COURSE TITLE COURSE # & SECTION

As a way of introduction 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 entirely convincing, but each 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.

MILARLY, 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 i 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.)
 

"Sexing the Body: How Biologists Construct Human Sexuality"

By Anne Fausto-Sterling
Division of Biology & Medicine, Brown University
[Sexing the Body. ©  1999 by Anne Fausto-Sterling. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved.]

Abstract
This article is a version of Chapter One: Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. In it is argued that science is often thought of as being beyond the reach of social
and political debates. In fact, it is precisely such debates that have dictated the course of scientific research, ranging from the very questions scientists pose to the experimental methods they
employ. And this is highly pertinent to the ongoing debate concerning the biological versus social nature of gender and sexuality. In most public and in most scientific discussions, sex and
nature, are thought to be real, while gender and culture are seen as constructed. But these are false dichotomies. In fact, it is argued, there is a complex and subtle interaction that exists between
the biological and the social/political that must be understood and reexamined.
  
In The Tempest, Shakespeare's Prospero denounces Caliban as, "A devil, a born devil, one whose nature nurture can never stick..." This passage of The Tempest makes clear that questions
of nature and nurture have troubled European culture for some time. Euro-American ways of understanding how the world works depend heavily on the use of dualisms --pairs of opposing
concepts, objects or belief systems. Let me consider today three related pairs --sex/gender, nature/nurture and real/constructed. We usually employ dualisms in some form of hierarchical
argument. Prospero complains that nature controls Caliban's behavior and that his, Prospero's, "pains humanely taken" (to civilize Caliban) are to no avail. Humane nurture can't conquer the
devil's nature. Today, I will argue that intellectual questions cannot be resolved nor social progress made by reverting to Prospero's complaint. In the creation of biological knowledge about
human sexuality, I look to cut through the Gordian knot of dualistic thought. I propose instead of nature vs. nurture or real vs. constructed, that sexuality is a somatic fact created by a cultural
effect.

Ultimately, the sex/gender dualism limits feminist and other forms of analysis. The term 'gender,' placed in a dichotomy, necessarily excludes biology. Thinking critically about biology remains
impossible because of the real/constructed divide (sometimes formulated as a division between nature and culture), in which many map the knowledge of the real onto the domain of science while
equating the constructed with the cultural. Dichotomous formulations from feminists and non-feminists alike conspire to make a socio-cultural analysis of the body seem impossible.

Some feminist theorists, especially during the last decade, have tried --with varying degrees of success-- to create a non-dualistic account of the body. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler, for
example, tries to reclaim the material body for feminist thought. Why, she wonders, has the idea of materiality come to signify that which is irreducible, that which can support construction but
cannot, itself be constructed. We have, Butler says, (and I agree) to talk about the material body. There are hormones, genes, prostates, uteri and other body parts and physiologies that we use to
differentiate male from female, that become part of the ground from which varieties of sexual experience and desire emerge. Furthermore, variations in each of these aspects of physiology
profoundly affect an individual's experience of gender and sexuality. But every time we try to return to the body as something which exists prior to socialization, prior to discourse about male
and female, Butler writes, "we discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which that term can be put."

Western notions of matter and bodily materiality, Butler argues, have been constructed through a "gendered matrix". Classical philosophers associated femininity with materiality. Consider, for
example, the origins of the word "matter" from mater and matrix referring to the womb and problems of reproduction. In both Greek and Latin, according to Butler, matter was not understood to
be a blank slate awaiting the application of external meaning.

