle that it took this reviewer two viewings of the movie to catch it. The last scene, a coda, fittingly shows Stéphane sitting in a restaurant talking with Maxime. Camille arrives and Maxime goes to get the car - they are a couple again. Briefly alone with Stéphane, Camille asks him about his feelings for the dead man. Stéphane's reply, wonderfully nuanced and appropriate to the delicate but rich tones of the film, is that he used to think the teacher was the only person he loved. I take it he now realizes that he loved Camille and that he loved his friend Maxime as well. Camille tenderly kisses him goodbye and drives off with Maxime. She knows that the miraculous moment is irretrievably lost. Stéphane sits alone, a man who now too late believes that love and music are part of the same dream.  Originally published in the December 1993/ January 1994 issue of Boston Review

14. Intimacy (2001) - A film by Patrice Chéreau

The first English-language film from French director Patrice Chéreau (Queen Margot) is a bold exploration of one man's sexual obsessions and emotional weaknesses. A lonely nightclub worker, Jay (Mark Rylance), and an actress, Claire (Kerry Fox), engage in an impersonal sexual affair. When Jay learns that Claire is married, he strikes up a bizarre friendship with her husband. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival and a Best Actress Award for Fox. "Intelligent and courageous" (Elvis Mitchell, New York Times).

Reviewed by Alan A. Stone - Desperately Seeking Sex

In Chéreau's Intimacy, sex breeds obsession and isolation.

 Patrice Chéreau's controversial new film Intimacy begins with thirty-five minutes of graphic sex. Claire (brilliantly played by Kerry Fox) arrives uninvited on her free Wednesday afternoon, knocks, and enters a squalid house flat belonging to Jay (Mark Rylance). Puzzled, he asks "was this agreed?" Apparently not, but without another word they proceed to have sex, at her initiative, on the floor. Their frenzied passion is repeated on subsequent Wednesday afternoons until Jay makes the mistake of trying to find out who Claire really is. And then the spell is broken.

People who expected erotica were disappointed. Roger Ebert, the dean of popular film criticism, describes the opening as "short, brutal, anonymous sex." Ebert expresses distaste and reports the dismissive judgment of Kristine Nordstrom, director of the Women Film Makers' Symposium of Los Angeles: "No woman would be attracted to sex like that," she opined. Nordstrom's premise is that the typical male director projects his 'slam bam thank you ma'am' sexual fantasies onto the screen, where a woman's desires are presented as a gratifying mirror image of what men want. In Intimacy, "[Claire] walks in, they rip off each other's clothes and a few seconds later they're in a frenzy." Nordstrom concluded that "[a]ny woman would know that this movie was directed by a man."

Although I think the feminist criticism misses everything interesting and important about Intimacy, Ebert and Nordstrom's reaction to the opening scene was typical. Most critics were not turned on by watching a man and woman who are determined to give and get everything they can out of the sexual encounter. And not for want of realism: the two actors—he is thin and balding, she is more attractive but not a conventional beauty, and both are pushing forty—are the ones having sex. Chereau films them in semi-darkness so I cannot attest that every sexual act that seemed to take place actually was consummated, but one episode unmistakably shows Kerry Fox with Mark Rylance's penis in her mouth. Chacun a son goût, but most people will find Intimacy's graphic display of sex and nudity neither beautifully erotic nor excitingly pornographic. But it is as real as Chereau means it to be, and real sex can be disturbing. For me it was like being trapped in a room where I felt more like an uncomfortable intruder rather than an aroused voyeur.

Chereau is a serious and sophisticated artist who has directed theater and opera as well as film. He has also been around long enough to understand what turns people on. One can assume he knows that many women, as Nordstrom asserts, prefer a man who spends "time being tender and sweet and showing that he cares for her." But his ambitions were artistic not erotic. Chereau was confronting our sexuality, exploring its disruptive power, not trying to arouse either the men or the women in the audience.

Critics have compared Chereau's Intimacy  to Bertolucci's 1972 Last Tango in Paris. The comparisons are prompted by obvious similarities. In Last Tango, Marlon Brando meets Maria Schneider when they are both looking to rent the same empty Paris apartment. Total strangers, they meet and almost immediately have sex against a wall in an empty room. The sexual connection works for them and both experience a kind of liberation. They return to the empty flat to perform every sexual act they (or perhaps we) have imagined. The relationship ends when Brando, an older man in the film, proposes marriage to Schneider. But the audience sees nothing graphic; everything is suggested. And although the sex is short, brutal and anonymous, Pauline Kael was not alone in describing it as the "erotic bombshell" of its time.

But times and sexual mores change. In the current culture, sex is more obsession than liberation. Kids watch faux pornography on MTV; Cosmo  readers learn that proficiency in oral sex is the foundation of a happy marriage; for men, sex is often seen as a matter of performance, and with Viagra the show never ends. Chereau believes that in some important sense even class struggle "has moved inside the body" and become sexualized: it is the new millennium struggle of all against all for sexual power. Obsessive sex offers no liberation, but only repetition and the search for new aphrodisiac rituals, new partners, and new limit experiences. It is this desperate sexuality, isolating people rather than connecting them, that ultimately intrigues Chereau. His film is more questioning, more troubled, more relevant to our times than Bertolucci's sultry, wish-fulfilling, tango dream.

Hanif Kureishi, whose recent fiction was the basis of the screenplay for Intimacy, has written an illuminating essay about his collaboration with Chereau. It all started when Chereau, like Claire, knocked on the door one day. Although Kureishi does not mention it, Chereau may have come to him because of Kureishi's early fame and Oscar nomination for the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette, another erotic bombshell in its day. The story is about two beautiful young men—one English (Daniel Day Lewis), the other Pakistani (Gordon Warrecke)—who have a West Side Story  love affair in a lower class London community. It is the kind of neighborhood where, after a few pints at the pub, the xenophobic skinheads go out for some Paki-bashing. And it is Daniel Day Lewis, publicly and unrestrainedly kissing his Pakistani lover that transforms cross-racial hostility into its erotic counterpart. Pauline Kael marveled at what she experienced as My Beautiful Laundrette's "thrills of perilous display." In his essay on the making of Intimacy, Kureishi notes that what was shocking in the 1980s is now commonplace; you cannot turn on the television in London "without seeing boys snogging, particularly on the sports channels."

Kureishi seems to want us to know that he is straight, in contrast to his collaborator, Patrice Chereau, "a gay French man." Whatever his own sexual preferences may be, Kureishi has a fertile sexual imagination. In his early days he wrote pseudonymous pornography, along with some plays and My Beautiful Laundrette. Chereau's original idea was to collaborate on a cinematic version of Kureishi's novel, Intimacy, which describes a man's reaction to his divorce. But after much brainstorming, Chereau decided to base his film on a recent Kureishi short story about a man and a woman whose only connection is that they meet for sex on Wednesday afternoons. Chereau also used bits from the novel—Rylance's character is recently divorced—and from other Kureishi short stories, but decided ultimately to have his own screen writer, a French woman, write the screenplay. Only the title of the projected film remained unchanged.

Kureishi's description of his collaboration with Chereau sounds like someone trying to have the last word about a relationship. One can imagine these two men circling around each other, their creative narcissism at risk, testing to see who would be dominant; who would give and who would take. In the end, Kureishi's account suggests that Chereau took what he wanted and went his own creative way. Chereau invited Kureishi to the penultimate screening of the rushes and expressed little interest in editorial input. One can understand why Kureishi compares the collaboration to the affair—Chereau did use him. Though Chereau has made collaborative films in different European countries (one in Germany and now this one in England), Intimacy is his film, animated by his French sensibilities, despite its London setting and British actors.

According to Kureishi, "Patrice seemed interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another's bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while keeping away strong feeling and emotional complexity....Patrice and I talked about keeping the camera close to the bodies; not over-lighting them, or making them look pornographically enticing or idealized…The point is to look at how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what a darkness and obscenity our pleasures can be."

This approach to sex comes from Freud, not Sigmund but his grandson Lucian, the painter whose hyperrealistic aesthetic Chereau avowedly adopted for his film. One need only look at some of Lucian Freud's early nudes to understand Chereau's interest. The Freud painting on display in the new Tate Modern's exhibition of nudes is an amazing achievement: a woman's naked body is fully revealed, but entirely without erotic suggestion. It is as though the artist has stepped out of social reality and all its erotic baggage to see and reveal the thing in itself. Like Chereau's film, Freud's nudes are arresting without being alluring.

Roger Ebert, to his credit, acknowledged that he may have missed something about Intimacy  by relying on the barometer of his sexual arousal. He admitted to being puzzled about the psychology of Jay, the head barman in a busy London club. He speculates that Jay's bitterness at the world may express repressed homosexual impulses. Ebert, I think, is listening to the wrong Freud. Jay is the new millennium Londoner, the kind of man who has seen and done everything; his bitterness reflects a lack of purpose, not repression.

Jay is played by Mark Rylance whom I first saw as Hamlet in a Royal Shakespeare Production on American tour. His Hamlet was truly melancholic and he wore pajamas like an invalid. In performances in England he reportedly mooned Polonius; (this is a man who is easy with nudity). He is also a superb actor and now the artistic director of the Globe Theater, built on London's South Bank as a replica of the original venue for Shakespeare's plays. Recently, I saw Rylance there, as the lead in Shakespeare's seldom-performed Cymbeline. An elegant and gracious stage presence, he has formidable talent and an enchanting voice. He rarely makes films, but he was convinced by Chereau's project and put his reputation and his naked body on the line.

His character, Jay, is something of a control freak and becomes furious when the club management, without consulting him, hires a gay Frenchman as a barkeeper, despite his ignorance about the work. These two characters inevitably suggest Kureishi and Chereau. In a subplot Jay will eventually come to accept and befriend the gay Frenchman who seems unusually perceptive about people's problems. If this is not Chereau's commentary on his collaboration with Kureishi, then the subplot will seem gratuitous.

Jay, once a struggling musician trying to make it in a band, has now settled for less. He is on speaking terms with his former wife and seems to love his two sons, but he is obviously a narcissist preoccupied with himself and with sex. Chereau makes this point inescapable in a scene when Jay spends time at his ex-wife's home looking after the kids. After bathing the boys and being a good parent, he unexpectedly goes to his ex-wife's bureau and fondles her underwear. Selecting a pair, he takes it to the bathroom and masturbates while sniffing it. Chereau's cinematography in this scene is cautious and far from explicit, still there is no doubt what Jay is doing and no question about the point, particularly when one of Jay's young sons barges into the bathroom and almost catches his father in the act. Isolating and narcissistic sex is erupting into everyday family life, threatening the bastion of sentimental connectedness.

All the children in the film are angels whose innocent faith in their parents is threatened by the darkness and obscenity of sexuality. Claire's only son is one of those threatened angels. He worships his mother, who is married to a crude, obese, but seemingly benign taxi driver (Timothy Spall). Claire has decided that sex has passed out of her life, but she wants to preserve the security of her marriage and the illusions of domesticity. Apparently, she has run into Jay at his bar and experienced an unexpected spark; she gambles that he will make her catch fire again and he does. Claire does not want intimacy of the mind, only intimacy of the body. The first thirty-five minutes demonstrate what Claire wants and the rest of the film shows us how it ruins her life. Jay, ever the control freak, follows her across London to learn her identity and discovers that she is a so-so actress who is starring in a production of Tennessee William's Glass Menagerie  performed in a theater in the basement of a pub. Unbeknownst to Claire, Jay meets her husband and son. The boy attends all of his mother's performances and starry eyed with love, tells Jay that his mother gets better every night. We have seen the sexual realities of Claire's life; now Chereau gives us the adoring son, the doting supportive husband, and the aspiring actress/mother, all connected in a façade of sentimental family life. We know Jay has the power to destroy that façade, and when the anonymity is lost and the affair ends, he continues to stalk Claire's family, hinting about the affair to her husband and son, driven on by his mysterious rage.

Timothy Spall, who plays Claire's husband, the taxi driver, is a talented actor with surprising range. He played a benevolent photographer in Mike Leigh's Secret and Lies, the Mikado in Topsy Turvy, and here he is a menacing bully under a surface of bonhommie. He will explode in an unforgettable scene of rage against his wife, an eruption of shattering hatred. Chereau filmed this scene with Claire sitting in the back seat of her husband's cab as he vilifies her. Not a blow is struck, but this is unmitigated domestic violence. Kerry Fox's extraordinary performance as Claire earned her best actress at the Berlin Film Festival. Claire's loss is clear, but to underline Jay's predicament Chereau gives him a one-night stand, this time with an attractive young woman who babbles away during the sexual act sending Jay out the door with a new sense of the loneliness of the narcissist.

No Frenchman of Chéreau's age and education could title his film Intimacy  without thinking of Sartre. Sartre wondered if human intimacy was even possible and Chereau explores that idea through sex in a way that Sartre might relish. Is sex the ultimate instance of human intimacy or is that idea itself just bad faith sentimentality?

Chéreau answers that question with thirty-five minutes of desperate sex between people who are strangers to each other: people who cling to "the reef of sollipsism"— to use Sartre's telling phrase—as their aphrodisiac. It is a sad and paradoxical commentary on the human condition. The dream of intimacy is to be fully known and accepted by the other. If that is what we wish for, then Chereau's film is our nightmare. Intimacy  is a rare achievement, a film of ideas that intrigue and disquiet us.  (Alan A. Stone is Toureff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard Law School. Originally published in the February/March 2002 issue of Boston Review).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Intimacy (2001) - A film by Patrice Chéreau

The first English-language film from French director Patrice Chéreau (Queen Margot) is a bold exploration of one man's sexual obsessions and emotional weaknesses. A lonely nightclub worker, Jay (Mark Rylance), and an actress, Claire (Kerry Fox), engage in an impersonal sexual affair. When Jay learns that Claire is married, he strikes up a bizarre friendship with her husband. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival and a Best Actress Award for Fox. "Intelligent and courageous" (Elvis Mitchell, New York Times).

Reviewed by Alan A. Stone - Desperately Seeking Sex

In Chéreau's Intimacy, sex breeds obsession and isolation.

 Patrice Chéreau's controversial new film Intimacy begins with thirty-five minutes of graphic sex. Claire (brilliantly played by Kerry Fox) arrives uninvited on her free Wednesday afternoon, knocks, and enters a squalid house flat belonging to Jay (Mark Rylance). Puzzled, he asks "was this agreed?" Apparently not, but without another word they proceed to have sex, at her initiative, on the floor. Their frenzied passion is repeated on subsequent Wednesday afternoons until Jay makes the mistake of trying to find out who Claire really is. And then the spell is broken.

People who expected erotica were disappointed. Roger Ebert, the dean of popular film criticism, describes the opening as "short, brutal, anonymous sex." Ebert expresses distaste and reports the dismissive judgment of Kristine Nordstrom, director of the Women Film Makers' Symposium of Los Angeles: "No woman would be attracted to sex like that," she opined. Nordstrom's premise is that the typical male director projects his 'slam bam thank you ma'am' sexual fantasies onto the screen, where a woman's desires are presented as a gratifying mirror image of what men want. In Intimacy, "[Claire] walks in, they rip off each other's clothes and a few seconds later they're in a frenzy." Nordstrom concluded that "[a]ny woman would know that this movie was directed by a man."

Although I think the feminist criticism misses everything interesting and important about Intimacy, Ebert and Nordstrom's reaction to the opening scene was typical. Most critics were not turned on by watching a man and woman who are determined to give and get everything they can out of the sexual encounter. And not for want of realism: the two actors—he is thin and balding, she is more attractive but not a conventional beauty, and both are pushing forty—are the ones having sex. Chereau films them in semi-darkness so I cannot attest that every sexual act that seemed to take place actually was consummated, but one episode unmistakably shows Kerry Fox with Mark Rylance's penis in her mouth. Chacun a son goût, but most people will find Intimacy's graphic display of sex and nudity neither beautifully erotic nor excitingly pornographic. But it is as real as Chereau means it to be, and real sex can be disturbing. For me it was like being trapped in a room where I felt more like an uncomfortable intruder rather than an aroused voyeur.

Chereau is a serious and sophisticated artist who has directed theater and opera as well as film. He has also been around long enough to understand what turns people on. One can assume he knows that many women, as Nordstrom asserts, prefer a man who spends "time being tender and sweet and showing that he cares for her." But his ambitions were artistic not erotic. Chereau was confronting our sexuality, exploring its disruptive power, not trying to arouse either the men or the women in the audience.

Critics have compared Chereau's Intimacy  to Bertolucci's 1972 Last Tango in Paris. The comparisons are prompted by obvious similarities. In Last Tango, Marlon Brando meets Maria Schneider when they are both looking to rent the same empty Paris apartment. Total strangers, they meet and almost immediately have sex against a wall in an empty room. The sexual connection works for them and both experience a kind of liberation. They return to the empty flat to perform every sexual act they (or perhaps we) have imagined. The relationship ends when Brando, an older man in the film, proposes marriage to Schneider. But the audience sees nothing graphic; everything is suggested. And although the sex is short, brutal and anonymous, Pauline Kael was not alone in describing it as the "erotic bombshell" of its time.

But times and sexual mores change. In the current culture, sex is more obsession than liberation. Kids watch faux pornography on MTV; Cosmo  readers learn that proficiency in oral sex is the foundation of a happy marriage; for men, sex is often seen as a matter of performance, and with Viagra the show never ends. Chereau believes that in some important sense even class struggle "has moved inside the body" and become sexualized: it is the new millennium struggle of all against all for sexual power. Obsessive sex offers no liberation, but only repetition and the search for new aphrodisiac rituals, new partners, and new limit experiences. It is this desperate sexuality, isolating people rather than connecting them, that ultimately intrigues Chereau. His film is more questioning, more troubled, more relevant to our times than Bertolucci's sultry, wish-fulfilling, tango dream.

Hanif Kureishi, whose recent fiction was the basis of the screenplay for Intimacy, has written an illuminating essay about his collaboration with Chereau. It all started when Chereau, like Claire, knocked on the door one day. Although Kureishi does not mention it, Chereau may have come to him because of Kureishi's early fame and Oscar nomination for the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette, another erotic bombshell in its day. The story is about two beautiful young men—one English (Daniel Day Lewis), the other Pakistani (Gordon Warrecke)—who have a West Side Story  love affair in a lower class London community. It is the kind of neighborhood where, after a few pints at the pub, the xenophobic skinheads go out for some Paki-bashing. And it is Daniel Day Lewis, publicly and unrestrainedly kissing his Pakistani lover that transforms cross-racial hostility into its erotic counterpart. Pauline Kael marveled at what she experienced as My Beautiful Laundrette's "thrills of perilous display." In his essay on the making of Intimacy, Kureishi notes that what was shocking in the 1980s is now commonplace; you cannot turn on the television in London "without seeing boys snogging, particularly on the sports channels."

Kureishi seems to want us to know that he is straight, in contrast to his collaborator, Patrice Chereau, "a gay French man." Whatever his own sexual preferences may be, Kureishi has a fertile sexual imagination. In his early days he wrote pseudonymous pornography, along with some plays and My Beautiful Laundrette. Chereau's original idea was to collaborate on a cinematic version of Kureishi's novel, Intimacy, which describes a man's reaction to his divorce. But after much brainstorming, Chereau decided to base his film on a recent Kureishi short story about a man and a woman whose only connection is that they meet for sex on Wednesday afternoons. Chereau also used bits from the novel—Rylance's character is recently divorced—and from other Kureishi short stories, but decided ultimately to have his own screen writer, a French woman, write the screenplay. Only the title of the projected film remained unchanged.