"The matrix is a...formative principle which inaugurates and informs a development of some organism or object...for Aristotle, 'matter is potentiality, form actuality.'...In reproduction women
are said to contribute the matter, men the form." As Butler notes, the title of her book, Bodies that Matter, is a deeply intentional pun. To be material is to speak about the process of
materialization. And if viewpoints about sex and sexuality are already embedded in our philosophical concepts of how matter forms into bodies, the matter of bodies cannot form a neutral,
pre-existing ground from which to understand the origins of sexual difference.This, then, is our dilemma: since matter already contains notions of gender and sexuality, it cannot be a neutral
recourse on which to build "scientific" or "objective" theories of sexual development and differentiation. At the same time, we have to acknowledge and use aspects of materiality that "pertain to
the body". "The domains of biology, anatomy, physiology, hormonal and chemical composition, illness, age weight, metabolism, life and death" cannot "be denied". In other words, to talk
about human sexuality requires a notion of the material. Yet the idea of the material comes to us already tainted, containing within it pre-existing ideas about sexual difference. Butler suggests that
we must look at the body as a system that simultaneously produces and is produced by social meanings, just as any biological organism always results from the combined and simultaneous
actions of nature and nurture.

Unlike Butler, feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz allows some biological processes a status that pre-exists their meaning. She believes that biological instincts or drives provide a kind of raw
material for the development of sexuality. But raw materials are never enough. They must be provided with a set of meanings, "a network of desires which" organize the meanings and
consciousness of the child's bodily functions. This claim becomes clear if one follows the stories of so-called "wild children" raised without human constraints or the inculcation of meaning.
Such children acquire neither language nor sexual drive. Thus while their bodies provided the raw materials, without a human social setting, the clay could not be molded into recognizable
psychic form. Without human sociality, human sexuality cannot develop. Grosz tries to understand how human sociality and meaning that clearly originate outside the body, end up incorporated
into its physiological, demeanor, and both unconscious and conscious behaviors.Some concrete examples illustrate the problem: consider a tiny gray-haired woman, well into her 9th decade,
peering into the mirror at her wrinkled face. "Who IS that woman in the mirror?" she wonders. Her mind's image of her body does not synchronize with the mirror's reflection. Her daughter,
now in her mid-fifties, tries to remember that unless she thinks about using her leg muscles instead of her knee joint, going up and down the stairs will be quite painful. (Eventually she will
acquire a new kinesic habit and dispense with conscious thought about the matter). Both women are working at readjusting the visual and kinesic components of their body image, formed on the
basis of past information, but always a bit out of date with the current physical body. How do such readjustments occur, and how do our earliest body images form in the first place? To discuss
this problem we need the concept of the psyche --a place where two-way translations between the mind and the body take place-- a United Nations, as it were, of bodies and experiences.In
Volatile Bodies Elizabeth Grosz thinks out loud about how the body and the mind come into being together. To facilitate her project she uses the image of a Mobius strip as a metaphor for the
psyche. The Mobius strip is a topological puzzle, a flat ribbon, twisted once and then attached end to end to form a circular twisted surface. One can trace the surface, for example, by imagining
an ant walking along it. At the beginning of the circular journey, the ant is clearly on the outside. But as it traverses the twisted ribbon, without ever lifting its legs from the plane, it ends up on
the inside surface. Grosz proposes that we think of the body --the brain, muscles, sex organs, hormones and more as comprising the inside of the Mobius strip. Culture and experience, would
constitute the outside surface. But, as the image suggests, the inside and outside are continuous and one can move from one space to the other without ever lifting one's feet off the ground.

Grosz envisions that bodies create psyches by using the libido as a marker pen to trace a path from biological processes to an interior structure of desire. It falls to a different arena of scholarship
to study the "outside" of the strip, a more obviously social surface marked by "pedagogical, juridical, medical, and economic texts, laws and practices" in order to "carve out a social
subject...capable of labor, or production and manipulation, a subject capable of acting as a subject...". Thus Grosz also rejects a nature vs. nurture model of human development. While
acknowledging that we do not understand the range and limits of the body's pliability, she insists that we cannot merely "subtract the environment, culture, history" and end up with "nature or
biology." This is where a lot of feminist constructed work happens.
  
Beyond Dualisms

Grosz postulates innate drives that become organized by physical experience into somatic feelings that translate into what we call emotions. Taking the innate at face value, however, still leaves
us with an unexplained residue of nature. Humans are biological and thus in some sense natural beings AND social, and thus in some sense artificial, or, if you will, constructed entities. Can we
devise a way of seeing ourselves, as we develop from fertilization to old age, as simultaneously natural and unnatural? During the past decade an exciting vision has emerged which I have loosely
grouped under the rubric of developmental systems theory, or DST. What do we gain by choosing DST as an analytic framework?Developmental systems theorists deny that there are
fundamentally two kinds of processes, one guided by genes, hormones and brain cells (i.e. nature), the other by the environment, experience, learning or inchoate social forces (i.e. nurture).

How, specifically, can DST help us break away from dualistic thought processes? Consider a goat born with no front legs. During its lifetime it managed to hop around on its hind limbs. An
anatomist who studied the goat after it died found that it had an S-shaped spine (as do humans) "thickened bones, modified muscle insertions, and other correlates of moving on two legs." This
(and every goat's) skeletal system developed as part of its manner of walking. Neither its genes, nor its environment determined its anatomy. Only the ensemble had such power. Many
developmental physiologists recognize this principle. As one biologist writes, "Enstructuring occurs during the enactment of individual life histories."A few years ago, when neuroscientist
Simon LeVay reported that the brain structures of gay and heterosexual men differed (and that this mirrored a more general sex difference between straight men and women), he became the center
of a firestorm. Although an instant hero among many gay males, he was at odds with a rather mixed group. On the one hand feminists such as myself disliked his unquestioning use of gender
dichotomies which have in the past never worked to further equality for women. On the other, members of the Christian right hated his work because they believe that homosexuality is a sin
which individuals can choose to reject. LeVay's, and later geneticist Dean Hamer's, work suggested to them that homosexuality was inborn or innate. The language of the public debate quickly
became polarized. Both sides contrasted words such as genetic, biological, inborn, innate, and unchanging with ones such as environmental, acquired, constructed and choice.

The ease with which such debates evoke the nature/nurture divide is a consequence of the poverty of a non-systems approach. Politically, the nature/nurture framework holds enormous dangers.
Although some hope that a belief in the nature side of things will lead to greater tolerance, past history suggests that the opposite is also possible. Even the scientific architects of the nature
argument recognize the dangers. In an extraordinary passage in the pages of Science, Dean Hamer and his collaborators indicated their concern. "It would be fundamentally unethical to use such
information to try to asses or alter a person's current or future sexual orientation...Rather, scientists, educators, policy-makers and the public should work together to ensure that such research is
used to benefit all members of society."Feminist psychologist and critical theorist Elisabeth Wilson uses the hubbub over LeVay's work to make some important points about systems theory.
Many feminist, queer and critical theorists work by deliberately displacing biology, hence opening the body to social and cultural shaping. This, however, is the wrong move to make. Wilson
writes: "What may be politically and critically contentious in LeVay's hypothesis is not the conjunction neurology-sexuality per se, but the particular manner in which such a conjunction is
enacted." An effective political response, she continues, doesn't have to separate the study of sexuality from the neurosciences. Instead, Wilson, who wants us to develop a theory of mind and
body --an account of psyche that joins libido to body-- suggests that we feminists incorporate into our world view an account of how the brain works that is, broadly speaking, called
connectionism.

The old fashioned approach to understanding the brain was anatomical. Function could be located in particular parts of the brain. Ultimately function and anatomy were one. This idea underlies
the uproar over LeVay's work. Many scientists believe that a structural difference represents the brain location for measured behavioral differences. In contrast, connectionist models argue that
function emerges from the complexity and strength of many neural connections acting at once. The system has some important characteristics: (1) the responses are often non linear, (2) the
networks can be "trained" to respond in particular ways, (3) the nature of the response is not easily predictable, and (4) information is not located anywhere, rather it is the net result of the many
different connections and their differing strengths.

The tenets of some connectionist theory provide interesting starting points for understanding human sexual development. Because connectionist networks, for example, are usually non linear,
small changes can produce large effects. One implication for studying sexuality: we could easily be looking in the wrong places and on the wrong scale for aspects of the environment which
shape human development. Furthermore, a single behavior may have many underlying causes: events that happen at different times in development. I suspect that sexualities which we label as
homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and transgender are really not good categories at all, and are best understood only in terms of unique individual developmental events. Thus, I agree with
those connectionists who argue that "the developmental process itself lies at the heart of knowledge acquisition...Development is a process of emergence."