Kureishi's description of his collaboration with Chereau sounds like someone trying to have the last word about a relationship. One can imagine these two men circling around each other, their creative narcissism at risk, testing to see who would be dominant; who would give and who would take. In the end, Kureishi's account suggests that Chereau took what he wanted and went his own creative way. Chereau invited Kureishi to the penultimate screening of the rushes and expressed little interest in editorial input. One can understand why Kureishi compares the collaboration to the affair—Chereau did use him. Though Chereau has made collaborative films in different European countries (one in Germany and now this one in England), Intimacy is his film, animated by his French sensibilities, despite its London setting and British actors.

According to Kureishi, "Patrice seemed interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another's bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while keeping away strong feeling and emotional complexity....Patrice and I talked about keeping the camera close to the bodies; not over-lighting them, or making them look pornographically enticing or idealized…The point is to look at how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what a darkness and obscenity our pleasures can be."

This approach to sex comes from Freud, not Sigmund but his grandson Lucian, the painter whose hyperrealistic aesthetic Chereau avowedly adopted for his film. One need only look at some of Lucian Freud's early nudes to understand Chereau's interest. The Freud painting on display in the new Tate Modern's exhibition of nudes is an amazing achievement: a woman's naked body is fully revealed, but entirely without erotic suggestion. It is as though the artist has stepped out of social reality and all its erotic baggage to see and reveal the thing in itself. Like Chereau's film, Freud's nudes are arresting without being alluring.

Roger Ebert, to his credit, acknowledged that he may have missed something about Intimacy  by relying on the barometer of his sexual arousal. He admitted to being puzzled about the psychology of Jay, the head barman in a busy London club. He speculates that Jay's bitterness at the world may express repressed homosexual impulses. Ebert, I think, is listening to the wrong Freud. Jay is the new millennium Londoner, the kind of man who has seen and done everything; his bitterness reflects a lack of purpose, not repression.

Jay is played by Mark Rylance whom I first saw as Hamlet in a Royal Shakespeare Production on American tour. His Hamlet was truly melancholic and he wore pajamas like an invalid. In performances in England he reportedly mooned Polonius; (this is a man who is easy with nudity). He is also a superb actor and now the artistic director of the Globe Theater, built on London's South Bank as a replica of the original venue for Shakespeare's plays. Recently, I saw Rylance there, as the lead in Shakespeare's seldom-performed Cymbeline. An elegant and gracious stage presence, he has formidable talent and an enchanting voice. He rarely makes films, but he was convinced by Chereau's project and put his reputation and his naked body on the line.

His character, Jay, is something of a control freak and becomes furious when the club management, without consulting him, hires a gay Frenchman as a barkeeper, despite his ignorance about the work. These two characters inevitably suggest Kureishi and Chereau. In a subplot Jay will eventually come to accept and befriend the gay Frenchman who seems unusually perceptive about people's problems. If this is not Chereau's commentary on his collaboration with Kureishi, then the subplot will seem gratuitous.

Jay, once a struggling musician trying to make it in a band, has now settled for less. He is on speaking terms with his former wife and seems to love his two sons, but he is obviously a narcissist preoccupied with himself and with sex. Chereau makes this point inescapable in a scene when Jay spends time at his ex-wife's home looking after the kids. After bathing the boys and being a good parent, he unexpectedly goes to his ex-wife's bureau and fondles her underwear. Selecting a pair, he takes it to the bathroom and masturbates while sniffing it. Chereau's cinematography in this scene is cautious and far from explicit, still there is no doubt what Jay is doing and no question about the point, particularly when one of Jay's young sons barges into the bathroom and almost catches his father in the act. Isolating and narcissistic sex is erupting into everyday family life, threatening the bastion of sentimental connectedness.

All the children in the film are angels whose innocent faith in their parents is threatened by the darkness and obscenity of sexuality. Claire's only son is one of those threatened angels. He worships his mother, who is married to a crude, obese, but seemingly benign taxi driver (Timothy Spall). Claire has decided that sex has passed out of her life, but she wants to preserve the security of her marriage and the illusions of domesticity. Apparently, she has run into Jay at his bar and experienced an unexpected spark; she gambles that he will make her catch fire again and he does. Claire does not want intimacy of the mind, only intimacy of the body. The first thirty-five minutes demonstrate what Claire wants and the rest of the film shows us how it ruins her life. Jay, ever the control freak, follows her across London to learn her identity and discovers that she is a so-so actress who is starring in a production of Tennessee William's Glass Menagerie  performed in a theater in the basement of a pub. Unbeknownst to Claire, Jay meets her husband and son. The boy attends all of his mother's performances and starry eyed with love, tells Jay that his mother gets better every night. We have seen the sexual realities of Claire's life; now Chereau gives us the adoring son, the doting supportive husband, and the aspiring actress/mother, all connected in a façade of sentimental family life. We know Jay has the power to destroy that façade, and when the anonymity is lost and the affair ends, he continues to stalk Claire's family, hinting about the affair to her husband and son, driven on by his mysterious rage.

Timothy Spall, who plays Claire's husband, the taxi driver, is a talented actor with surprising range. He played a benevolent photographer in Mike Leigh's Secret and Lies, the Mikado in Topsy Turvy, and here he is a menacing bully under a surface of bonhommie. He will explode in an unforgettable scene of rage against his wife, an eruption of shattering hatred. Chereau filmed this scene with Claire sitting in the back seat of her husband's cab as he vilifies her. Not a blow is struck, but this is unmitigated domestic violence. Kerry Fox's extraordinary performance as Claire earned her best actress at the Berlin Film Festival. Claire's loss is clear, but to underline Jay's predicament Chereau gives him a one-night stand, this time with an attractive young woman who babbles away during the sexual act sending Jay out the door with a new sense of the loneliness of the narcissist.

No Frenchman of Chéreau's age and education could title his film Intimacy  without thinking of Sartre. Sartre wondered if human intimacy was even possible and Chereau explores that idea through sex in a way that Sartre might relish. Is sex the ultimate instance of human intimacy or is that idea itself just bad faith sentimentality?

Chéreau answers that question with thirty-five minutes of desperate sex between people who are strangers to each other: people who cling to "the reef of sollipsism"— to use Sartre's telling phrase—as their aphrodisiac. It is a sad and paradoxical commentary on the human condition. The dream of intimacy is to be fully known and accepted by the other. If that is what we wish for, then Chereau's film is our nightmare. Intimacy  is a rare achievement, a film of ideas that intrigue and disquiet us.  (Alan A. Stone is Toureff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard Law School. Originally published in the February/March 2002 issue of Boston Review)

Additional films of interest :

Film 01. Belle de Jour (1967) - A film by Luis Buñuel (with comments by Julie Jones)

Producer: Robert and Raymond Hakim for Paris F Films.
Released: 1967, Valeria (France); 1968, Allied Artists (U.S.).
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel and Claude Carrière (based on the novel by Joseph Kessel)
Catherine Deneuve's Costumes: Yves Saint Laurent

SYNOPSIS: Despite affection for her husband Pierre, Séverine is unable to respond to his lovemaking; she fantasizes the enjoyment of a masochistic relationship with her husband, and rejects the advances of her husband’s friend, Henri Husson. The latter mentions a local brothel, Madame Anaïs, and Séverine eventually goes to work there each afternoon, from two to five, using the name of Belle de Jour. Séverine's relationship with her various clients improve her lovemaking with  Pierre. However, on such client, a cheap hood named Marcel (brought to the brothel by another gangster, Hyppolite) becomes infatuated with her, and after Husson's discovery of her in the brothel Séverine's quitting prostitution, Marcel goes to her home and shoots  Pierre in a jealous rage, before being shot by the police. Husson reveals Séverine's secret life to the now blind and paralyzed Pierre. In the final scene Séverine imagines that Pierre is whole again and the two of them are happily married.

COMMENTARY: With its close links to L'Age d’Or and iys  blatantly commercial theme, Belle de Jour is certainly Buñuel's most successful film, and also one of entertaining. It is cloyingly lush in its cinematography and in the Yves Saint Laurent wardrobe worn by Catherine, (although her short skirts now seem the most dated aspect of the production). Buñuel announced the film as his swan  song,  which it was not - and obviously had a great deal of fun in keeping both the audience and the critics guessing as to how much of the film was reality, and how much Séverine’s fantasy world. The fact that many critics were confused, and did wonder if the entire prostitution story, including Marcel's shooting of Pierre, was nothing more than a figment of Séverine's  imagination, shows how well Buñuel succeeded in the Surrealistic theory that reality and dreams are one. In a New York Times interview (August 18, 1968), Catherine Deneuve was able to confirm that the girl really did work in a brothel and really did have a gangster-lover, and that her husband really was shot. What Miss Deneuve was unable to clarify, and what has fascinated audiences, is what exactly the Japanese client at the brothel had in his lacquered box-was it a bee, and  if so, what did he do with it?

The fantasy sequences are not that hard to identify, particularly if one bears in mind that the film opens with the best-known one: as Séverine and Pierre drive in a horse-drawn coach into a wood, Séverine is dragged from the coach, tied to a tree, stripped to the waist and whipped, and then, as the film suggests, raped by one of the coachmen. The presence of the coach and the sound of bells usually signify a fantasy (although, of course, the Japanese client does have a couple of bells). The one sequence that does give one pause is when Belle de Jour is picked up at an open-air café, taken by a duke to his château and placed in a coffin while the duke apparently  masturbates underneath. Is this a fantasy or does it really happen to Séverine? The reference to letting out the cats, a reference also  made in the opening sequence, would seem to imply this is fantasy. But who knows?

Belle de Jour is one of six films that Buñuel wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière, the others being Diary of a Chambermaid (1965), The Milky Way (1968), The Discreet Charm of the  Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Buñuel did not care too much  for Joseph Kessel's 1929 novel - "but I found it interesting to try and turn something I didn't like into something I did" - and considerably changed the ending, which originally had Marcel accidentally shoot Séverine's husband while attempting to  kill Husson, who was about to reveal her secret life. Buñuel has described the film as "chaste eroticism," but by current standards Belle de Jour is exceedingly coy.

All in all, as Robert Hatch commented in The Nation (April 29, 1968), "Except that she needs to be raped daily, the heroine is a dull girl." And certainly Catherine Deneuve is not the most responsive of actresses. Her expression seldom changes;  she may be "deliciously sumptuous" (as Penelope Gilliatt found her in the April 20, 1968 edition of The New Yorker), but she displays little sensuality and even less emotion.

American critics, perhaps because they could not decide what to make of Belle de Jour, were cautious in their praise. In Esquire (February 1968), Wilfrid Sheed had to admit, "The result,  even in a relatively trashy film like Belle de Jour, is oppressively powerful. Like being buried alive in Sarah Bernhardt's dressing room."

THREE REVIEWS

a) by Phil Anderson

We've seen plenty of movies about sexual confusion and the bourgeois desert in the last few decades, but never any as blankly funny/sad/angry as director Luis Buñuel's classic satire from 1967. Often resembling a clinical documentary without the all-knowing voiceover, Belle de jour profiles the double life of Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), a gorgeously passive woman who's both frigid wife and daytime hooker. The film's oppositional style refuses to explain Séverine or provide any anchors for easy interpretation; Buñuel simply follows the character and her daydreams wherever they go. Fitting the postmodern moment, the director's observations about propriety and desire, secrecy and danger, offer something for everyone: farce, harsh diatribe, melodrama, maybe even symbolic sermon. You can take your pick, because Buñuel, champion of absolute liberty, would've wanted you to.

b) by Roger Ebert

In the days after I first saw Stanley Kubrick's ``Eyes Wide Shut,'' another film entered my mind again and again. It was Luis Bunuel's ``Belle de Jour'' (1967), the story of a respectable young wife who secretly works in a brothel one or two afternoons a week. Actors sometimes create ``back stories'' for their characters--things they know about them that we don't. I became convinced that if Nicole Kidman's character in the Kubrick film had a favorite film of her own, it was ``Belle de Jour.''

It is possibly the best-known erotic film of modern times, perhaps the best. That's because it understands eroticism from the inside-out --understands how it exists not in sweat and skin, but in the imagination. ``Belle de Jour'' is seen entirely through the eyes of Séverine, the proper 23-year-old surgeon's wife, played by Catherine Deneuve. Buñuel, who was 67 when the film was released, had spent a lifetime making sly films about the secret terrain of human nature, and he knew one thing most directors never discover: For a woman like Séverine, walking into a room to have sex, the erotic charge comes not from who is waiting in the room, but from the fact that she is walking into it. Sex is about herself. Love of course is another matter.

The subject of Séverine's passion is always Séverine. She has an uneventful marriage to a conventionally handsome young surgeon named Pierre (Jean Sorel), who admires her virtue. She is hit upon by an older family friend, the saturnine Henri (Michel Piccoli, who was born looking insinuating). He's also turned on by her virtue--by her blond perfection, her careful grooming, her reserve, her icy disdain for him. ``Keep your compliments to yourself,'' she says, when she and Pierre have lunch with him at a resort.

Her secret is that she has a wild fantasy life, and Buñuel cuts between her enigmatic smile and what she is thinking. Buñuel celebrated his own fetishes, always reserving a leading role in his films for feet and shoes, and understood that fetishes have no meaning except that they are fetishes Séverine is a masochist who likes to be handled roughly, but she also has various little turn-ons that the movie wisely never explains, because they are hers alone. The mewing of cats, for example, and the sound of a certain kind of carriage bell. These sounds accompany the film's famous fantasy scenes, including the opening in which she rides with Pierre out to the country, where he orders two carriage drivers to assault her. In another scene, she is tied helplessly, dressed in an immaculate white gown, as men throw mud at her.

The turning point in Séverine's sexual life comes when she learns of exclusive Paris brothels where housewives sometimes work in the afternoons, making extra money while their husbands are at the office.

Henri, who has her number, gives her the address of one. A few days later, dressed all in black as if going to her own funeral, she knocks at the door and is admitted to the domain of Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), an experienced businesswoman who is happy to offer her a job. Séverine runs away, but returns, intrigued. At first she wants to pick and choose her clients, but Anaïs gives her a push, and when she answers ``Yes, Madame,'' the older woman smiles to herself and says, ``I see you need a firm hand.'' She understands Séverine's need and is pleased that it will bring her business.

There is no explicit sex in the movie. The most famous single scene--one those who have seen it refer to again and again--involves something we do not see and do not even understand. A client has a small lacquered box. He opens it and shows its contents to one of the other girls, and then to Séverine. We never learn what is in the box. A soft buzzing noise comes from it. The first girl refuses to do whatever the client has in mind. So does Séverine, but the movie cuts in an enigmatic way, and a later scene leaves the possibility that something happened.

What's in the box? The literal truth doesn't matter. The symbolic truth, which is all Buñuel cares about, is that it contains something of great erotic importance to the client.

Into Madame Anaïs' come two gangsters. One of them, young and swaggering, with a sword-stick, a black leather cape and a mouthful of hideous steel teeth, is Marcel (Pierre Clementi). ``For you there is no charge,'' Séverine says quickly. She is turned on by his insults, his manner, and no doubt by her mental image of her cool perfection being defiled by his crude street manners. They have an affair, which leads up to the deep irony of the final melodramatic scenes--but what Marcel never understands is that while Séverine is addicted to what he represents, she hardly cares about him at all. He is a prop for her fantasy life, the best one she has ever found.

Buñuel (1900-1983), one of the greatest of all directors, was almost contemptuous of stylistic polish. A surrealist as a young man, a collaborator with Salvador Dali on the famous ``Un Chien Andalou'' (1928), he was deeply cynical about human nature, but with amusement, not scorn. He was fascinated by the way in which deep emotional programming may be more important than free will in leading us to our decisions. Many of his films involve situations in which the characters seem free to act, but are not. He believed that many people are hard-wired at an early age into lifelong sexual patterns.

Séverine is such a person. ``I can't help myself,'' she says at one point. ``I am lost.'' She has a kind of resignation late in the film. She knows she has betrayed Pierre. For that matter, she knows she has used Marcel shamefully, even though that's what he thought he was doing to her. In the words of Woody Allen, which contain as much despair as defiance, the heart wants what the heart wants.

The film is elegantly mounted--costumes, settings, décor, hair, clothes--and languorous in its pacing. Séverine's fate seems predestined. So does that of her husband, who as a weak man is swept away by the implacable strength of his wife's desire. The best stylistic touches are the little ones, which someone unfamiliar with Buñuel might miss (although they work even if you don't notice them). The subtle use of meows on the soundtrack; what do they represent? Only Séverine knows. The weary wisdom about human nature: After Séverine refuses an early client, Anaïs sends in another girl, then takes Séverine into the next room to watch through a peephole and learn. ``That is disgusting,'' Séverine says, turning away. Then she turns back and looks through the peephole again.

``Belle de Jour'' and ``Eyes Wide Shut'' are both about similar characters--about staid, middle-class professionals whose marriages do not satisfy the fantasy needs of the wives. That long story about the Naval officer that Nicole Kidman's character tells her husband is closely related to the scenarios that play out in Severine's imagination. Both husbands remain clueless because what their wives desire is not about them, but about needs and compulsions so deeply engraved that they function at the instinctive level. Like a cat's meow. (July 25, 1999).

3) by Rita Kempley

After an absence of 20 years, Luis Buñuel's "Belle de Jour" returns to American theaters under the auspices of Martin Scorsese, a longtime fan of this 1967 psychodrama. Catherine Deneuve is at her iciest as the perverse Séverine, a Parisian housewife whose double life as a prostitute allows her to explore the masochistic fantasies that fill her dreams.

Bunuel, a pioneer of surrealism in the '20s and '30s, easily travels between Séverine's real and fantasy worlds, presenting both with equal clarity. This technique keeps audiences off balance and tricks them into mistaking the heroine's dreams for what Buñuel referred to as the "other reality."

The opening scene, in which Séverine and her husband, Pierre (Jean Sorel), enjoy a carriage ride through the French countryside, is really an elaborate sight gag. What appears to be the sumptuous opening of a period romance ends with the panting Séverine bound, gagged and whipped by the coachmen, who were ordered to do so by her husband. Then, Séverine opens her eyes and Pierre, in his chaste pajamas, enters their elegant bedroom and slips into one of the twin beds. A surreal gotcha.

Buñuel's sense of humor has been lauded by critics and fans, but this smug, stylish study in sexual degradation affords few laughs. Of course, how funny this film is depends on whether one finds amusement in Buñuel's disgust for middle-class institutions. This time, he goes after marriage, with its sterility and constrictions.

The brothel where Séverine works becomes the metaphoric antithesis of marriage. Here, customers and prostitutes alike are able to express genuine passion and experience genuine turn-ons. This notion went down well with art house patrons in the '60s, but that was before feminists like Lizzie Borden grew up to make films like 1986's "Working Girls," a harrowing documentary on prostitution. As Borden made clear, working girls aren't exploring their erotic yearnings, they're selling sex to men—most of whom don't look anything like Hugh Grant.

Séverine prefers her creepy customers to her handsome and tender husband, a hard-working surgeon who mistakes her frigidity for a lingering shyness. The enigmatic Séverine, a precursor of "Twin Peaks's" Laura Palmer, has flashbacks that link these erotic compulsions to childhood sexual abuse.

The director may have been ahead of his time, but he displays no more compassion for his characters than a psycho killer shows for his victims. Buñuel, who adapted the screenplay from Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel, does give the audience a choice of endings. The happy one is obviously another of Severine's fantasies. "Belle" seems the work of a beast.  (July 14, 1995)

02:  Jules et Jim (1962) - A film by François Truffaut

In Paris, 1900, two friends, Jules (Austrian) and Jim (French) fall in love with the same woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) . But Catherine loves and marries Jules. After WWI, when they meet again in Germany, Catherine starts to love Jim... This is the story of three people in love, a love which does not affect their friendship, and about how their relationship envolves with the years.

User comments: A breathless film about time (12 July 2001)

Time and revisionist critics have tried to tarnish the gleam of Truffaut's final masterpiece - citing its apparent misogyny and apoliticism; but for some of us, 'Jules et Jim' is the unforgettable film that opened the gates to both European film, and the great masters of American cinema like Hitchcock, Hawks and Ray.  'Jules et Jim' is, along with 'Citizen Kane', THE vindication of the pleasures of cinematic form: the first half especially, in its rush of narrative registers and technical exuberance, is unparalleled in modern film. This isn't mere trickery - the use of paintings, books, plays, dreams, conversations, documentary footage, etc., as well as the different ways of telling a story through film, all point to the movie's theme - how do you represent people and the world in art without destroying them? Or is art the only to save people and life from extinction?
The foregrounding of theatricality, acting, disguises, pseudonyms, games, works-within-the-work, all point to the high modernism in which the film is set, when the old certainties about identity and place were being destroyed by the Great War. In fact the film could be considered Cubist in the way it uses film form to splice up and rearrange images, space, characters, viewpoints. Truffaut's film is a beautiful elegy about time: the historical time heading towards destruction in the shape of the Nazis, and the circular time of love, obsession and art. These times struggle in the film's structure, history zipping past years in the framing, Parisian sections, and days stretching out interminably in the central rural rondelay.  Far from being misogynistic, the film places Catherine's speech about 'grains of sand' at its philosophical heart. AND she's played by Jeanne Moreau, the most honest and human of all great actresses. Author: Alice Liddel - from Dublin, Ireland

03: Betty Blue (1986). A Film by Jean-Jacques Beineix   (see website of "Images of Women in French Cinema")

Synopsis:  Zorg is a handyman working at the French Riviera, maintaining and looking after the bungalows. He lives a quiet and peaceful life, working diligently and writing in his spare time. One day Betty walks into his life, a young woman who is as beautiful as she is wild and unpredictable. After a dispute with Zorg's boss they leave and Betty manages to get a job at a restaurant. She persuades Zorg to try and get one of his books published but it is rejected which makes Betty fly into a rage. Suddenly Betty's wild manners starts to get out of control. Zorg sees the woman he loves slowly going insane. Can his love prevail even if it comes to the worst? A tragic love story about Zorg and Betty, who from the moment they met are passionately in love.  When she discovers the manuscripts that he has written, she becomes obsessed not only with him, but with his dream to be a writer. Her obsessions lead to madness, and eventually Zorg does have his novel published, after Zorg resolves himself to "put an end to Betty's misery."

This love story is of an absolutely modern sensibility, but with the tragic proportions of centuries-old dramas. The aesthetic is the same ìsuper-coolî style Beineix mastered in Diva.  Betty and Zorg have been called examples of the lost youth of the 1980s: intensely passionate with no focus, they end up self-destructing.  Or they can be seen as victims of the wild vicissitudes of art. Even for those who find the love story too melodramatic, Beineix's film is a visual and musical pleasure, making the tragic end that much harder to bear. André Sarris believed it was "the most explicite erotic movie ever nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and not for every taste." The film opens with a torrid love scene, a long take, tracking-in shot of Betty and Zorg, naked, making love under the smile of a Mona Lisa painting with a voice-over of Zorg saying: "From the moment I knew Betty, we made love every night."

One Film Review

She is neurotically generous. She is neurotically needy. We all know about people like Betty Blue : in movie, though not necessarily in life, they come to a bad end. Indeed, much of the suspense in this high-fevered melodrama resolves around whether that end will arrive sooner ot later, and just how painful it will be.

Yet one ends up caring about Betty, because Writer-Director J.- J. Beineix keeps coiling the story of her last months tighter and tighter until the tension is unbearable. Also, Béatrice Dalle as Betty and Jean-Hughes Anglade as Zorg, her bewitched and befuddled lover, bring mesmerizing intensity to their work.

The movie begins under false, bright colors at a beach colony where Zorg is the caretaker, and glad enough to have an attractive girl come into his life. The sex here is very naked and bluntly erotic - a few minutes of careless sex unmediated by commitment or guilt. For a while the movie seems like another study of love along what is left of the hippy margin. But no, it moves toward ever darker, more claustrophobic interiors as Betty realizes that the lackadaisical Zorg cannot absorb all of her energies.  She discovers that he once wrote, and abandoned, a novel.  She will type out the manuscript and get the masterpiece off to publishers. When the rejections pile up, she focuses her hopes on motherhood. When her pregnancy proves to be false, the only place to turn is inward, toward self-destruction. It is a fine irony that  Zorg achieves a passion to answer hers only when he must help her complete her boched suicide.

04. Un Deux Trois Soleil  (1993) - A filn by Bertrand Blier

Synopsis:  Bertrand Blier's exhilaratingly surreal coming-of-age drama follows a young Marseilles girl as she navigates through the uncomfortable waters of adolescence. Victorine (Anouk Grinber) is a feisty teenager who can't seem to escape her awful life. Living with a drunk for a father (Marcello Mastroianni) and a kook for a mother (Myriam Boyer), Victorine eventually forms a close bond with the gorgeous Petit Paul . Un deux trois soleil is a wild French drama about a young woman growing up in the slums of Marseilles. Totally wild from start to finish the film may confuse and possibly anger some viewers. But amid all the bizarre storytelling it has a good theme about the  French filmmaker Bertrand Blier is never above being outrageous and humorously irreverent to the point of offending at least someone along the way. With Un deuztroissoleil he pulls out all the stops and manages to tell a good story as well as provoke.

"Outrageous from the first frame...marbled with hard truths treated in a fanciful time hopping manner. " -  Variety

Film Reviews

a)  by Glenn Erickson
Un, deux, trois, soleil is one of those weird films that makes a positive impression even as it disturbs with unpleasant and threatening images and ideas. It's an excellent example of Theater of the Absurd at its challenging best. A love-starved young girl in a depressed Marseilles housing project is battered from all sides. Just about the time we've recovered from one nightmarish moment (a deranged mother following the heroine to school, a teacher being threatened by rape-hungry adolescents), something happens that convinces us that writer-director Bertrand Blier is sending us a worthwhile message about love and children and human understanding. This crazy picture isn't an empty provocation.

b) Glenn Erickson

The first thing to understand about Blier is that he puts most of the emotions, thoughts and actions of his characters on the surface in his films. If someone thinks a sexual thought it will become an action, if someone wants to kill someone they usually will.

He also has a ribald sense of humor, which would easily make the politically correct crowd howl; one of his best films (Going Places) involves two guys trying to give a woman an orgasm, another (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs) is about a woman who falls in love with a 14-year-old boy.

The story of un deux trois soleil is about the life of a young woman name Victorine (Anouk Grinberg) who grows up with a crazy mother and an absent drunken father. As she grows older she meets a young thief who is killed and then in time - just like most everyone else - she gets married to someone who she doesn't really love.

This is essentially Blier's 'life goes on' movie. But it is anything but typical. He plays with time, blends reality with imagination and goes off on wild tangents quite often. And while he can often be very funny with his irreverent attitude in this film it tends to get old. He throws in so many surreal flourishes, moments of madness and sexually provocative situations that the film loses it's narrative thread and gets a bit tiring.

The performances are all quite good especially from Anouk Grinberg who plays the main character from childhood to adulthood quite well, and Marcello Mastroianni who plays the drunk father who can never seem to find his way home. The cinematography by Gérard de Battista is excellent in its use of CinemaScope.

Although there is no nudity there are plenty of sexual situations and borderline questionable material. For instance, early on a topless heavy set black woman puts a young boy on her chest to bring him back to life after he has been shot. It's the kind of scene that makes one realize that Blier could care less about social conventions in his movies. Once audiences understand that and accept it then they can enter Blier's world and listen to what he has to say.

05. A Matter of Taste (Une affaire de goût, 1999) - A film by Bernard Rapp

Recipient of five Cesar Award nominations this year, Bernard Rapp’s A Matter of Taste  is a delicious affair, to say the least. A psychological thriller of the highest order, the film is adapted from Philippe Balland’s novel and drives a sharp skewer through class issues and society as its core pair of characters, a food taster and his rich employer, slowly change from friends to foes.

Handsome, carefree Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Lorit) works as a waiter in a posh Parisian restaurant, far from his frills-free, but contented home life with Béatrice (Florence Thomassin), his loving and lovely girlfriend. One day Nicolas serves lunch to wealthy, high-profile executive Frédéric (Bernard Giraudeau) who professes a sensitivity to certain ingredients. Asking Nicolas to taste his food for him, Frédéric discovers the young man’s ability to identify every ingredient precisely, and smitten by his charms to boot, hires him as personal food taster. Well paid for his duties, the pair slowly grow close, although Frédéric begins resorting to cunning schemes in order to tailor Nicolas’ culinary preferences, lifestyle and moral values more precisely to his own tastes. This gels an obsessive codependency between the two, and leads to worsening games of cruelty.

A Matter of Taste’s escalating look at dominance, economic seduction and questionable intents is in good company with such films as The Servant and Suite 16. A tasteful dish, regardless of the bitter aftertaste it can leave in your mouth. Bon appétit!   http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/matter_of_taste/

Reviews

a) by Stephen Holden - Hired to Be the Taster, but Not to Finish the Task

"A Matter of Taste" gives new meaning to the term "control freak," a concept that seems to have been invented for the era of overpaid, overly empowered corporate royalty. This deliciously nasty French deconstruction of male pecking orders, directed by Bernard Rapp, should send a pleasant shiver down the spine of anyone who has ever obsessed about wanting to please a devious and manipulative boss.

When that employer is as elegant and treacherous a narcissist as Frédéric Delamont (Bernard Giraudeau), the epicurean, insanely fastidious business mogul who hires a handsome young waiter to be his personal food taster, the very term "boss" takes on a new and sinister dimension. Owner and trainer might be more apt descriptions of the roles Frédéric assumes in the life of his new employee, Nicolas Rivière (Jean-Pierre Lorit). Frédéric is looking for nothing less than a soul mate, a psychic twin and a slave rolled into one: everything, that is, but a lover.

Frédéric's tapping of Nicolas suggests a modern corporate version of the apocryphal story of Lana Turner's being discovered sipping a soda at Schwab's Drugstore. While waiting on Frédéric and his associates in a fancy restaurant, Nicolas is asked to sample an appetizer and identify the ingredients. Pleased by his response, Frédéric suggests at the end of the meal that if Nicolas would like to be more than a waiter, he should telephone him.

After their initial interview, Frédéric, who says he fears accidental poisoning and has an aversion to fish and cheese, offers Nicolas a high- paying job as his personal food taster at business meals. One condition, however, is that Nicolas give up smoking. To make sure he doesn't cheat, Nicolas must agree to undergo monthly lung examinations. Choking back his doubts, the younger man agrees.

Dazzled by his new employer's wealth and thrilled by his salary, Nicolas endures a series of trials and training sessions that he rationalizes as a humorous continuing test of his mettle. Virtually a prisoner for several days on Frédéric's estate, he is put on a stringent diet, given diet pills and forced to drink huge quantities of water. After this enforced fast, he is rewarded with an enormous cheese and seafood feast that he devours, only to become sick to his stomach. The meal, it turns out, was laced with a nausea-inducing drug to spoil Nicolas's taste for fish and cheese and thus more closely align his palette with that of his employer.

Frédéric's demands take a mounting toll on Nicolas's relationship with Béatrice (Florence Thomassin), a robust working-class woman who runs a newsstand. As time goes by, Nicolas begins acquiring his employer's refined tastes and, to Frédéric's delight, even starts looking more like him. A slippery boundary is crossed when Frédéric invites Nicolas to sleep with a beautiful young translator he has been flirting with in a hotel lobby and offers to rent the couple a luxury suite. Just as they are about to have sex, Frédéric appears in a bathrobe and takes over, coolly informing Nicolas, "Your job is to test, not to consume."

"A Matter of Taste" is somewhat undermined by being told in flashback as Nicolas, who appears to have just murdered his boss, responds to questions from a magistrate and a psychiatrist. Since the film lacks a surprise ending, some suspense is sacrificed.

Where a less ambitious movie would have been content to spin out this clever plot, "A Matter of Taste" fleshes out a relationship that develops the heat of a tormented, unconsummated and highly addictive love affair. Frédéric may be a demonic ringmaster, but he also suffers terribly. Claustrophobic, germ obsessed, physically frightened and prone to nightmares and panic attacks, he is a neurotic mess who requires Nicolas to complete him in a way that he can't complete himself. Nicolas, for his part, is a working-class Joe who can't resist this opportunity for upward mobility. And his corruption lends the movie a social and political dimension.

Mr. Giraudeau's Frédéric is the ne plus ultra of suavely feline male elegance and refinement. We've all rubbed shoulders with dangerous smoothies like this, who use their power to seduce and emasculate other men. But because Mr. Lorit's Nicolas isn't as sharply focused, we feel more sympathy for the poor little rich boy pulling the strings than for the macho toady he puts through hoops. Had the two characters been more evenly balanced, "A Matter of Taste" might have been a minor classic comparable to "The Servant," a film to which it pays frequent homage. © The NYT, September 7, 2001

05. Beau Travail (1998) -  A film by Claire Denis

SYNOPSIS: In loosely adapting Herman Melville's BILLY BUDD, Claire Denis has constructed dreamy, detached visual poem that is at once somber and gorgeous. Denis transfers the tale's original location from the sea to the sparse landscape of East Africa's Djibouti. The film is narrated by Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), a French Foreign Legion officer who is intimidated by the arrival of Sentain (Gregoire Colin). Galoup becomes jealous when his commander, Forestier (Michel Subor), begins showing the new recruit extreme favoritism, and after Sentain bravely aids in the rescue of a downed aircraft, Forestier bestows upon him a glowing commendation. Galoup, overcome with jealousy, recklessly acts out on his irrational emotion, with near tragic results.

Denis boldly composes BEAU TRAVAIL like a silent film, including several extended scenes of the soldiers training in a rhythmic, choreographed manner. Agnès Godard's hypnotic cinematography captures the beauty of the soldier's tanned bodies and photographs the landscape with a rhythm that is both haunting and poetic. In what may be one of cinema's most electric final shots, Denis gives Galoup a last chance at redemption, after his recent descent into jealousy and cruelty. It provides an invigorating conclusion to the film and proves that Denis is one of the world's most gifted artists.

MOVIE QUOTES
"Maybe freedom begins with remorse. I heard that somewhere."--Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant)

TIDBITS
The actors worked with a choreographer to perfect their training drills.
BEAU TRAVAIL world-premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival
The film was acquired for American theatrical distribution by New Yorker Films after screening at the 1999 New York Film Festival.
Stephen Holden of the New York Times and Philip French of the Guardian Unlimited (UK) named BEAU TRAVAIL one of the 10 best films of 2000; the Village Voice and Film Comment named it the best film of the year.

Reviews

a) by Charlotte O’Sullivan

Claire Denis is good with bodies, and in this most spectacularly somnambulant of narratives they do a lot of work. As soon as we see the soldiers Sentain and Galoup, we know they are two forces which can only cancel each other out. Where Denis Lavant's Galoup has a face as rough as a lion's, Grégoire Colin's Sentain's is as smooth as a stone. Sentain's body tells us nothing about what he's thinking, while Galoup's blares out his sexual secrets. As a result, while we can empathise with Sentain, we never identify with him.

We first see Galoup's beloved captain Forestier in a black-and-white photograph. When this is replaced by the 'real' image of him smoking it's difficult to tell the difference - he still looks as mysterious as any noir hero. The same is true, too, of the men in the army and the prostitutes who service them: they're all gorgeous, iconic and remote.

What you realise, slowly, is that this is because they're all creatures of Galoup's memory. When, as a bitter civilian, Galoup presses an iron into his clothes, he looks stiff and ludicrous - a man doing a woman's job. But when the soldiers iron their clothes, they look fluid and complete. As they do their exercises, the camera crawls up their arms and thighs, asking us to breathe in their perfection. Like Galoup, we can't escape these visions of loveliness and begin to feel almost as oppressed by them. Are we and Galoup the aberrations, or are they? As the glowing landscape - yellow sand, green water, white rocks - pulsates behind the men's bodies, we enter into Galoup's masochistic, waking dream in which the answer, over again, seems to be that it's only the beautiful who belong.

Framing her essay on sexual identity like a thriller - "one stays and two are expelled," says Galoup of the trio he forms with Sentain and Forestier, prompting the question, which two? - Denis hooks our attention. Having allowed us to meet Forestier, she then has the screen fade to black, creating a sense of narrative expectation. The commandant's behaviour reveals flickers of nerves (unlike Sentain, he's self-conscious, given to gazing at himself in the mirror) which makes us wary of how he might treat the possessive Galoup. It's important that we don't sympathise with Galoup (or Sentain) too soon; looking for weak spots or the seeds of triumph in all three men, we see both, everywhere. Unable to judge these characters, we just have to stay with them.

The obvious dramatic models for Beau Travail'’s jealousy-fuelled narrative are Othello, Herman Melville's Billy Budd  (Benjamin Britten's music for the opera based on Melville's novella dashes gloomy panic into our ears) and Greek tragedy. Denis clearly enjoys paying homage to other texts: Michel Subor's commandant is called Forestier, the name of the character the actor played in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1960). Like the soldiers who never engage in 'real' fighting, but merely prepare themselves, endlessly, the film feels like a dress rehearsal, full of props over-eager to simulate life.

The language in the film is excessively formal. Galoup's diary entries are entirely elegant (unlike the man). And it's as if he's supplying the words for everyone else, too. Thus a languid Forestier tells his men, "If it weren't for fornication and blood we wouldn't be here [in Africa]", while they themselves make clunky reference to the fact that Forestier is the "father" of their family unit. The language here is unnatural, stylised, but that's why it works. Galoup's jealousies are all about the body, but like a puppet master - or even a precious screenwriter - he seeks to control any jerky, commonplace impulses. The dialogue continually alerts us to this controlling desire, and its limitations.

What makes Beau Travail   so special - and confounding - is that after all these clotted, self-defeating demonstrations of control, Galoup does find release. Early on, he tells himself that there's "freedom in remorse". It seems like just another sonorous try-out for genuine feeling, but towards the end we suddenly discover a new side to Galoup. He's in a disco, the anthemic club track 'The Rhythm of the Night' is playing and suddenly all the elements we've seen up to now - caged beast, clockwork toy, villain - blaze manically into life. With movements that are almost spasms, Lavant turns Galoup's body into something that takes up space rather than watches others encroach.