In most public and in most scientific discussions, sex and nature, are thought to be real, while gender and culture are seen as constructed. But these are false dichotomies. Sometimes, for
example, sex is, literally, constructed. In the case of intersexuality, surgeons remove parts and use plastic to create "appropriate" genitalia for people born with body parts that are not easily
identifiable as male or female. Physicians believe that their expertise enables them to "hear" nature telling them the truth about what sex their patient ought to be. Alas, their truths come from the
social arena and are reinforced, in part, by the medical tradition of rendering intersexual births invisible.

Let me sum up: when we examine the construction of sexuality starting with structures visible on the body's exterior surface and ending with behaviors and motivations --that is with activities
and forces which are patently invisible-- inferred only from their outcome, but presumed to be located deep within the body's interior we find that behaviors are generally social activities,
expressed in interaction with distinctly separate objects and beings. Thus, as we move from genitalia on the outside, to the invisible psyche, we find ourselves, suddenly, walking along the
surface of a Mobius strip back towards, and beyond, the body's exterior. Only if we conceptualize sexuality as part of a developmental system which reaches from our cultural and social history
to the cells in our bodies can we learn how we move from outside to inside and back out again, without ever lifting our feet from the strip's surface.
  

References

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". London: Routledge.

Grosz, Elizabeth A. 1994.Volatile Bodies : Toward A Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington IN: University Press.

Hamer, Dean H. and Peter Copeland.1994.The Science Of Desire : The Search For The Gay Gene And The Biology Of Behavior. New York: Simon & Schuster,.

LeVay, Simon. 1991. "A difference in hypothalamic structure between heterosexual and homosexual men." Science 253: 1034-1037.

LeVay, Simon. 1996.Queer Science : The Use And Abuse Of Research Into Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wilson, Elizabeth A. 1998. Neural Geographies : Feminism And The Microstructure Of Cognition. New York : Routledge.
 

Films to be screened

Film 1. Belle de Jour (1967) - A film by Luis Buñel

Addendum: Catherine Deneuve interviewed by Larry King on CNN

Producer: Robert and Raymond Hakim for Paris F Films.
Released: 1967, Valeria (France); 1968, Allied Artists (U.S.).
Screenplay: Luis Buñel 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 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 brother 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."
 

Film 2 :  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.

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
 

Film 3: 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 4

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 Mathias (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.

Mathias, 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.

Another review

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.

IMDb user comments for Un pont entre deux rives
Date: 6 May 2003 - Summary: Symbolic "Bridge"

Gérard Depardieu can sometimes come off on screen as an oaf and other times he can be smooth and charming. I think his direction in this film can be described as the latter. This film starts out
in 1962 in a small French city where Georges (Depardieu) is looking for work and decides to apply with a construction company that is going to be building a bridge. Georges wife Mina (Carole
Bouquet) is bored with her life and goes to the cinema as often as she can with her son Tommy (Stanislas Crevillen). One day at the cinema Mina notices a man near her crying during the film.
After the film they talk and he introduces himself as Mathias (Charles Berling) and it turns out he is her husbands foreman at work. Soon Mina and Mathias are having an affair while Georges is
away with the work crew. I liked the pedestrian pace that Depardieu sets for the film and the cinematography is very well handled. Its a very good looking film and it surprised me that Depardieu
could be so impressive directing. They're is a lot of symbolism in this film and of course its apparent that the bridge that Georges is lending his hand to build represents an exit out of their
relationship. Another thing that I found interesting was the tomato plants that Georges seems preoccupied with, they seem to also symbolize George and Mina's marriage and when George
knows his marriage is in trouble he spends his time tending to the tomato plants.