It's quite right that Sentain, Forestier and the prostitute should remain loose ends, untouched by reality. Perfect, saintly young boys may not really exist; prostitutes may not lead sleepy, ecstatic lives; captains may not stretch and tease in noir bubbles; but everyone except Galoup already knew that. It's also right that his sexuality should remain an unknown quantity - repression can't be undone in a day. What's important is that, while he may still be invisible to others (the disco is empty), Galoup can at last see himself and like what he sees - a glorious moment for him and for us. © Sight and Sound, August 2000)

b) By Stephen Holden -  Beau Travail': Billy Budd in Boot Camp for Legionnaires
.
Although the films of Claire Denis have always displayed a cool, vaguely hallucinatory appreciation of the surfaces of the world, none of this gifted French filmmaker's previous work has prepared us for the voluptuous austerity of "Beau Travail." Loosely adapted from "Billy Budd" and set in a French Foreign Legion outpost in the East African enclave of Djibouti, the film is narrated by Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), the movie's equivalent of Claggart, the sinister master-of-arms who destroys an innocent sailor in Melville's allegorical novella.

"Beau Travail" hews to the basic outlines of Melville's fable, which was set in the British Navy in 1797, but the story is really just a pretext for what emerges as a woman's rapt meditation on an all-male society, its pecking order and its punishing rituals of authority, repression, discipline and honor. And because it is set in an impoverished East African country (Ms. Denis spent her childhood in French West Africa), the film has a political dimension. You sense the repressed racial tensions among the legionnaires, who are both white European and black African, and their uneasy relationship with the townspeople near the outpost.

What Ms. Denis has made of "Billy Budd" is the visually spellbinding cinematic equivalent of a military ballet in which the legionnaires' rigorous drills and training rituals are depicted as ecstatic rites of purification, the embodiment of an impenetrable masculine mystique before which the director stands in awe. Where another filmmaker exploring the same material might emphasize its homoerotic subtext, Ms. Denis is in search of something deeper, more elemental and ultimately more elusive.

Observing the young men's beautiful bodies in motion, the movie often presents them as the bodies of sleek trained animals relentlessly conditioned into mechanized fighting machines. Some of the most haunting images show the men wriggling and scurrying like agitated rodents through the dirt under barbed wire. But other sequences have an astounding poignancy. In one training ritual, the bare-chested legionnaires ritually and without a trace of self-consciousness or squeamishness throw themselves into each other's arms. A stunning sequence views them from a distance through a chain fence as they frolic in the waters in the Gulf of Aden. The landscape, which juxtaposes extreme beauty and desolation, surreally mirrors this life of rugged austerity. The parched, stony wasteland in which they train abuts a gorgeous turquoise sea from whose waters jut three volcanic islands.

"Beau Travail" de-emphasizes Melville's allegory to the point that the story is almost incidental. Its Billy Budd figure, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), offends the sergeant by saving the life of a fellow soldier who is seriously injured when a helicopter mysteriously crashes into the sea. Refusing to believe in Sentain's selflessness, Galoup decides Sentain is really up to no good and begins persecuting him. Colin's role is a marked departure for this talented actor, who recently played a lean and hungry predator in "The Dreamlife of Angels." But instead of the radiant embodiment of goodness, Sentain is a model of blank military discipline and obedience whose humane instincts are what get him into trouble.

In the embattled relationship that develops between them, we never have a sense of pure good and pure evil locked in a metaphysical struggle. Nor does the film build up a terrifying sense of implacable cruelty goaded into viciousness by an image of heroic innocence and victimization. Galoup ultimately emerges as a sympathetic figure whose urge to destroy Sentain is portrayed as an inevitable, almost Pavlovian response to the punishing asceticism of military life. Ms. Denis, having been entranced by the life she is been observing, ultimately wants to disavow its mystique.

  "Beau Travail" ends with a thrilling and unexpected leap in a scene of frenzied Dionysian release. It is the perfect final gesture in a film that has the sweep and esthetic power of a full-length ballet. © The NYT Company, March 31, 2000.

06. Amour de femme (Un Amour de femme, 2001) - A film by Sylvie Verheyde)

SYNOPSIS: Jeanne, 35, is a successful osteopath in Paris, offering healing to others through massage and touch. Married, with a son of seven years, Jeanne expertly and willingly goes through the motions of a happy marriage, though her faraway manner belies this suggestion of satisfaction. But something unsettled brews from within. Attending a party with her husband, she meets a professional dancer named Marie, with whom she forms an immediate bond. Recalling times when she herself used to dance, Jeanne resolves to take lessons from Marie. Through dance, she begins to reacquaint herself with her own body (even as she has cared for the bodies of others), and with the expression of inner passion, which has been lacking in her marriage. When Marie reveals her sexual attraction to Jeanne, almost immediately Jeanne realizes that she feels the same way. Then, it’s only a brief matter of time before she falls in love - shocking a close friend in whom she confides, angering her husband as his suspicions of an affair grow stronger, and overwhelming Jeanne herself with waves of passion that lift her ever higher… and carry her farther and farther away from the life she has known.

COMMENTARY: In a tour-de-force of direction, Sylvie Verheyde tells the compelling story of two passionate women weighing the undeniability of their love against forces that would keep them apart. Presented with depth and subtlety, the film glimmers with its director’s considerable storytelling prowess, and especially with the raw immediacy and passion of its leading performances. Hélène Fillières, as Jeanne, is a formidable screen presence: her stormy beauty simultaneously suggesting the terror with which she at first cowers from love’s promise, then lunges at it hungrily, epitomizing Jeanne’s greatest question in life: who is this woman that I am becoming?  She is aptly paired with Raffaëla Anderson (of the controversial French feature BAISE-MOI), whose Marie is the very picture of courageous self-determination, whether romancing Jeanne in quiet conversation, or wildly dancing with a commanding ferocity. Though the film sidesteps easy solutions to the challenges these women face, it is exhilarating for the force and conviction with which it depicts love’s disregard for convention and timidness, in a relentless flow toward its own truth.

The French flick Un amour de femme offers up first-time Sapphic love with a simple, austere realism. A beautiful married woman is instantly drawn to the lively, passionate dancer she meets at a birthday party for her husband's friend. As their attraction builds and she considers what it might mean to be in love with another woman, her life becomes a clash of contradictions and tough decisions. Avoiding all the trappings of cheesy lesbian melodrama (well, except maybe in the title), and beautifully shot, Un amour  plays out with Chekhovian grace - longing and kindness, then desire, grow out of the smallest of gestures and looks, the heaviest of silences. Un amour  is about how the most intense thoughts and feelings can be minute and intimate, and simultaneously thundering, wild and universal (MH)

"Rife with sexual tension and intimate, realistic dialogue, Amour de Femme is a classic character-driven tale of self-discovery set in beautifully atmospheric Paris. Directed with haunting beauty by Sylvie Verheyde, the film boldly advocates faith in life’s possibilities when it comes to following your heart." - OUTFEST LOS ANGELES LESBIAN & GAY FILM FESTIVAL ]
 
 

08. Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves, 1992) -  A film by Cyril Collard [UML Media center]
Cast: Cyril Collard, Romane Bohringer, Carlos Lopez, Corine Blue

SYNOPSIS: Jean (director Cyril Collard) is young, gay, and promiscuous. Only after he meets one or two women, including Laura (Romane Bohringer) does he come to realize his bisexuality. Jean has to overcome a personal crisis (he is HIV-positive) and a tough choice between Laura and his male lover Samy (Carlos Lopez).

A Film Review by James Berardinelli

"AIDS, like tuberculosis in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, is just a backdrop [in Savage Nights]. Jean's struggle with the illness is also a struggle with stupidity, with all sorts of racism, with tyranny... Jean acts as though nothing were different in his daily life. He continues to drink, laugh, and drive fast. In his own way, he is shattering the taboos. He doesn't let himself get locked into the status of being HIV-positive, like some people for whom the illness becomes a sort of identity card."  - Cyril Collard, writer/director/actor, Savage Nights

French filmmaker Cyril Collard published Les Nuits Fauves, his autobiographical novel, in 1989. It relates events in the life of Jean (Collard), a 30-year old Parisian who, in 1986, is diagnosed as being HIV-positive. Unwilling to acknowledge that the virus has made him different, Jean continues his promiscuous bisexual life, pursuing a male lover by the name of Samy (Carlos Lopez), and falling in love with seventeen-year old Laura (Romane Bohringer).

In 1992, Collard (together with longtime companion Corine Blue) brought the book to the screen. Released in October of that year, Savage Nights caused an immediate stir across France. It went on to take four Cesars (Best Film, Best First Film, Best Film Editing, and Best Female Newcomer - Romane Bohringer) in March 1993 -- three days after its writer/director/star died of AIDS.

As was Collard's intention, this film is about the relationship between Jean and Laura, with AIDS serving as a vital backdrop for their interactions. Theirs is a twisted, dysfunctional affair, with jealousy and co-dependence working to destroy them. As a love story, this is dark and tempestuous, filled with searing arguments that become progressively more violent.

The most refreshing facet of Savage Nights is its willingness to flout political correctness. After learning of his condition, Jean does nothing to curb his sexual appetites, nor does he attempt to practice safe sex. And, when Jean eventually confides in Laura, her reaction (after initially being horrified) is to toss away the condom he proposes to use. Unlike in Philadelphia, AIDS here does not equate to near-nobility.

Giving a stunning performance in her debut is Romane Bohringer, the talented daughter of actor Richard Bohringer. The part of Laura, which not only earned Bohringer a Cesar, but also the role of the title character in The Accompanist, demands an extreme output of energy and emotion, and there is no instance when the actress isn't up to the task. Her scenes with co-star Cyril Collard crackle with intensity.

Speaking of Collard, he wasn't his own first choice for Jean, but he took the role when no other French actor was willing to risk playing a character so closely identified with AIDS and bisexuality. In retrospect, the ultimate casting of Jean is perfect, leaving us this legacy of Collard's skills as an actor.

Savage Nights  is not without problems. The erratic pacing is amplified by a series of jarring cuts which can make the viewing experience similar to reading a book without transitions. Also, there are times when it's difficult (if not impossible) to sympathize with the film's protagonist because he's such a self-centered jerk. This, in part, leads to a rather unsatisfying final scene.

Passionate and unrelentingly grim in its portrayal of life on the edge of death, Savage Nights  is a film that refuses to compromise. This may lead to an uncomfortable movie-going experience; this motion picture is neither traditionally entertaining nor escapist in nature. However, for those who want a grittier portrayal of the effects of AIDS than the one presented in Jonathan Demme's recent Philadelphia, Savage Nights offers the option. Few will leave this film unaffected - one way or another.  © 1994 James Berardinelli

Film 09 : A Heart in Winter (Un coeur en hiver,1993) -  A film by Claude Sautet

Claude Sautet's Un Coeur en Hiver is a story about rejecting love and - in the end - acknowledging its claims.

A Post-Modern Romance?

by Alan A. Stone

Un Coeur en Hiver, written and directed by Claude Sautet, is the negation of a love story and in our post-modern world negation can have the deepest power of instruction. Not that this marvelous film is didactic or ponderous. Like the fragile violins that Stéphane (the protagonist) repairs, the movie is delicate and beautifully crafted. It is also an uncompromisingly sophisticated work that never condescends to its audience.

Many moviegoers will want to see this film as an old fashioned psychological study of character - to explain Stéphane's refusal of love as the natural outcome of his neurotic hang-ups. Sautet has invited such speculation by making a film which is like one of those figures in elementary psychology textbooks. Viewed one way you see a vase, viewed another way you see two witches; it is virtually impossible to see witches and vase at the same time. If you want to see both, you must go back and forth between them.

Sautet has put together a modern psychological drama and a medieval morality play and you need to go back and forth to capture the sophisticated aesthetics of his film. His "double vision" narrative takes us beyond determinist psychology and into the moral adventure of life. Except for Stéphane, all of his characters are recognizable personalities; if we cannot predict their behavior, we can certainly understand it after the fact. They all belong in the psychological drama. But Stéphane's personality is an unsolvable mystery and one cannot say about him that his psychology is his destiny. His character undercuts and challenges settled conventions of thought and gives this movie its post-modern spin. It does not, however, spin into radical relativism or nihilism. Sautet has rediscovered the possibility of love by negating it.

Stéphane (Daniel Auteuil) and Maxime (André Dussollier) are partners in the violin business. Maxime - sophisticated, worldly, ingratiating, sensitive to the moods of others - has all the small-talk that reduces social tension. The enigmatic Stéphane has mysterious depth and social insensitivity, and his qualities are highlighted by the way Sautet plays the characters off against each other. Stéphane is less than handsome, but his face is intriguing and Sautet's prolonged close ups make the most of its many surprising possibilities.

The partners buy, sell, repair, and construct the finest stringed instruments for a carriage trade of musicians. Maxime is the classic outside man: expansive, engaging, and expert at dealing with the temperamental artists who need to be reassured about their treasured instruments. Stéphane is the classic inside man: the master craftsman who can find and repair the slightest flaws because he fully understands the music as well as the instruments.

The French can make waiting on tables a high art form and, more than any other people, seem to have preserved the tradition of dignified artisanry. Stéphane, once a serious student violinist, is obviously a master craftsman. But only Sautet's French imagination would allow us to recognize and celebrate the heroic qualities of a man in his vocation.

There is something definitely monachal about Stéphane's life. His immaculate button down shirts are his clerical collar. Unmarried, he lives in rooms behind the shop, apparently desiring no pleasures beyond the satisfactions of his work. Most important, Stéphane seems to have no need for other people and no dreams of love. Music is his only dream. Maxime by contrast is a sybarite who happily mixes business with the pleasures of the flesh. From the outset, the audience can see that the partnership between these men is a perfect fit.

The film begins with the meticulous Stéphane gluing the top of a violin in place. He utters Maxime's name. Maxime, needing no instruction, arrives from the front office at the correct moment to screw the wooden vises in place. The partners work together, play racquetball together, and seem to have an enviable friendship. But not, as we shall learn, by Stéphane's standards. He does not reciprocate Maxime's apparent affection.

Maxime is living in the fast track: married, having affairs, travelling all over Europe, hobnobbing with concert artists. But now, as he tells Stephane over dinner in a restaurant, something important has happened - he is in love.

Many of the scenes in Sautet's movie take place in this same restaurant. If home and family are the center of ordinary people's lives, Sautet's characters have no center. No one seems to have children or to be bound by family obligation. The restaurant is their public place for private conversations.

At such dinners in the past, Maxime had no compunction about describing his extra-marital affairs. But for him this is a different kind of conversation. He has kept this affair secret, even from Stéphane, because he wanted to protect the beautiful and talented Camille (Emmanuelle Béart) - a young concert violinist. Maxime has been touched by grace; he admires as well as loves Camille and has now decided to leave his wife for her. Stéphane is less than gracious in his response to these revelations.

A standard psychoanalytic take on his reaction might see Stéphane as a jilted lover - a woman has come between two men with a latent homosexual attachment. Sautet has written the screenplay to permit such ideas to surface. Thus, Stéphane looks across the restaurant at the beautiful Camille, the new love who is sitting with her agent, Régine, a woman of mannish appearance. Stéphane pointedly asks Maxime whether he has broken up a couple. Whatever the latent or actual erotic nature of these male and female relationships, both will be fractured by the new love affair.

Each of the intimate relationships in this film presents a variation on the theme of non-reciprocal love. The musical metaphor is worth stressing because this film is not only about making music; it seems to have been conceived and constructed as a musical composition. For example, the theme of couples overheard quarreling is played out again and again in variations among the major and minor characters.

If Stéphane's question about breaking up the couple is less than gracious, Maxime quickly defuses the tension by insisting that the agent, Regine, is the best friend of Camille's mother. Stéphane borders on rudeness as he presses Maxime about how his wife is dealing with this new turn of events. But Maxime refuses to be offended. With worldly wisdom he declares that in relationships someone always gets hurt. What Maxime does not imagine as he prepares to move in with Camille, is that he will be the one to get hurt - by Stéphane.

If in relationships someone has to have the dominant hand, Maxime seems to have it over Stéphane. He wins their racquet ball games and has dismissed Stéphane as a possible competitor in the game of love. Stéphane, though previously willing to take a back seat to Maxime, somehow cannot accept the new arrangement. The most striking aspect of this situation is that the beautiful Camille is a promising concert violinist. She is a high priestess in the temple of music where the monastic Stéphane worships. Indeed each of the characters in this movie worships in that same temple where art is God and music is prayer. Maxime, in possessing Camille, has found a place closer to the altar and perhaps, for the first time, the devout Stéphane envies the less virtuous man.

The relationship between Camille and Régine is another variation on the theme of non-reciprocal love. Régine, the strong older woman, has taken Camille, the young artist, under her wing, cultivated her talent, promoted her career, and lovingly fed her ego. But the relationship which once nourished Camille now suffocates her. She wants to break out and assert her independence. Although Maxime gives her more freedom than Régine had, she has found in him an older man who will care for her in much the same parenting way. It is change without growth and we soon see that it too is a non-reciprocal love that has not fully engaged her.

Régine knows that she has been rejected. She rankles with resentment and shows her feelings of hurt and betrayal. Whether or not Régine was (as Sautet suggests) Camille's lover, Régine certainly behaves as if she has been jilted. Stéphane, seemingly insensitive and unaware of himself, may have similar feelings but takes a different course.

It would be wrong to say that he purposefully sets out to seduce Camille. Stéphane never acts with obvious, identifiable, motives. He is like Camus's existential protagonist in The Stranger who kills for no reason. So Stéphane makes this beautiful woman love him for no reason, rejects her for no reason, and then has every reason to suffer for his actions. But the subtle Sautet stops far short of Camus. His hero, Stéphane, has reasons and motives. They just do not seem sufficient to explain his actions and in that insufficiency Sautet creates the moral space that gives his fragile movie its profundity.

Emmanuelle Béart was splendidly naked in her recent film La Belle Noiseuse. But Sautet keeps Camille's body covered and his discipline makes her expressive face seem even more beautiful. Camille, as it turns out, had studied as a child with the same violin teacher as both Maxime and Stéphane. Scenes at that violin teacher's home in the French countryside are interwoven like musical passages with long stretches of urban scenes in Paris. But the home, beautiful in its setting of trees, is no conventional family residence. When the main characters gather there for a dinner party and discussion of art, it seems that the elderly teacher's middle-aged companion is his cook and nurse but not his wife. It is another non-reciprocal relationship and Stéphane will overhear their desperate quarrels. Later sequences show the country house filled with children, one of whom is somehow related to the woman. We might wonder if the child is their bastard. Sautet seems to delight in such ambiguity. But the children are in his movie more for decorative purposes and to lighten the mood than because they belong.

This teacher is the one person whom Stéphane seems to admire. He is a man of intellect, faithful to the church of music, and exacting in his judgment. The teacher, who once taught Camille, describes to Stéphane the young girl he had known as hard and smooth with a considerable temperament behind the hardness. No longer a student, Camille is at a critical moment in her career. She is preparing to record the Ravel Sonata and trio. Though her technical excellence is not in doubt, Camille has yet to prove that she can go beyond hard and smooth to artistry.

Maxime brings her to the shop so that Stéphane can find and fix the flaw in her violin. It is impossible not to sense the instant electricity between Stéphane and Camille. She is intrigued by his intensity, his exacting standards, his emotional unavailability. He fixes her instrument and then attends her rehearsal to listen. His presence seems to disturb her concentration. He leaves but returns of his own accord at a later time and with a subtle adjustment the master craftsman further improves the violin's tone. Camille quickly becomes dependent on his presence. Stéphane has become the mechanical and spiritual catalyst for her artistry. Having made himself necessary, he absents himself - and she is hooked, like a woman who falls in love with her psychiatrist. She needs him, loves him, must have him. We begin to glimpse the temperament that will boil over in the scenes to come. Sautet's sophisticated taste and subtlety are present everywhere in this movie, and it surely was inspiration to cast Auteuil and Béart, husband and wife [at the time], in the roles of Stéphane and Camille.

Camille reveals her love for Stéphane to Maxime who, though incredulous, remains a man of the world in the best sense. He is prepared to step aside, at least temporarily. Indeed, knowing Camille's intense feelings, he asks Stéphane to attend the Ravel recording. Camille, inspired by her passion and believing it to be fully reciprocated by the seemingly worshipful Stéphane, plays Ravel's ecstatic music as never before; it is a triumph and everyone at the recording knows it. Filled with confidence, Camille wants to consummate her love. But in her moment of glory, when she surrenders herself body and soul to Stéphane, he refuses her.

For many people love holds the only promise of transcendence. And romantic (yes sexual) love is the closest most of us come to realizing the fulfillment of that promise. So when Stéphane rejects Camille's offer of love Sautet surprises and defeats our expectations. The knee-jerk psychological reaction is that Stéphane has to be crazy. Our dismay must be allayed by denying his sanity. But in the morality play, to which he belongs, his mysterious negation of love can illuminate our own hopes and fears as would-be lovers.

Stéphane does not refuse out of loyalty to his friend, Maxime. He had told Camille in an earlier conversation that Maxime was not his friend - only his partner. Nor does the refusal grow out of his love for some other woman, as Camille imagines. He has given his only woman friend no promise of love. Deep in their heart of hearts some people wonder if they are even capable of love. Stéphane might be one of them. But in the end, neither Stéphane's character nor the web of relationships in which he and Camille are involved is sufficient to explain his refusal of this proud and beautiful woman. Like obstinate men who refuse to pray because they do not believe in God, Stéphane refuses Camille because he does not believe in love. He is a man of rectitude, but without faith. He has therefore lost an opportunity in the moral adventure of his life - and one that we are made to feel may have been his best and only chance.

The desolate Camille goes on a drunken binge and the next day confronts Stéphane in one of Sautet's restaurant scenes. There the high temperament we glimpsed earlier explodes in a public display of angry confrontation. This is the ultimate overheard quarrel. Everyone in the restaurant is forced to be a party to Camille's crescendo. After shaming herself and humiliating Stéphane, she leaves the restaurant. Maxime replaces her and, standing over Stéphane like an outraged husband, slaps him in the face and sends him crashing to the floor.

Auteuil plays the perfect bewildered victim in this public scene - and it is slightly bewildering. After all, Maxime is furious with Stéphane because he did not sleep with the woman Maxime loves - and, of course, under the circumstances Maxime is right to be furious. Sautet has created one of those rare moments when comedy and tragedy converge.

Stéphane's rejection of Camille ends his partnership with Maxime. His other woman friend who has been his only companion announces that she has found a man who cares for her. Stephane goes on with his vocation but he is almost alone in the world. Does he understand what has happened?

Stéphane openly acknowledges all of his possible psychological motives to Camille - from sexual hang-ups to deviousness - but only to demonstrate that they are insufficient. He goes to the wise old violin teacher who raises all the other more existential reasons - from a need to demystify love to the possibility that Stéphane might have felt inadequate. But those reasons too are insufficient and the teacher and his former student do not solve the mystery of the insufficiency. Indeed, Sautet wants to preserve the notion that there is no complete explanation - what he has left open is moral choice and lost opportunity. If Stéphane is not "neurotic," then Un Coeur en Hiver  raises questions about how the rest of us make our choices in the moral adventure of life.

Sautet shows his audience early in the movie that Stéphane's relationship with the teacher is of great significance to him - a son's admiring love for the ideal father. Toward the end of the movie Stéphane is called back to the teacher's country home. The man is dying a painful death. Neither the woman who cares for him, nor Maxime who had already arrived, has the will to put him out of his misery. Stéphane, the man without sentiments, does what is necessary. He enters the room and no words are spoken. The dying man looks at Stéphane and then looks to the bedside table where the medications are. Stéphane, the ultimate craftsman, approaches the task at hand and completes it with the practiced skill of a surgeon.

One might think that this death scene - a Doctor Kevorkian moment - is gratuitous, not really connected to the central dynamic of the film. It is also quite implausible that Stéphane would be adept with an intravenous syringe. Yet, thematically, it ties everything together and prepares for the coda. The death of a loved one reminds us all of our mortality, of missed opportunities for the expression of love, of what is most precious in the moral adventure of life. In Stéphane's decisive action, we see the power of a will unmoved by sentiment and for that very reason lacking some human quality. Kant thought that passion was a disease of reason but Sautet shows us through Stéphane that the absence of passion is a disease of human nature.

The final question that Sautet asks is whether Stéphane has been changed by these experiences. The answer is so subtle that it took this reviewer two viewings of the movie to catch it. The last scene, a coda, fittingly shows Stéphane sitting in a restaurant talking with Maxime. Camille arrives and Maxime goes to get the car - they are a couple again. Briefly alone with Stéphane, Camille asks him about his feelings for the dead man. Stéphane's reply, wonderfully nuanced and appropriate to the delicate but rich tones of the film, is that he used to think the teacher was the only person he loved. I take it he now realizes that he loved Camille and that he loved his friend Maxime as well. Camille tenderly kisses him goodbye and drives off with Maxime. She knows that the miraculous moment is irretrievably lost. Stéphane sits alone, a man who now too late believes that love and music are part of the same dream.  Originally published in the December 1993/ January 1994 issue of Boston Review

Film 11: The Housekeeper (Une femme de ménage, 2002  - A film by Claude Berri
From the novel A Cleaning Woman, by Christian Oster

Reviews
a) by Leslie Camhi - It's Not Easy Being Clean French Maid

For someone living in disarray, a housekeeper can provide more than a simple return to order. When the ashtrays are finally emptied, the bed freshly made with clean sheets, the dishes washed and neatly arranged in the cupboard, who hasn't felt the promise of a new beginning? The Housekeeper, veteran French director Claude Berri's remarkably faithful adaptation of Christian Oster's slyly comic and bitter novel A Cleaning Woman (newly translated by Mark Polizotti for the Other Press), explores that delicate moment of transition when one phase of a man's life has ended, and he's not yet aware that another has begun.

Jean-Pierre Bacri stars as Jacques, a usually meticulous fifty something Parisian sound engineer who's managed to let the newspapers and dirty socks pile up at home in the months since he was dumped by his longtime live-in girlfriend. One day, responding to an ad in his local bakery, he hires Laura (Emilie Dequenne), an inexperienced young woman, to clean his apartment. They make an odd pair—he likes reading and listens to jazz or classical music, while she sweeps to techno and enjoys sinister television game shows. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, her presence begins to arouse first his curiosity, then something more.

Berri, whose previous film, La Débandade  (Hard Off), was an autobiographical farce about erectile dysfunction, has an unerring instinct for probing the chinks in masculine armor. In a flawless performance, Bacri lets us glimpse the tender desperation beneath his character's harsh, curmudgeonly exterior. Whether chewing dinner alone in his apartment (like a man eating his last meal and not liking the taste), or hanging onto a pole in the métro as if for dear life, he radiates both toughness and a terrible loneliness. Director of photography Eric Gautier's camera makes the most of Bacri's knife-like presence, framing him repeatedly against vast backgrounds—a shopping mall or a crowded beach—that are studies in alienation.

Dequenne's tattered charm and sheer joie de vivre (unsuspected from her breakthrough role in the Dardenne brothers' grim Rosetta) shift their balance of power, shattering his brittle reserve. The film's French title, Une Femme de Ménage, carries an erotic connotation—as in ménage à trois. But don't suspect a happy ending. As in Oster's novel, this is a deceptively light story about the emptiness that drives people both into each other's arms, and away from one another. When a long-lost girlfriend finally returns (here director Catherine Breillat, in a surprising cameo), it's almost always too little that's offered, and too late. (July 9 - 15, 2003)

b) by Stephen Holden - A Clean House Leads to Tangled Romance

"The Housekeeper" Claude Berri's amused comic reflection on middle-aged susceptibility to the sexual power of youth, is not much more than an extended anecdote that culminates in a gently admonitory punch line. But the modesty of this miniature but tasty French soufflé, adapted from a novel by Christian Oster, suits its purposes. The movie, which opens today in New York, fits squarely into a Gallic tradition of wistful, worldly-wise comedies that reflect on the weakness of the flesh. That vulnerability seems to be the guiding theme of this 69-year-old French director's work nowadays. The middle-aged men bumbling through his last film were discovering the joys and limitations of Viagra.

With its later scenes set on the Brittany coast at the height of summer, "The Housekeeper" plays like a less verbally dexterous homage to Eric Rohmer. Its smooth, effortless performances by Jean-Pierre Bacri as Jacques, a sound engineer for classical and jazz recordings in his 50's, and Émilie Dequenne (from "Rosetta") as Laura, the beautiful but opaque 20-year-old housekeeper who invades his life, capture the clash of middle-aged wariness and youthful impetuousness.

The romantic tango in which Jacques is caught up inevitably leaves him gasping for breath and unsteady on his feet. If you're over 40 and have been tempted against your better judgment to an April-September fling, "The Housekeeper" should produce a sting of recognition

As the movie begins, Jacques is still struggling to organize his life months after the stormy departure of his wife, Constance (Catherine Breillat), who still pesters him with anonymous phone calls and shows up at his door one evening in a state of high agitation. Their edgy exchange reveals the complexity of an entanglement that still has enough sparks left in it to be rekindled.

By this time Laura has barged into Jacques's life and blithely initiated an affair in no time, advancing from once-a-week housekeeper to roommate (one day she announces that she's homeless after breaking up with her boyfriend and begs him to take her in) to weepy, clinging lover. From the beginning of course there are warning glitches, as when Laura dances around the apartment to hip-hop music played at top volume and watches trash television while Jacques tries to relax in the next room with classical and jazz recordings.

When Jacques tells Laura he's going to visit a friend on the Brittany coast, she insists on accompanying him, and all at once they're a couple. Their zany host, Ralph (Jacques Frantz), is a chicken farmer who paints portraits of the fowl he serves to his dinner guests. As the lovers tour the local nightclubs and beaches, the disparity of their ages quickly begins to take its toll.

The movie's biggest weakness is Laura, who is less a full-blown character than a symbol of youth and its careless ways. She is finally such a blank that her mood swings and changes of heart take on a creepy psychotic undertone that was probably not intended by the filmmaker and that leaves you with a sense of incompletion.

12. Look at Me (Comme une image, 2004) - A Filn by Agnès Jaoui

Agnès Jaoui's film follows a group of Parisians who balance their affection and friendship with fierce ambition and a willingness to betray one another to get what they want. At the center of the struggle is Lolita (Marilou Berry), the daughter of a successful literary editor (Jean-Pierre Bacri). The self-conscious Lolita seeks attention from two men, but suspects that they're more interested in her father than they are in her. A ripe and exacting comedy, the film earned the prize for Best Screenplay at Cannes.

Two Film Reviews

a) by Ruthe Stein

When a novelist names his firstborn Lolita, he probably doesn't envision her turning into a pudgy 20-year-old who is unrelentingly sour. Lolita's anger stems from an acute awareness that she has failed to live up to expectations in "Look at Me," an engrossing new drama from France. She's an inappropriate daughter for an exalted author. Her father, a wire hanger away from being daddy dearest, continually reminds Lolita of her shortcomings by ignoring her need to be loved or at least noticed.

One of the many marvels of this keenly observed family saga is the rapidness and economy with which it establishes a disturbing father-daughter dynamic. "Look at Me" opens with the writer Etienne (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and Lolita (Marilou Berry) heading to a party after the Paris premiere of a movie based on one of his novels. In the crush of guests, he loses her. Etienne tells her it was an accident. But on a subconscious level, he would rather Lolita hadn't found his table, and the audience immediately grasps this.

Etienne has the hauteur associated with intellectuals. But it's too facile to attribute his emotional cruelty simply to arrogance. "Look at Me" is so compelling because a universal experience can be read into it. You needn't be bright or accomplished to feel that your adult children somehow don't measure up, and anybody can be stupid enough to show it.

Bacri wrote the insightful and droll script with Agnes Jaoui, who also directs and appears as Sylvia, Lolita's voice coach. Accomplished at multitasking, they're the same team who made and starred in "The Taste of Others," a delicious romantic comedy.

As played by Bacri, Etienne is so smug you want to punch him out, yet a trace of humanity shines through. Jaoui subtly shows a change in Sylvia's relationship with Lolita.

Trying to get her father's attention by taking up an artistic pursuit, Lolita's already failed at acting when she joins a vocal ensemble. She hangs on Sylvia's every word -- when she tells her to move her face more, Lolita goes off into a corner and practices so much her jaw must hurt -- and at first her neediness annoys her teacher. But Sylvia, who happens to be married to a struggling novelist, develops more patience after discovering who Lolita's father is.

Although it must be tempting for screenwriters to give themselves the juiciest roles (think Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in "Good Will Hunting''), Bacri and Jaoui have the generosity to make Lolita the central character. Berry is a wonder in the role, self-deprecating but also self-aware. When Etienne's well-meaning and very skinny second wife takes her stepdaughter shopping for clothes to improve her self-esteem, Lolita comments, "I'll be lucky if I fit in the dressing room."

With a wary glance, Berry communicates Lolita's distrust of young men who might be feigning interest in her because of her proximity to fame. Lolita wants someone to not just look at her, but see her for who she is. © San Francisco Chronicle

b) James Berardinelli

At first glance, Look at Me appears to be a standard French drama about a dysfunctional family. All the elements are in place: the domineering father whose celebrity status has made him indifferent to the needs of his family, the meek trophy wife, the overweight daughter who craves her father's unavailable affection, and several outsiders who find themselves drawn into an unstable orbit around these people. Yet first glances can be deceiving. Yes, this is a dysfunctional family drama, but it's also something more profound. Look at Me takes aim at the common human character flaw of self-absorption and examines how we no longer seem to communicate with one another.[...]

Look at Me stars Jean-Pierre Bacri as Étienne Cassard, the aforementioned father. Bacri co-wrote the script with Jaoui, who is on-screen as Sylvia Millet, a voice teacher who becomes enmeshed in the Cassard family's struggles. Bacri and Jaoui have enjoyed a long and fruitful on-screen and off-screen collaboration, but this may be their swansong. According to what I have heard, they experienced an acrimonious break-up during the making of Look at Me, and may not be working with each other again.

Étienne is a star author, whose every new work is awaited with baited breath by an adoring public. He absorbs adulation like it's his right, and treats friends and family members with equal portions indifference and contempt. His daughter, Lolita (Marilou Berry), who forms the film's emotional center, has a beautiful voice, but Étienne cannot see past her physical appearance. She is overweight, and therefore an object of ridicule. His second wife, Karine (Virginie Desarnauts), fares little better than his daughter. He shows her no affection and often makes nasty jokes at her expense. She's a classic trophy wife - beautiful, half his age, and not worth engaging (at least in his opinion) in conversation.

Enter Sylvia and her lazy writer-husband, Pierre (Laurent Grévill). She is Lolita's vocal coach. At first, she is impatient with the young woman - until she learns that Lolita could provide her with an opportunity to meet Étienne. The meeting happens, and Pierre and Sylvia end up joining the Cassards on a trip to the country (shades of Chekhov). While there, a lot of things come into the open, and wounds are laid bare. There is resolution at the end, but no real closure.

With the exception of Étienne, who is an outright bastard, all of the characters are presented using vivid shades of gray. But the universal characteristic, as intimated by the English-language title, is self-absorption. Every individual in this film sees himself or herself as being at the center of the universe. Some, like Sylvia, are less in the grip of this character flaw. Others, like Étienne, have developed narcissism and self-obsession to a high art. The most sympathetic of Look at Me's protagonists is Lolita. Despite her impressive voice, her poor self-image, bolstered by her weight, have made her timid, and her father's callous attitude towards her has only re-enforced her feeling.

Jaoui's observation that people today do not communicate well is not original, but it is presented intelligently. Combine self-absorption with a reliance upon impersonal methods of interaction (the cell phone, for example), and this is a recipe for a society in which we no longer hear each other. We speak, but we do not listen. When someone else it talking, we're busy figuring out what we are going to say next.

Although Look at Me is not a farce, there are plenty of opportunities for laughter. Characters who are self-absorbed rather than self-aware give writers opportunities to highlight the absurd, and that's what Jaoui does. As is almost universally the case in French productions, the acting is top notch. Bacri, who has played this kind of character on previous occasions, presents Étienne as a dislikable, but believable, man. The other standout is newcomer Marilou Berry, whose portrayal of Lolita touches the heart without becoming maudlin. The dialogue sparkles, and the development of the story, in addition to recalling Chekhov, may have some cineastes thinking of Eric Rohmer. (Although, as good as Jaoui's gift for writing speech is, she hasn't attained Rohmer's level of mastery.)

Look at Me is a fine motion picture - simple, direct, and offering truth. It is for a particular audience - those who like films that concentrate on character rather than plot, and who aren't put off by subtitles. Look at Me is French in the way it is presented (when we think of a "French movie," this is the kind of film that will jump to mind), but the themes it embodies are universal.  © 2005 James Berardinelli

01. La Femme Nikita (1990) - A Film by Luc Besson

Main reading -  by Paul Sutton:  "La Femme Nikita: Violent Woman or Amenable Spectacle?"

Luc Besson, the director of La Femme Nikita (1990), is known in France as an exponent of the so-called cinéma du look, a term that has generally been used pejoratively to describe a certain kind of filmmaking and certain kinds of films that are thought to privilege style over content. This genre of film is generally regarded as "youth-oriented" and is associated "with high production values," with the "look" of the cinéma du look referring to their "high investment in non-naturalistic, self-conscious aesthetics." (1) The main critical objections to these films center on their associations with post modernity and consequently their perceived "lack of ideological or social substance.(2) Thus, Besson has been associated with "the aspirations and the anxieties ... of the  young" in France. (3) Bearing this in mind, it is certainly no coincidence that at the beginning of La Femme Nikita, its heroine is represented as a member-the only female member-of a doubly subcultural or marginal gang, both junky and punk. Speaking of the origins and style of the British punks in 1976 and 1977, Dick Hebdige in his influential Subculture: The Meaning of Style, argues that punk was a bricolage of "distorted reflections of all the major post-war subcultures." (4)  He further suggests that punk was in fact a kind of masquerade, condemned to act out alienation, to mime its imagined condition, to manufacture a whole series of subjective correlatives for the official archetypes of the "crisis of modem life."

Thus, for Hebdige, the punks were not only directly responding to increased joblessness,changing moral standards, the rediscovery of poverty, the Depression, and so forth, they were dramatizing what had come to be called "Britain's decline."