*****SPOILER ALERT***** The last scene pretty much sums up where both characters are headed in life. They both meet by accident at a gas station and both of their cars are pointed in
different directions. Film is written with a very mature focus to it and when Georges finds out about his wife he's not violent and doesn't make a big scene. He seems to understand it. No, he
doesn't like what has happened. But he's such a level headed lug that it would be wrong to argue. Some viewers complained about the slow pace, but I found it refreshing. The characters stand
out even more when a film is paced this way. Hollywood, are you listening?
 

Film 5: 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.
 

Film 6: Western (1997) -  A film by Manuel Poirier
 

SYNOPSIS:  Two men hitch hike through Western France. Two solitary strangers who soon will find solidarity: a Don Juan- like Catalan and a Russian craving the love of one woman. They
walk and dream aloud on the secondary roads of rural Brittany, flirting with the utopia of a phalanstery [community] filled with children.

Poirier's approach to his work and its subject matter rests on this intimacy and a desire to be exposed to the life of a place and its people. Born forty [some] years ago in Peru, Poirier came to
cinema through a long and unusual trajectory. "I started out doing loads of different jobs, I was a factory worker, a prison visitor and a cabinet maker. After all, the most important thing at the
end of the day is one's relationship with others, and curiosity, the need to live things." His films are characterised by this intimate concentration on relationships and friendship as well as by their
loose, episodic and gradual narrative development. A road-movie, with its detours and chance encounters seems the ideal format for a filmmaker with Poirier's preoccupations.

"The idea behind this film had been in my mind for some years, "the director explains, "it's a story of two young strangers, very different from each other, in their personalities but also in their
relationships with women and love. Bringing out their differences was both meaningful and interesting." But the most telling statement that Poirier could make about the overlap of life and art
that his filmmaking is dedicated to capturing ? with the utmost delicacy - comes in his words, "For me, life is still more important than the cinema." Chris Darke

Reviews

a) The sly, delightful ''Western,'' a peacefully scenic Cinemascope film that won the Cannes Film Festival's Jury Prize last year, hardly looks as if it has such magic at first. A traveling
shoe salesman named Paco (Sergi Lopez) is conned into picking up a hitchhiker named Nino (Sacha Bourdo), who looks like a runty, hapless version of the young Bob Dylan. They make
awkward small talk. Then the car breaks down, and somehow Nino manages to steal it, only to be caught and clobbered not long afterward by Paco in a picturesque coastal town. ''You know,
stealing cars is not in my philosophy,'' Nino explains when Paco subsequently visits him in the hospital. To account for the heist, he says, ''Something got into me when I saw all those shoes.''

It happens that while Paco was stranded, he met and quickly fell in love with Marinette (Elisabeth Vitali), who runs the local gift shop. And that Marinette wants to give the sudden romance a
three-week rest. So, for lack of any better plans, Paco and Nino set out on a trip through the countryside. Before long, they are forging a friendship based on the most unexpected details, like the
fact that each knows how to walk on his hands.

It was crayfish for dinner when Paco was wooing Marinette, but now he and Nino enter their spaghetti days. Traveling on foot, staying wherever anyone will have them, they share a wonderful
journey. Paco turns out to be Spanish, while Nino came from Russia, and the two are united by their feelings of loneliness in France. At an especially charming juncture in the story, they meet a
disabled African who feels similarly estranged and who teaches them a game he calls ''Bonjour la France.'' The idea is to sit in a cafe and greet passers-by, collecting points if they answer. A
man is worth one point, a woman two, a couple three. No points are scored when the stranger yells, ''Go back where you belong!''

The director, Manuel Poirier, born in Peru and living in Normandy, knows all about that game and all about Paco and Nino's longings. So, of course, the filmmaker and Jean-Francois Goyet,
with whom he wrote the screenplay, send them in search of women. Far from predatory, the two men are almost childlike in their ingenuous scheming.

It's touching to find that good-looking Paco, who draws women away from Nino without meaning to, wants so much to help his new friend. ''You see that town?'' he says, pointing to a
postcard-pretty village in the distance. ''I'm sure in that town there has to be a woman for you.'' And since France is full of such towns, he adds helpfully, ''the potential is enormous.''