Nikita (Anne Parillaud), then, is situated, at the very beginning of the film, as a member of a marginal social group that is associated with social deprivation, with difference, with otherness - signifiers of a subcultural style "which offends the 'silent majority,' which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus"(5).  What I want  to stress [in this chapter of Women in Contemporary French Cinema ] is the constructedness of Nikita as punk (and junky), as social "deviant" and to illustrate how this operates as a forerunner of her later incarnation as state assassin. Nikita, as we will see, is doubly constructed as violent and twice has her violence explained. In the first instance by the simple fact of being a punk/junky, and in the second through her employment; she is required to do the job so as to repay her debt to society. Detailing how subcultures become visible in the wider culture, Hebdige notes the following:
 

"In most cases, it is the subculture's stylistic innovations which first attract the media's attention. Subsequently deviant or "anti-social" acts-vandalism, swearing, fighting, "animal behaviour" - are "discovered" by the police, the judiciary, the press; and these acts are used to "explain" the subculture's original transgression of sartorial codes.... In the case of the punks, the media's sighting of punk style virtually coincided with the discovery or invention of punk deviance." (6)

The sartorial element functions in La Femme Nikita as the barometer for Nikita's status, but, as it will become clear, only within a male governed economy of value-she is devalued as punk/junky, valued as beautiful femme (fatale). In the case of Nikita then, her punkishness is used to "explain" her initial violence, just as her violence also explains punk. Her crime, the apparently motiveless murder of a policeman in cold blood, is explained by the identity she has assumed, and this explanation serves, perhaps, to contain this violence, to render her shocking act somehow comprehensible. The murder occurs only after the police have shot and killed the other gang members-Nikita has only survived because she is a woman. The policeman she shoots dies because he makes an assumption about gender; he dies because he has perceived her to be unthreatening. Nikita, in terms of her drug addiction is represented as the needy one of the gang. It is Nikita who whispers "J’en veux" [I need it]," who is situated as passive, both in relation to her need and in relation to her male counterparts, who actively attempt to supply that need.

 It should be stressed, however, that during this opening sequence Nikita's gender appears indeterminate. She is, as one critic has suggested, "woman, child, boy, man" and it is only when Nikita is seen in a classically fetishistic close-up that it becomes clear that she is indeed a woman.(7)  Now this is partly a function of her punkishness with its denialof conventional notions of beauty, and its "blank robotics" of bodily expression or deportment that sets her up as a woman who requires "feminization," i.e., the mythical transformation from beast to beauty.

Nikita's becoming woman, and specifically a French woman, as one commentator has noted, is a double process.(9) As Amande (Jeanne Moreau) remarks when Nikita comes to her as part of her government training: "My dear girl, you don't look much now, but if we work hard together and if fortune smiles on us, we'll be able to make you into a human being. An intermediary but necessary step before becoming man's perfect complement: a woman." (10)

However, despite her accommodating transformation, Nikita's gender remains ambiguous and thus requires the continued use of various cultural and sartorial signifiers to render it stable, primarily through her position as femme fatale. There is a certain irony here, for as the phallic woman Nikita does indeed become "man's perfect complement," a fetishized fantasy object-a phallus-that affirms, whilst it also threatens, his masculinity.

So punk, then, in Besson's film, signifies both style and anti-style, a certain transgression and a certain conformity-it is fundamentally spectacular, as are Besson's films themselves, which might lead one to argue, with Hebdige, that ultimately Besson's films are stylized masquerades." Similarly, it is clear that Nikita herself is simply spectacular, simply spectacle. Essentially, both Besson's film and its protagonist may be read as instances of "style over content," where style ultimately becomes content. Nikita is constructed, as a woman and as violent, as much through style-cinematic and sartorial-as through the agency of patriarchy and the state.

Thus far a number of associative links between Besson's film style, punk as a sartorial and cultural style, femininity as masquerade, and gender as performance have been proposed. In what follows, notions of masquerade will be examined in more detail.

Nikita is twice constructed as violent-once, as already argued, as a punk/drug addict, and once as a state sponsored assassin. She is further doubly constructed, as intimated earlier, as a woman: first, as a beautiful object and, second, through the sanction of a heterosexual relationship. (12)  Nikita is both contained and not contained within the diegesis of the film. In other words while one can argue perhaps for either, she nonetheless remains an ambiguous figure.(13)  Fundamental to this question of containment is the dynamic of spectatorial relations vis-à-vis La Femme Nikita, both the film and the character, and I will address this central question in the  context of Nikita's narrative manufacture and containment.

Generally, readings of La Femme Nikita have hinged on the  question of Nikita's transgressive behavior, on whether she represents a positive or negative image  for women. (14) She is often regarded in the opening sequence of the film as "wild, disorderly-what is outside the law, what is uncontrollable," more specifically, what cannot be contained." However, this violent and transgressive behavior is already contained by the punk trope that explains it. Nikita is further contained in the narrative through her arrest and subsequent life imprisonment; she is also quite literally framed because having killed one policeman, her imprisonment, for a minimum of thirty years, is for the murder of three. She is then given what appears to her, and to the viewer, to be a lethal injection. When she later wakes up, she learns that she has officially committed "suicide" and is given a "choice" to either work for the state and Bob (its representative, her "boss," played by Tcheky Karyo), or become a so-called suicide for real. Here, then, Nikita finds herself contained by death (her family have attended her funeral) and by the threat of death.

Once "dead," Nikita undergoes an intensive training period, three years, which transforms her both into a woman and an assassin. She is trained in the use of computers, guns, and fists and also in "the construction of a new and feminine identity. (16)  This process of transformation culminates in the construction of a new Nikita. We see her metaphorically reborn on the completion of a trial mission, after which she is put to work, code-named Jos6phine, and using a job as a nurse-the ultimate feminine ideal-as a cover. Thus, as Susan Hayward has noted, "in order to stay alive, she [Nikita] has to deal out death on orders from the state, on orders from Bob the father; in other words she is no longer the agent of violence she was in the opening sequence. She has become the vehicle for and the embodiment of state violence, the sadistic outcome of containment." (17)

This trial mission takes place on Nikita's twenty-third birthday. She is taken out to a restaurant by Bob and given a gun as a present. She is instructed to carry out an execution. However, the information that Nikita is given by Bob is misleading, and her escape route (via the men's restroom) is blocked - she thus has to shoot her way out and eventually escapes by jumping into a waste chute. From trainee to assassin, Nikita is literally reborn during this mission, the chute a metaphorical birth canal.

The rebirth of Nikita functions, then, on a number of representational levels. Nikita is first shown to have become une femme, the perfect dinner partner. However, she is also visually coded, her costume indicating her embodiment of the femme fatale. On receipt of the pistol from Bob, she also becomes a literally fatal woman: a state controlled killer. She has been reduced to a stereotypical image: "little black dress, great big gun." Nikita, dressed in classic fetishist apparel-high heels, second-skin dress, gun-has become a literal fetish, the means by which the state and Bob who have created her can both disavow and represent their fear of female difference, their fear of castration. As fetish,Nikita is contained as the projection of a mental construct, an image behind which the "real" woman disappears. Guy Austin has argued that this fetishized Nikita is also contained at the level of the cinematic image. In contrast to her earlier punk incarnation, this Nikita "no longer spills out of the frame" but "fits the Screen as an amenable spectacle." (18)

Susan Hayward, who views the early Nikita as only contained at the point of her arrest and incarceration, argues that this newly born Nikita "embodies a male construction of the femme fatale as deceptive masquerade." Given Nikita's gender ambiguity, she is both the "male made female" and a woman constructed by a man, Bob, and by the male, patriarchal, state. Nikita, as a state assassin, as the "site of state violence [she] masquerades, because she is already a male construct.... She is fetishised and then obliged to act phallically. She is the phallus masquerading as the phallus."(19)

Nikita is contained, then, through her construction, as a phallic woman, by a man, Bob, and the state under whose hetero-patriarchal control he operates. As Hayward asserts, the female body is being fixed both as object and "is also being used as a displaced figure of masculinity." However, as the rebirth sequence attests, Nikita is also continually positioned as female, primarily in order to disavow any potential same-sex desire on the part of the male spectator. Thus Nikita's escape route is via the men's restroom, allowing for a shot that situates her male pursuers in relation to the legend "Hommes/Gents," followed immediately by a shot of the fetishized femme Nikita herself.

Now before moving on to discuss issues of contaimnent in relation to male and femalew spectatorship, I would like to cite a number of brief extracts from an interview (remarkable for th convergence it reveals between the film and real life), given by Anne Parillaud, the actress who plays Nikita, at the time of the film's release. Conducted by Richard  Cannavo and entitled "Birth of an Actress," the interview, parallelling the central theme of La  Femme Nikita itself, refers to the rebirth of Parillaud, her metamorphosis from "ex-starlette" to "real actress."(20). In Cannavo's words: "She [Parillaud] returns, and this return is a shock, for in [La Femme] Nikita, she is simply amazing, revelation" (p. 86).

Cannavo continues, stressing, through a series of violent images, what he surmises must have been Besson's role in this transformation:

“It required the audacity and quiet confidence of someone like Besson ? this mercenary of the cinema - to risk backing this disembodied creature, this empty carcass, this broken doll. It can't have been easy for him, alone, to overcome the reservations or to ignore the sniggers of laughter.” (p.86)

Here we have exactly the structure that I have delineated so far in relation to the diegesis of the film itself, but in this instance in terms of a privileged spectator (Cannavo) and the actress playing the role. Cannavo sets up Parillaud in exactly the same way that Besson sets up or contains Nikita in his film. Besson, it should be noted, is also Parillaud's partner, and it would appear that she was the inspiration or template for the character of Nikita. Cannavo  asks: "Were you surprised when you read the screenplay by what Besson wanted to make you act?" Parillaud replies: "I was really very surprised by what I had inspired in him, or at least by what he had wanted to show of me" (p. 87).Parillaud explains how she began acting at age sixteen and believed in her elders, rather than in herself; she says: "[W]hen these elders transform you, when they decide your personality and your image for you, you let them, because at this age of uncertainty  and research, they answer the questions that you are asking yourself" (p. 86). Parillaud recounts how she became uncomfortable with this world and resolved to leave it: "I decided ... that stopping everything was the only way that I might enable myself to reappear one day, different" (p. 86). It would appear that this filmic reappearance is attributable to La Femme Nikita's director. In a later question, Parillaud is asked whether she "owe[s] Besson  everything?" This is her response:
 

“I owe him the most important thing - his belief in me. To have noticed what others, including me, hadn't seen. I will always be conscious of his belief in me for such a role, no doubt in the  face of opposition. Because it was him (sic), and him (sic) alone who allowed me to realize one of my greatest dreams.” (p. 89)

As illustrated, the interdiegetic containment of Nikita shares an uncanny relationship with the containment of Anne Parillaud, and the extracts from this interview certainly appear to lend extradiegetic evidence to the assertion that Nikita reflects in  fact a negative rather than a positive image for women.

With reference to the extra - as opposed to interdiegetic, I would like to address the question of spectatorship in relation to La Femme Nikita, focusing specifically on the female spectator, as opposed to the fetishistic, Mulveyean male spectator already briefly examined. A study conducted by Susan Hayward noted that many, especially young, women viewers of the film regard Nikita as representing a positive image for women; a character on a "trajectory towards freedom." (21)  However, it has been argued that the visual pleasure of the film leads to an identificatory position, on the part of male and female spectators, with the position of the state, and that viewers of the film survey Nikita just as she is placed under surveillance by this state.(22)  Thus one might ask where the female spectator is located in this male economy of visual pleasure? Susan Hayward argues that ultimately any reading of La Femme Nikita, i.e., the character and the film, from a position  of female spectatorship is problematic and that the film, as suggested earlier, used the female body "as a displaced figure of masculinity." (23)  Female spectators of Nikita are confronted by a set of limited spectatorial positions that ultimately contain them. Thus, they can either identify with the positive, powerful Nikita but suffer with her the consequences of her transgression of patriarchy. Such a position is a masochistic one, in which, as Hayward notes, "we [women spectators] view our own subjection and approve of it." Alternatively, female spectators of the film can view Nikita negatively, occupying the sadistic and voyeuristic position of the traditional male spectator. As Hayward points out this "is ... a trope of the film noir, one that makes the female body safe by fetishising it." (24)

In conclusion I would like to focus briefly on the issue of containent in La Femme Nikita and its Hollywood remake Point of No Return. ith reference to the final sequence of each film I wonder whether either Nikita or Maggie (Bridget Fonda) can be seen to escape contaiment interdiegetically and whether there might also be a relationship of containment between  the French film and its American remake. Point of No Return duplicates La Femme Nikita more or less scene for scene. However, the film's final scene demonstrates clearly that Maggie has escaped he clutches of the government -Bob (Gabriel Byme) lies to his bosses, telling them that she is dead - and is therefore free. La Femme Nikita, by contrast, ends on an ambiguous note with Bob and Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade) mourning Nikita's disappearance: "Elle va nous manquer" ("We'll miss her.")

In Point of No Return, it is clear that Maggie escapes government control, and hence containment. In the case of La Femme Nikita it is diffcult to be sure that she escapes, although it is certainly a possibility. However, here it remains more a function of a particular reading of the film: Nikita as "on a trajectory to freedom" or not. In the case of Maggie, while there is no question that she has eluded the state, her escape has in fact been engineered by Bob and thus in a sense she remains contained by the state and by patriarchy. The closing image of Point of No Return is the photo that J.P.= (Dermot Mulroney) has taken of Maggie, an image hat ultimately also illustrates Maggie's spectatorial containment as fetish.

The potentially open-ended La Femme Nikita is therefore closed or contained by the final sequence of Point of No Return. Furthermore,Badham's film contains and remakes the cinematic violence of Besson's film in an act of metaphorical violence. In other words, the Hollywood remake controls the hyperactivity of the French film, much as Nikita is controlled by the state. Thus just as Nikita is herself contained, as a violent woman, by the government, patriarchy, Bob, so Badham's film contains the potential open-endedness of Besson's film and defuses its final mbiguity through its hegemonic Hollywood happy ending. © Film Studies: Women in Contemporary French Cinema, 2002 Peter Lang Publishing.

Notes

1. Ginette Vincendeau, ed. Encyclopedia of European Cinema  (London: Cassell and the British Film Institute, 1995), 82.
2. Vincendeau., 82.
3.  My translation, P. S.
4. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1989), 26.
5. Hebdige, 26.
6. Hebdige, 93.
7. Susan Hayward, "Nikita: Sex, Violence, Surveillance," paper presented at the conference "Violence and Gender: Representation and Containment," London, 9 December 1995. Hayward has since published an excellent extended study of Luc Besson and his films. See Susan Hayward, Luc Besson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998).
8. Hebdige, 108. Nikita's manner of walking, before her transformation would appear to owe much to Hebdige's description of punk dance as "blank robotics."
9. "One way of reading Nikita is as the transformation of an androgynous transnational youth-gum-chewing and virtually indistinguishable from her male friends... - into a French woman, with all the accoutrements of the part from Degas posters to couture clothes and the ability to decorate a Parisian  apartment." Ginette Vincendeau, "Hijacked," Sight and Sound (July 1993): 25.
10. Nikita, dir. Luc Besson, France 1990. Original French version  with English subtitles. VHS PAL. Distributed by Fox Video. Implicit in this remark is the idea that woman, unless  beautiful, does not exist; and if beauty, as Francette Pacteau suggests, requires the absence of "real" woman, then woman can only exist for the hetrerosexual male, as beautiful image. Francette Pacteau notes: "The fantasmatic production of woman as image bespeaks the desire for apresence, a fullness of the seen which would preclude ambiguity,  disjunction, loss and lack." See Francette Pacteau, The Symptom ofBeauty (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 110.
11. The punk in Besson's film is, of course, an appropriation of punk as cinematic style in that it forms part of the look of the film. Postmodernity has been described as an "aesthetic of recycling," and one might want to think of Nikita in similar terms, as a kind of recycled male fantasy.
12. As Francette Pacteau notes in The Symptom of Beauty, "beauty subsists," on "misrecognition and undecidability," and requires the "absence of the real woman that is the necessary support of the attribution of beauty," 12.
13. Hayward notes the importance of containment for this film when she remarks that, "containment ... is the deep rooted meaning of this film." See "Nikita. "
14. See for example, Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996), 130-31; and Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), 293.
15. Hayward, "Nikita. "
16. Austin, 130.
17. Hayward, "Nikita. "
18 Austin, 130.
19. Hayward, "Nikita. "
20. Richard Cannavo, "Naissance d'une actrice," Premiere, April 1990, 86. This and subsequent translations are mine.
21. Hayward, "Nikita. " Hayward's study refers to the responses to the film of female students in her film classes.
22. Hayward, "Nikita. "
23. Hayward, "Nikita. "
24. Hayward, "Nikita. "

Bibliography

Austin, Guy. Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.
Bachet, Laurent. "Poisson Pilote." Première, April 1990, 83.
Cannavo, Richard. "Naissance d'une actrice." Première, April 1990, 86.
Hayward, Susan. French National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993.
- Luc Besson. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.
- "Nikita: Sex, Violence, Surveillance." Paper presented at the conference "Violence and Gender: Representation and Containment."London, 9 December 1995.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1989.
La Femme Nikita. Dir. Luc Besson. Perf. Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jeanne Moreau. Palace Pictures, Gaumont, Cecci, Tiger,  1990.
Pacteau, Francette. The Sympton of Beauty. London: Reaktion Books, 1994.
Point of No Return. Dir. John Badham. Perf. Bridget Fonda, Dermot Mulroney, Gabriel Byrne. Warner Bros., 1993.
Vincendeau, Ginette. "Hijacked." Sight and Sound (July 1993): 25.
-, ed. Encyplopedia of European Cinema. London: Cassell and the British Film Institute, 1995.

Un Deux Trois Soleil  (1993) - A filn by Bertrand Blier

Synopsis:  Bertrand Blier's exhilaratingly surreal coming-of-age drama follows a young Marseilles girl as she navigates through the uncomfortable waters of adolescence. Victorine (Anouk Grinber) is a feisty teenager who can't seem to escape her awful life. Living with a drunk for a father (Marcello Mastroianni) and a kook for a mother (Myriam Boyer), Victorine eventually forms a close bond with the gorgeous Petit Paul . Un deux trois soleil is a wild French drama about a young woman growing up in the slums of Marseilles. Totally wild from start to finish the film may confuse and possibly anger some viewers. But amid all the bizarre storytelling it has a good theme about the  French filmmaker Bertrand Blier is never above being outrageous and humorously irreverent to the point of offending at least someone along the way. With Un deuztroissoleil he pulls out all the stops and manages to tell a good story as well as provoke.

"Outrageous from the first frame...marbled with hard truths treated in a fanciful time hopping manner. " -  Variety

Film Reviews

a)  by Glenn Erickson
Un, deux, trois, soleil is one of those weird films that makes a positive impression even as it disturbs with unpleasant and threatening images and ideas. It's an excellent example of Theater of the Absurd at its challenging best. A love-starved young girl in a depressed Marseilles housing project is battered from all sides. Just about the time we've recovered from one nightmarish moment (a deranged mother following the heroine to school, a teacher being threatened by rape-hungry adolescents), something happens that convinces us that writer-director Bertrand Blier is sending us a worthwhile message about love and children and human understanding. This crazy picture isn't an empty provocation.

b) Glenn Erickson

The first thing to understand about Blier is that he puts most of the emotions, thoughts and actions of his characters on the surface in his films. If someone thinks a sexual thought it will become an action, if someone wants to kill someone they usually will.

He also has a ribald sense of humor, which would easily make the politically correct crowd howl; one of his best films (Going Places) involves two guys trying to give a woman an orgasm, another (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs) is about a woman who falls in love with a 14-year-old boy.

The story of un deux trois soleil is about the life of a young woman name Victorine (Anouk Grinberg) who grows up with a crazy mother and an absent drunken father. As she grows older she meets a young thief who is killed and then in time - just like most everyone else - she gets married to someone who she doesn't really love.

This is essentially Blier's 'life goes on' movie. But it is anything but typical. He plays with time, blends reality with imagination and goes off on wild tangents quite often. And while he can often be very funny with his irreverent attitude in this film it tends to get old. He throws in so many surreal flourishes, moments of madness and sexually provocative situations that the film loses it's narrative thread and gets a bit tiring.

The performances are all quite good especially from Anouk Grinberg who plays the main character from childhood to adulthood quite well, and Marcello Mastroianni who plays the drunk father who can never seem to find his way home. The cinematography by Gérard de Battista is excellent in its use of CinemaScope.

Although there is no nudity there are plenty of sexual situations and borderline questionable material. For instance, early on a topless heavy set black woman puts a young boy on her chest to bring him back to life after he has been shot. It's the kind of scene that makes one realize that Blier could care less about social conventions in his movies. Once audiences understand that and accept it then they can enter Blier's world and listen to what he has to say.
 

Film 7: Dry Cleaning (Nettoyage à sec, 1997) -  A film by Anne Fontaine

Plot Summary

In a provincial town, not very far from the train station, not too far away from the big city of Paris, exists a night club where small town tastes are challenged by sexually ambiguous performers who tease and agitate conservative thinkers. One evening, a group of friends, all of whom are merchants with stores on the same block venture into the netherworld of a nightclub known as "La nuit des Temps", where a brother and sister perform a provocative strip-tease drag number that hypnotizes Jean-Marie and his wife Nicole who run a dry cleaning shop in the town. After fifteen years of love and faithfulness, working at the dry cleaning has cemented their relationship into a routine, but consistent lifestyle. They are slaves dedicated to eliminating the minute stains on the community's clothing. Never a day of rest, never a vacation for this beleaguered couple. Then one day the brother of the strip tease act stumbles into the dry cleaners to remove a stain from his dress. Now, Nicole and Jean-Marie begin a new life, dry cleaning during the day and spinning out of control at night. At first, they let themselves be taken in by the excitement of the game, which later has dire consequences for the couple's sanity. The strong excitement of a new sexual partner ignites feelings in both Nicole and Jean-Marie and makes them see themselves in ways they cannot understand.  Summary written by Strand

Reviews:

a)  by Arthur Lazere

Anne Fontaine's new film, Dry Cleaning stimulates ongoing thinking and plants a solid emotional whammy that cannot be ignored. The premise is reasonably easy to describe. A late thirties-ish, attractive young couple are living a dull, provincial life in a dull, provincial town. They've been married for fifteen years, have an ordinary son, an ordinary live-in mother-in-law who is prone to sing charmlessly, and they run an ordinary dry cleaning business. Money is tight, vacations endlessly put off because they're just too expensive. One lives within one's means, within the rules; life is ordered and roles are understood.

Enter an androgynous young man, Loïc (Stanislas Merhar in a notable début), brought up in foster homes, performing (on and offstage) with his sister, with whom there has been an incestuous relationship. Attractive and sensual, they have made their lives as transvestite perfomers in nightclubs and sexual performers with paying clients. They live from club to club, from hand to mouth. There are few rules, life is unordered and in the moment, roles are hazily defined, changeable. A different moral order from that of our dry cleaning friends.

With a screenplay by Fontaine and Gilles Taurand (Wild Reeds, Les Voleurs) that patiently and credibly crosses the paths of these people from different worlds, they find themselves in a menage that unsettles the settled. Loïc's sister breaks with him and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) offers him a job in the cleaning shop. Loïc's emotional neediness is apparent. He has never had a family, nor the comfort that stability offers - just the opposite of his hosts, locked into their secure petite bourgeois ways. He turns out to be a superb worker and wends his way into the life of the family.

Nicole (Miou-Miou), the wife, we see to be more open to alternatives, interested in change, experimentation, while Jean-Marie, clearly tempted, is resistant to stepping outside his known boundaries. The scene is thus set for these three to work through their destinies; the film seems to gather momentum with a downward spiral of inevitability. CV will not spoil it for you by telling more.

That this is a carefully wrought and thoughtfully constructed movie is evident. The performances by the three leads, in difficult roles requiring subtle interpretations, are first rate; a less accomplished cast could easily have missed the emotional detail and psychological insight that make the unfolding events believable and give them weight beyond that of an obvious morality tale.

Fontaine leaves a deliberate ambiguity to the conclusion. There is no obvious right and wrong here, no good guy or bad guy; what happens grows out of who we have learned these characters to be. There are complex emotional needs, repression, constraining life circumstances. We can't always choose who and how we love; there are some choices we may or may not be free to make  - either way, we are never free of the consequences.

b) by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.

Someone once said that the division of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals is an artificial one. The reality, he concluded, is that people separate into two categories: those who love and those who cannot. If you're one of the lucky persons in the former group, you could feel attracted to either sex. The theory is a provocative one, running completely counter to "normal" thought throughout the world. Broad-minded people accept the reality and validity of homosexuality but few people honestly believe that we're all bisexual, pushed into making a choice by the influence of bourgeois thinking.

But the intriguing presumption gets a thorough workout in Anne Fontaine's "Dry Cleaning," known in French as "Nettoyage à sec, a film which has already garnered major international prizes: one at Venice for its screenplay, the other, a Cesar, going to Stanislas Merhar as best new actor. Mr. Merhar fully deserves such consideration for a genuine achievement, and the screenplay effectively deviates from a theme that has been done to death: that of a drifter who comes to town, causes trouble for a seemingly stable couple, and then leaves (either on his own feet or in a box). The classic tale, Tay Garnett's 1946 "The Postman Always Rings Twice," featured electrifying appearances by John Garfield and Lana Turner, the former in the role of a layabout who comes upon a diner run by Cecil Kellaway and Ms. Turner and destroys their marriage. In the more recent work, Robert M. Young's 1996 "Caught," a homeless Irish drifter eludes police by hiding in a fish store. The owners, played by Edward James Olmos and his wife by Maria Conchita Alonso, take him in to work as an assistant. Nick (Arie Verbeen) accepts Joe (Olmos) as a father figure but becomes sexually attracted to Joe's wife.

"Dry Cleaning" is both more complex than these predecessors and less so, less because the plotting is simpler, involving fewer outsiders; more, because the archetypal drifter becomes even more attracted to the father figure than to the older man's wife. Along with the creators of "Postman" and "Caught," writer-director Fontaine realizes that such a triangular arrangement can lead to no good.

In Fontaine's film Jean-Marie Kunstler (Charles Berling) and his wife Nicole (Miou-Miou), run a successful dry cleaning store in a French provincial town not too far from Paris. Jean-Marie is a typical small-town bourgeois, the sort of person who would not likely be cast in a commercial American movie as an audience in the U.S. would refuse to believe such an banal fellow could captivate a younger, sexier guy. His very profession serves as metaphor for his character: Jean-Marie is obsessed with cleanliness, with removing stains and ironing out creases. This is not the sort of person who gives in to irrational impulses. While Nicole is not content--she is fed up with cleaning other people's grime and has not had a decent vacation in ages--she has settled into her conventional, middle-class life and feels comfortable with the people of the town. When one evening they come upon a night club featuring a brother-sister transvestite act-- each performer dressing as the other gender--they are stimulated as they had not been for years, invite the couple to a hotel as a foursome, and later induce the young man, Loic (Stanislas Merhar) to board with them in their home. Though Nicole gives in to her passion for the drifter, Jean- Marie is reluctant to throw him out, though unaware of his own unconscious desire for the handsome visitor.

"Dry Cleaning" is talky, as French movies are wont to be, but a powerful piece of debut acting by the pale but charismatic Stanislas Merhar draws us into the family troubles. We empathize with all parties rather than to condemn Nicole for her abandon or Loic for his seductions. The threesome seem doomed like characters in a Greek tragedy to rush headlong into a sexually-driven catastrophe. By successfully creating an original twist in the destructive- outsider motif, director Anne Fontaine turns out an engrossing melodrama.

c) By Stanley Kauffmann

[...]  The writer-director, Anne Fontaine, is not out to exploit conventions but to fracture them, to show that patterns are compromises. Comparison with At First Sight is probably unfair to both, but the juxtaposition at least emphasizes a difference--between a picture that wants to snuggle with us and a picture that wants to make us face (it claims) secrets in ourselves that are suppressed.

Jean-Marie and Nicole, who have been married for fifteen years, run a dry cleaning shop in Belfort, a small city near the Swiss border. One evening they go to a nightclub and see two women, or what seem to be two women, perform a sinuous dance in slinky gowns. They learn that the two women are really brother and sister, and subsequently, somewhat to their bourgeois surprise, find themselves becoming friendly with the dancers. Circumstances, credibly arranged, soon leave the brother, Loïc, with the married couple. Loïc, a drifter who has not cared much where he drifts, becomes an assistant to Jean-Marie in the shop and does well at it. In time Loic and Nicole begin the affair that we expect; Jean-Marie discovers it and, without disclosing his knowledge, tolerates it. Jean-Marie, not stupid, understands without clearly admitting it to himself that the reason for his tolerance is that he himself is attracted to Loïc.

The catalytic effect that Loïc has on this conventional pair of shopkeepers is so convincing that Fontaine registers her cardinal point: many lives maintain their order, sexually speaking, less because they are firmly rooted than because they are never severely shaken. But the ending of the film descends into convention, not a pat happy finish but a pat unhappy one. Dark as it is, it is still a contrived escape hatch from the discomfiting situation that has been believably developed.

Charles Berling gives Jean-Marie both sufficient warmth to keep him interesting and sufficient timidity to make his routine life the armor that he needs. This is the most difficult of the three principal roles because it's the most difficult to keep sympathetic, and Berling strikes the right chord. Miou-Miou, happily visible on American screens ever since Going Places (1974), gives Nicole verity, appealing even as she tampers with her place in the cosmos. Stanislas Merhar fills Loic with what the role needs, a wistful yet forceful sexuality, a waif who makes his way with his musk but without incessant aggression. Fontaine, with her neat grim finish, causes her picture to falter in its tantalizing truth, but not so far that we can forget it.

d)  Fire under ice, 8 November 2004 - Author: edi_drums from London city UK

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Nettoyage à sec (Dry Cleaning) : a good choice of film title for starters. The initial image created by such a title is one of cleanliness, order and routine. In light of the closing scene though, a double-entendre can be detected : Nicole and Jean-Marie will certainly have their work cut out for them cleaning blood from their clothes and from their hands ...

The well-paced plot allows for good character development, and Berhing, Miou-Miou and Merhar do it fantastically.

The middle-aged couple, who have reached a stagnated period in their relationship, seek new direction. Nicole is bored and uninspired, she wants a change from the monotony of running the shop. Jean-Marie is "a very uptight man" according to Marilyn, Loïc's sister. His homosexual awakening is a great personal struggle for him, his self-doubt beginning in the hotel scene when Loic is so rude to him.

The couple's major flaw is an inability for their own introspection and thus for the damage they can cause. The repercussions of their ignorance become dangerous because they allow themselves "to be driven, not necessarily by a fault of their own, to a point of no return" (-Anne Fontaine, director).

From the moment that Loïc and Marilyn meet Nicole and Jean-Marie, they take full advantage of the latter's uncertainty, both materially and sexually. Loïc is not an evil spirit who planned all along to sew disorder. He is an intuitive and laid-back character whose pitiful situation - no family background and therefore no direction in his life - leads him to great negativity, and on the surface he presents a cold and uncaring personality. He is independent and self-centred because, apart from his sister, whom he protects aggressively, he has never had to look after anyone but himself.

In terms of the film's characterisation, the only real fault I noticed was an absence of relationship between Nicole and her son Pierre. They share only one affectionate exchange throughout the whole film; the boy's role has little (if any) importance at all.

SPOILER ... The final shot of the film : having disposed of Loïc in the laundry shoot, we see the couple walking together into the dusk. For the first time, Jean-Marie has an apparent expression of liberation on his face. If their relationship with Loïc has brought them closer as a couple, we could conclude that their uncontrolled downward slide into a different and frightening world was not altogether futile.

Assignment #8: Dry Cleaning (Nettoyage à sec, 1997) - A film by Anne Fontaine

Taking as a possible point of departure the following excerpts from various reviewers, write your own critique of the film

1. “In American movies, sex is inexorably linked to judgment. In Dry Cleaning, sex is the tip of the psychic iceberg -- at the surface of a cauldron of dark and dangerous influences.”

2. “It's one of those French endings, where something shocking and nihilistic must happen because regular solutions to plot problems won't do. “

3. “Fontaine leaves a deliberate ambiguity to the conclusion. There is no obvious right and wrong here, no good guy or bad guy; what happens grows out of who we have learned these characters to be. There are complex emotional needs, repression, constraining life circumstances. We can't always choose who and how we love; there are some choices we may or may not be free to make  - either way, we are never free of the consequences. “

4.  “Somehow, French films are able to convey the many permutations of love so effortlessly that viewers can only shake their heads in wonder. Dry Cleaning is no exception. The script reveals a knowledge of human nature that is almost frightening, the performances are of the highest caliber, and the film's slow-building dramatic tension will have viewers on the edge of their seats. In a season of spotty filmic fare, Dry Cleaning sparkles.”

5. “The sex scenes -- there are few, though the picture is humid with sexual atmosphere -- are not scenes of people getting what they want. They're just grasping in the dark, and what they're grasping for is nothing they can touch. A longing for connection and transcendence rips through this film, which is sad and true in ways that elude analysis.”

6.  “Particularly fine performances, especially from Miou-Miou, who plays the wife, lend the conflicts resonance, and for once a film manages to depict the wife’s frustrations without making the husband look like a dope.”

7. “The catalytic effect that Loïc has on this conventional pair of shopkeepers is so convincing that Fontaine registers her cardinal point: many lives maintain their order, sexually speaking, less because they are firmly rooted than because they are never severely shaken. But the ending of the film descends into convention, not a pat happy finish but a pat unhappy one. Dark as it is, it is still a contrived escape hatch from the discomfiting situation that has been believably developed.”

8. “Dry Cleaning is talky, as French movies are wont to be, but a powerful piece of début acting by the pale but charismatic Stanislas Merhar draws us into the family troubles. We empathize with all parties rather than to condemn Nicole for her abandon or Loïc for his seductions. The threesome seem doomed like characters in a Greek tragedy to rush headlong into a sexually-driven catastrophe. By successfully creating an original twist in the destructive- outsider motif, director Anne Fontaine turns out an engrossing melodrama.”

9. “If Dry Cleaning has a veneer of realism, the film, which accumulates an explosive psychological tension, has the structure and the implacable momentum of a stern moral fable. On the surface the movie may appear to be a titillating story about the "liberation" of two repressed swingers. But underneath, this essentially conservative film is a disturbing meditation on the power of unleashed sexuality to take over people's lives and dissolve conventional social boundaries and taboos with the force of a tornado.”

10. “The actors’ performances are fine, but the film crawls along like a snail on Valium, with more symbolism than dialogue, as it becomes increasingly tedious and improbable. Still, Tide and Javex experts may find the film's action-packed laundry metaphors as fascinating as the director herself. "I liked the idea that Jean-Marie should be obsessed with stains," Fontaine helpfully explains in the film's promotional literature. "Like many dry cleaners I have met, for whom white is never white enough."

11. “'DRY' HUMPING - Midlife marriage marred by swaggering, young sexual interloper in aimless import.  - “Maybe I didn't get it somehow, because while I like to think of myself as a foreign film kind of guy, Dry Cleaning felt more foreign than most. I got the feeling when the credits rolled that I must have missed something. The performances of Miou-Miou and Berling are both fascinating for their pent-up authenticity, which carries the movie a long way, but the story just did nothing for me. I never understood why I was spending 97 minutes with these people.”

12. “Dry Cleaning is a nasty little film. The dark subject matter isn’t the problem. It is the way that it is presented. Character motivations are entirely unclear, causing the movie to come off as senseless and pretentious attempt to titillate. For a similar result, an episode of Jerry Springer takes up much less of your time.”

Film 9: My Life on Ice (Ma vraie vie à Rouen, 2002) - A film by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau

SYNOPSIS:  My Life on Ice presents the unique point of view of 16-year-old Etienne, a cute would-be ice skating champion living in provincial Rouen who is obsessed with filming his daily life with a digital camera. Told from his subjective perspective, the focus of Etienne's video diary subtly takes shape as he records his single mother, his best friend Ludovic, and, almost stalker-like, his handsome male geography teacher Laurent. Though explaining his goal is to match his mother with Laurent, he gradually comes to the realization that other unconscious desires are motivating him, as hinted at in an intense discussion with Ludovic about the possibility of love between men.

Reviews

a) by Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper

It takes a while to get used to the aggressively analog style of this video-shot feature by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (The Adventures of Félix). Fashioned as the videotaped diary of a French teenager (the French title translates as My True Life in Rouen), My Life on Ice  offers no explanatory narration, just a series of images and situations that take us further and further inside the thoughts of Etienne (Jimmy Tavares), who among other things must come to terms with his mother dating again after the death of his stepfather and his own burgeoning homosexuality. The trick of My Life, and it becomes a fairly sublime one, is the way the camera is not just Etienne's eye, but his mind's eye: When he trails his handsome geography teacher around town to shoot him unawares, or plies his best friend with questions about his own nascent sex life, we can see the picture while Etienne's still fumbling for the light switch. A welcome twist on a familiar genre, My Life on Ice is less about coming out than going in. --S.A

b)  by Don Willmott

It’s Etienne’s (Jimmy Tavares) 16th birthday, and his doting, widowed mother (Ariane Ascaride) has given him the gift he most wanted: a camcorder. So begins My Life on Ice, an unusual coming-of-age story set in the provincial city of Rouen, France that includes several French twists along the way.

All we see of Etienne’s world is what he shows us through his cinema verite viewfinder. In fact, we see little of Etienne himself until he gets his hands on a tripod and discovers the remote control gadget in the bottom of the camcorder box. He takes the camera everywhere he goes and uses it constantly, taping his town, his horny schoolmates, and his training sessions at the ice rink, where he practices hard to maintain his national ranking in figure skating. He even tapes his mother every time she emerges from the bathroom so he can chronicle all of her frilly lingerie. (This being France, she has a lot of it.)

But Etienne has a problem: He’s increasingly sure that he’s gay (a fact he records in one of his diary-like taping sessions), but he chooses not to confide in anyone. Instead, hormonal teen that he is, he develops a series of ill-advised crushes. Camera in hand, he relentlessly questions his suave and dashing best friend Ludovic (Lucas Bonnifait) about his burgeoning sex life. The vain Ludo, who should be able to figure out what’s really on Etienne’s mind, loves the attention and prattles on about his conquests, never realizing that Etienne likes to get up close with the camera and lovingly zoom in on his elegant profile.

More dangerous is Etienne’s infatuation with his geography teacher, Laurent (Jonathan Zaccai). The pressure mounts when Laurent becomes Etienne’s mother’s boyfriend, and the threesome head off for weekends at the beach. Laurent notices that Etienne is fond of making long pans across his body with the camcorder; he knows that something is up. But like Ludo, he’s most interested in humoring Etienne, even after Mom finally puts her foot down and demands that Etienne turn off that damned camcorder every once in a while.

Of course, Etienne can’t. He’s hiding, and the only place he feels comfortable is behind the viewfinder. By becoming the cinematographer of his own life story, he tries to detach from his life and feelings and turn himself into a dispassionate narrator of his own story. Even though he realizes that someday the batteries will expire or he’ll run out of tape, he chooses not to worry about that in the present.

In an American version of this film, there would likely be a horrifying gay-bashing or a stunning confession at the Christmas dinner table, buy My Life on Ice  directors and writers Olivier Ducastel and Jaques Martineau are more subtle, sacrificing obvious plot points for a kind of ambivalence and subtlety that feels very natural. They’re helped greatly by Tavares, who was hired not for his acting (he was a first-timer) but for his skating. He gives a loose-limbed and utterly winning performance, and as it turns out, he’s a pretty good videographer, too. Luckily, Etienne is granted a happy ending of sorts, but it’s clear that at age 16, his journey is just beginning. © 2003 filmcritic.com

Sortie du film Ma vraie vie à Rouen  - Rencontre avec les cinéastes

Etienne, 17 ans, et sa découverte du désir… "Ma vraie vie à Rouen", le nouveau film d’Olivier Ducastel et Jacques Martineau (les auteurs de "Drôle de Félix") est un épatant portrait d’ado gay.

Qu’est-ce qui est à l’origine de l’idée de ce film hors norme ?

Olivier Ducastel : On voulait faire un film sur ce moment charnière qu’est l’adolescence, ce moment où on se pose toutes les questions existentielles, celle que je me posais à cet âge-là avec mon copain Christophe : "Quand on sera vieux — et ça commençait pour nous à 40 ans ! — est-ce qu’on sera toujours idéalistes ?", etc. Pour moi, c’est aussi le moment où est apparu le désir de cinéma.

Jacques Martineau : J’avais envie de raconter des choses personnelles sur le moment d’avant le coming out, sur ce qui travaille un ado à cette période presque jamais montrée. D’une certaine manière, on voulait faire un film qui se terminerait au moment où "Queer as folk" commence…

Comment avez-vous construit votre personnage d’ado, Etienne ? Qu’est-ce qui l’a nourri ?

OD : On ne vient pas du documentaire, on a donc pas cherché à voir spécifiquement des adolescents, on n’en a pas vraiment non plus dans notre entourage. On s’est basés essentiellement sur nos souvenirs, sur ce qui fait la permanence de l’adolescence : le rapport à la famille, à la mort, au désir, etc. De toute manière, il aurait été difficile de trouver des adolescents correspondant au personnage puisqu’il s’agit d’un film sur l’avant coming out, sur le moment où Etienne ne se dit pas encore les choses à lui-même. Or on sait bien que c’est fondamental de donner un nom aux choses. Poser un nom sur son désir est compliqué. Ça c’est un invariant que l’on voulait montrer.

JM : On voulait aussi montrer un jeune sportif, c’était très important, pour la question du rapport au corps. Ça permettait des scènes comme celle de la douche dans les vestiaires, le rapport au prof mais aussi à soi.

"Ma vraie vie à Rouen" est donc un film très autobiographique…

OD : Oui, mais une autobiographie à deux ! Ça donne donc un objet hybride très bizarre. J’ai passé mon enfance et mon adolescence à Rouen mais c’est Jacques qui faisait du patinage… Et tout est mélangé ainsi. Quand mon copain Christophe a vu le film, il a été troublé car il ne s’est pas reconnu dans le personnage de Ludo, le meilleur ami dont Etienne est amoureux, tout en s’y reconnaissant quand même. C’est normal car Ludo est surtout inspiré du meilleur ami de Jacques !

JM : C’est une expérience très partagée par les jeunes homos cette fixation sur le meilleur copain, tout en ne réussissant pas à la formuler. Et c’est impossible à formuler car on ne pense même pas à la question de l’homoérotisme ! Ça provoque donc une souffrance, mais délicieuse. En fait, si Ludo est comme il est (hyper viril, séducteur, baiseur…) c’est parce qu’Etienne veut qu’il soit comme ça car il voudrait être à la place des filles qu’il séduit.

Au premier abord, on a l’impression que "Ma vraie vie…" est l’équivalent d’un journal intime filmé. Et puis on se rend compte que pas du tout parce que la plupart des événements importants de la vie d’Etienne sont absents de l’image… Comment avez-vous choisi ce qui serait montré ou pas ?

JM : Je suis parti des ellipses pour écrire le scénario, des situations où Etienne n’avait pas de raison d’avoir une caméra et qui n’avaient donc pas de raison d’apparaître. On ne voulait pas faire un journal intime car cela aurait donné du faux Rémi Lange ("Omelette"), dont on adore le travail. "Ma vraie vie…" est plus proche d’un film de famille au camescope ou en Super 8 où on filme des fragments de vie, souvent des moments anodins.

OD : On avait envie de montrer également les niveaux d’expérimentation d’Etienne par rapport à sa caméra : c’était une des motivations du choix d’images qui change avec le temps. Au début, il filme un peu n’importe quoi, plus tard, il choisit mieux. Il y avait aussi la volonté de filmer des choses représentatives de ce qui fait la permanence de l’adolescence : des tombes, des dialogues avec des copains…

Ce qui est très beau et moderne dans le film, c’est la représentation d’une adolescence homo qui n’est pas présentée comme un "problème" même si ce n’est pas facile pour Etienne…

JM : L’adolescence est un problème en soi mais Etienne n’est pas un ado à problèmes. La vie de tout adolescent est un enfer : il est dans un délire d’activités qui lui permettent de ne pas regarder les choses en face, il a tellement de cartes en mains qu’il ne sait pas lesquelles choisir.

OD : C’est pour cela qu’on voulait installer Etienne dans la durée, celle d’une année scolaire. Notre intention était de montrer la transformation du personnage sur cette période : physiquement, psychologiquement, dans sa confrontation au désir… On ne voulait pas faire un film de crise mais un film d’évolution. Ce n’est pas un film sur un événement comme pourrait l’être un film sur le coming out.

Pensez-vous que les choses aient changé entre votre adolescence et celle des jeunes gays aujourd’hui, et en quoi est-ce sensible dans la façon dont vous avez représenté Etienne ?

OD : Pour que les choses changent réellement pour les gays, il faudrait une révolution autre que celle actuelle de la meilleure acceptation. Il faudrait que, plutôt que demander à un gamin  "Qu’est-ce que tu feras quand tu seras grand ?"  on lui demande "Tu seras gay ou hétéro ?"  Le film travaille là-dessus, sur le fait que, parce que ce type de question n’est pas posé, ça retarde forcément les choses pour un ado homo. Même si ça n’empêche rien, ça complexifie.

ntimacy (2001) - A film by Patrice Chéreau

The first English-language film from French director Patrice Chéreau (Queen Margot) is a bold exploration of one man's sexual obsessions and emotional weaknesses. A lonely nightclub worker, Jay (Mark Rylance), and an actress, Claire (Kerry Fox), engage in an impersonal sexual affair. When Jay learns that Claire is married, he strikes up a bizarre friendship with her husband. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival and a Best Actress Award for Fox. "Intelligent and courageous" (Elvis Mitchell, New York Times).

Reviewed by Alan A. Stone - Desperately Seeking Sex

In Chéreau's Intimacy, sex breeds obsession and isolation.

 Patrice Chéreau's controversial new film Intimacy begins with thirty-five minutes of graphic sex. Claire (brilliantly played by Kerry Fox) arrives uninvited on her free Wednesday afternoon, knocks, and enters a squalid house flat belonging to Jay (Mark Rylance). Puzzled, he asks "was this agreed?" Apparently not, but without another word they proceed to have sex, at her initiative, on the floor. Their frenzied passion is repeated on subsequent Wednesday afternoons until Jay makes the mistake of trying to find out who Claire really is. And then the spell is broken.

People who expected erotica were disappointed. Roger Ebert, the dean of popular film criticism, describes the opening as "short, brutal, anonymous sex." Ebert expresses distaste and reports the dismissive judgment of Kristine Nordstrom, director of the Women Film Makers' Symposium of Los Angeles: "No woman would be attracted to sex like that," she opined. Nordstrom's premise is that the typical male director projects his 'slam bam thank you ma'am' sexual fantasies onto the screen, where a woman's desires are presented as a gratifying mirror image of what men want. In Intimacy, "[Claire] walks in, they rip off each other's clothes and a few seconds later they're in a frenzy." Nordstrom concluded that "[a]ny woman would know that this movie was directed by a man."

Although I think the feminist criticism misses everything interesting and important about Intimacy, Ebert and Nordstrom's reaction to the opening scene was typical. Most critics were not turned on by watching a man and woman who are determined to give and get everything they can out of the sexual encounter. And not for want of realism: the two actors—he is thin and balding, she is more attractive but not a conventional beauty, and both are pushing forty—are the ones having sex. Chereau films them in semi-darkness so I cannot attest that every sexual act that seemed to take place actually was consummated, but one episode unmistakably shows Kerry Fox with Mark Rylance's penis in her mouth. Chacun a son goût, but most people will find Intimacy's graphic display of sex and nudity neither beautifully erotic nor excitingly pornographic. But it is as real as Chereau means it to be, and real sex can be disturbing. For me it was like being trapped in a room where I felt more like an uncomfortable intruder rather than an aroused voyeur.

Chereau is a serious and sophisticated artist who has directed theater and opera as well as film. He has also been around long enough to understand what turns people on. One can assume he knows that many women, as Nordstrom asserts, prefer a man who spends "time being tender and sweet and showing that he cares for her." But his ambitions were artistic not erotic. Chereau was confronting our sexuality, exploring its disruptive power, not trying to arouse either the men or the women in the audience.

Critics have compared Chereau's Intimacy  to Bertolucci's 1972 Last Tango in Paris. The comparisons are prompted by obvious similarities. In Last Tango, Marlon Brando meets Maria Schneider when they are both looking to rent the same empty Paris apartment. Total strangers, they meet and almost immediately have sex against a wall in an empty room. The sexual connection works for them and both experience a kind of liberation. They return to the empty flat to perform every sexual act they (or perhaps we) have imagined. The relationship ends when Brando, an older man in the film, proposes marriage to Schneider. But the audience sees nothing graphic; everything is suggested. And although the sex is short, brutal and anonymous, Pauline Kael was not alone in describing it as the "erotic bombshell" of its time.

But times and sexual mores change. In the current culture, sex is more obsession than liberation. Kids watch faux pornography on MTV; Cosmo  readers learn that proficiency in oral sex is the foundation of a happy marriage; for men, sex is often seen as a matter of performance, and with Viagra the show never ends. Chereau believes that in some important sense even class struggle "has moved inside the body" and become sexualized: it is the new millennium struggle of all against all for sexual power. Obsessive sex offers no liberation, but only repetition and the search for new aphrodisiac rituals, new partners, and new limit experiences. It is this desperate sexuality, isolating people rather than connecting them, that ultimately intrigues Chereau. His film is more questioning, more troubled, more relevant to our times than Bertolucci's sultry, wish-fulfilling, tango dream.

Hanif Kureishi, whose recent fiction was the basis of the screenplay for Intimacy, has written an illuminating essay about his collaboration with Chereau. It all started when Chereau, like Claire, knocked on the door one day. Although Kureishi does not mention it, Chereau may have come to him because of Kureishi's early fame and Oscar nomination for the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette, another erotic bombshell in its day. The story is about two beautiful young men—one English (Daniel Day Lewis), the other Pakistani (Gordon Warrecke)—who have a West Side Story  love affair in a lower class London community. It is the kind of neighborhood where, after a few pints at the pub, the xenophobic skinheads go out for some Paki-bashing. And it is Daniel Day Lewis, publicly and unrestrainedly kissing his Pakistani lover that transforms cross-racial hostility into its erotic counterpart. Pauline Kael marveled at what she experienced as My Beautiful Laundrette's "thrills of perilous display." In his essay on the making of Intimacy, Kureishi notes that what was shocking in the 1980s is now commonplace; you cannot turn on the television in London "without seeing boys snogging, particularly on the sports channels."

Kureishi seems to want us to know that he is straight, in contrast to his collaborator, Patrice Chereau, "a gay French man." Whatever his own sexual preferences may be, Kureishi has a fertile sexual imagination. In his early days he wrote pseudonymous pornography, along with some plays and My Beautiful Laundrette. Chereau's original idea was to collaborate on a cinematic version of Kureishi's novel, Intimacy, which describes a man's reaction to his divorce. But after much brainstorming, Chereau decided to base his film on a recent Kureishi short story about a man and a woman whose only connection is that they meet for sex on Wednesday afternoons. Chereau also used bits from the novel—Rylance's character is recently divorced—and from other Kureishi short stories, but decided ultimately to have his own screen writer, a French woman, write the screenplay. Only the title of the projected film remained unchanged.

Kureishi's description of his collaboration with Chereau sounds like someone trying to have the last word about a relationship. One can imagine these two men circling around each other, their creative narcissism at risk, testing to see who would be dominant; who would give and who would take. In the end, Kureishi's account suggests that Chereau took what he wanted and went his own creative way. Chereau invited Kureishi to the penultimate screening of the rushes and expressed little interest in editorial input. One can understand why Kureishi compares the collaboration to the affair—Chereau did use him. Though Chereau has made collaborative films in different European countries (one in Germany and now this one in England), Intimacy is his film, animated by his French sensibilities, despite its London setting and British actors.

According to Kureishi, "Patrice seemed interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another's bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while keeping away strong feeling and emotional complexity....Patrice and I talked about keeping the camera close to the bodies; not over-lighting them, or making them look pornographically enticing or idealized…The point is to look at how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what a darkness and obscenity our pleasures can be."

This approach to sex comes from Freud, not Sigmund but his grandson Lucian, the painter whose hyperrealistic aesthetic Chereau avowedly adopted for his film. One need only look at some of Lucian Freud's early nudes to understand Chereau's interest. The Freud painting on display in the new Tate Modern's exhibition of nudes is an amazing achievement: a woman's naked body is fully revealed, but entirely without erotic suggestion. It is as though the artist has stepped out of social reality and all its erotic baggage to see and reveal the thing in itself. Like Chereau's film, Freud's nudes are arresting without being alluring.

Roger Ebert, to his credit, acknowledged that he may have missed something about Intimacy  by relying on the barometer of his sexual arousal. He admitted to being puzzled about the psychology of Jay, the head barman in a busy London club. He speculates that Jay's bitterness at the world may express repressed homosexual impulses. Ebert, I think, is listening to the wrong Freud. Jay is the new millennium Londoner, the kind of man who has seen and done everything; his bitterness reflects a lack of purpose, not repression.

Jay is played by Mark Rylance whom I first saw as Hamlet in a Royal Shakespeare Production on American tour. His Hamlet was truly melancholic and he wore pajamas like an invalid. In performances in England he reportedly mooned Polonius; (this is a man who is easy with nudity). He is also a superb actor and now the artistic director of the Globe Theater, built on London's South Bank as a replica of the original venue for Shakespeare's plays. Recently, I saw Rylance there, as the lead in Shakespeare's seldom-performed Cymbeline. An elegant and gracious stage presence, he has formidable talent and an enchanting voice. He rarely makes films, but he was convinced by Chereau's project and put his reputation and his naked body on the line.

His character, Jay, is something of a control freak and becomes furious when the club management, without consulting him, hires a gay Frenchman as a barkeeper, despite his ignorance about the work. These two characters inevitably suggest Kureishi and Chereau. In a subplot Jay will eventually come to accept and befriend the gay Frenchman who seems unusually perceptive about people's problems. If this is not Chereau's commentary on his collaboration with Kureishi, then the subplot will seem gratuitous.

Jay, once a struggling musician trying to make it in a band, has now settled for less. He is on speaking terms with his former wife and seems to love his two sons, but he is obviously a narcissist preoccupied with himself and with sex. Chereau makes this point inescapable in a scene when Jay spends time at his ex-wife's home looking after the kids. After bathing the boys and being a good parent, he unexpectedly goes to his ex-wife's bureau and fondles her underwear. Selecting a pair, he takes it to the bathroom and masturbates while sniffing it. Chereau's cinematography in this scene is cautious and far from explicit, still there is no doubt what Jay is doing and no question about the point, particularly when one of Jay's young sons barges into the bathroom and almost catches his father in the act. Isolating and narcissistic sex is erupting into everyday family life, threatening the bastion of sentimental connectedness.

All the children in the film are angels whose innocent faith in their parents is threatened by the darkness and obscenity of sexuality. Claire's only son is one of those threatened angels. He worships his mother, who is married to a crude, obese, but seemingly benign taxi driver (Timothy Spall). Claire has decided that sex has passed out of her life, but she wants to preserve the security of her marriage and the illusions of domesticity. Apparently, she has run into Jay at his bar and experienced an unexpected spark; she gambles that he will make her catch fire again and he does. Claire does not want intimacy of the mind, only intimacy of the body. The first thirty-five minutes demonstrate what Claire wants and the rest of the film shows us how it ruins her life. Jay, ever the control freak, follows her across London to learn her identity and discovers that she is a so-so actress who is starring in a production of Tennessee William's Glass Menagerie  performed in a theater in the basement of a pub. Unbeknownst to Claire, Jay meets her husband and son. The boy attends all of his mother's performances and starry eyed with love, tells Jay that his mother gets better every night. We have seen the sexual realities of Claire's life; now Chereau gives us the adoring son, the doting supportive husband, and the aspiring actress/mother, all connected in a façade of sentimental family life. We know Jay has the power to destroy that façade, and when the anonymity is lost and the affair ends, he continues to stalk Claire's family, hinting about the affair to her husband and son, driven on by his mysterious rage.

Timothy Spall, who plays Claire's husband, the taxi driver, is a talented actor with surprising range. He played a benevolent photographer in Mike Leigh's Secret and Lies, the Mikado in Topsy Turvy, and here he is a menacing bully under a surface of bonhommie. He will explode in an unforgettable scene of rage against his wife, an eruption of shattering hatred. Chereau filmed this scene with Claire sitting in the back seat of her husband's cab as he vilifies her. Not a blow is struck, but this is unmitigated domestic violence. Kerry Fox's extraordinary performance as Claire earned her best actress at the Berlin Film Festival. Claire's loss is clear, but to underline Jay's predicament Chereau gives him a one-night stand, this time with an attractive young woman who babbles away during the sexual act sending Jay out the door with a new sense of the loneliness of the narcissist.

No Frenchman of Chéreau's age and education could title his film Intimacy  without thinking of Sartre. Sartre wondered if human intimacy was even possible and Chereau explores that idea through sex in a way that Sartre might relish. Is sex the ultimate instance of human intimacy or is that idea itself just bad faith sentimentality?

Chéreau answers that question with thirty-five minutes of desperate sex between people who are strangers to each other: people who cling to "the reef of sollipsism"— to use Sartre's telling phrase—as their aphrodisiac. It is a sad and paradoxical commentary on the human condition. The dream of intimacy is to be fully known and accepted by the other. If that is what we wish for, then Chereau's film is our nightmare. Intimacy  is a rare achievement, a film of ideas that intrigue and disquiet us.  (Alan A. Stone is Toureff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard Law School. Originally published in the February/March 2002 issue of Boston Review)