Brainstorm: The two will canvass the ladies of the town with a fake questionnaire. ''Does your ideal man have to be French?'' Paco asks, dreaming up one question. (Another is: ''Do you like a
man who shows philosophy in his life?'') ''That's damn good,'' Nino assures him. It is, too. After all its comic misadventures, ''Western'' finds one of the men so unexpectedly lucky in love
that his good fortune brings tears to his eyes. And Mr. Poirier, whose laconically funny timing often brings to mind Jim Jarmusch's deadpan style, need not compromise his film's amusing
diffidence to let ''Western'' warm the heart.

b) By Joshua Klein

The title of French director Manuel Poirier's award-winning 1997 film Western is one big red herring. Instead of tumbleweeds, shoot-outs, and cowboys, the movie's widescreen vistas focus
on the conventional conversations and minor personal quests of everyday people. When a chance encounter with a would-be car thief (Sacha Bourdo) leads to an unlikely friendship, and an
unlikely romance leads him to rethink his options as a shoe salesman, handsome Spaniard Sergi López and wiry new Russian buddy Bourdo set out hitchhiking throughout the Brittany region of
France. Western is a relationship movie, but often in the literal, relativist sense: The film toys with the idea that your identity is determined not by where you're from but where you find love. It's
an intriguing theory that makes the otherwise simple movie seem more complex and frequently affecting. Bourdo and López make a great odd-couple team of incomplete wandering souls, each
looking for complementary lovers and the stability they offer. Poirier makes his fascination with notions of nationality blatant: It's no coincidence that Bourdo and López's characters are not of
French descent, and that another major character they encounter is African. Poirier himself is Franco-Peruvian, and he makes a point of noting the disparate backgrounds of those listed in the
film's end credits. As one of the brightest stars of the new wave of humanistic French filmmakers, Poirier is most interested in the lives of those living in the rural regions of France and the
divisions promoted by differences, be they in class, race, philosophy, or beauty. In the small towns of Brittany, feelings of xenophobia are not camouflaged by the enforced cosmopolitanism that
marks big cities: The lonely outsiders of Western  must actively seek out the company of others to overcome their insecurities.

c) by Marc Savlov

Poirier's film took home the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year, which is as much an indication of the direction the festival is heading in as it is of the director's considerable talents. A tender,
comic road movie that manages to cover only about seven miles of road, Western is set in and around Brittany on the French Atlantic coast. It's a starkly beautiful landscape, full of open fields
and soaring azure skies, and it's here that we meet Poirier's two disparate protagonists, the Russian émigré Nino (Bourdo) and the Spanish traveling shoe salesman Paco. While on route to a
delivery, Paco stops to pick up the hitchhiking Nino, and summarily has his Renault stolen by the diminutive, nappy-haired vagabond. Distraught, the handsome Spaniard flags down a passing
car driven by Marinette (Vitali), a lovely Frenchwoman who offers to take him to the nearest police station to report the theft. Paco declines on the grounds that picking up hitchhikers could cost
him his job, and ends up staying in Brittany and developing a romance with Marinette. Several days later, Paco spots Nino walking across the street from Marinette's flat, rushes over, and beats
him within an inch of his life. Chagrined by his actions, Paco soon finds himself in Nino's hospital room offering apologies, and when Marinette shows him the door, the men take off on their
own, intent on traveling the open road together. As in more traditional road movies, Paco and Nino pass the time trading philosophies, bickering, and generally developing a tenuous relationship,
one that is continually tested by the fact that Paco is constantly surrounded by beautiful women wherever he goes, while his more hesitant companion can't seem to find a girl to save his life.
Things come to head during a wedding party when a drunken Nino loudly berates the assembled women on the grounds that they're only interested in surface appearances. From here on in, the
duo's mission is apparent: Get Nino laid, before he explodes. To that end they embark on several wild schemes, most of which go predictably and disastrously awry. Almost falling into the
realm of the French sex farce as seen from a whole new angle, Western slides in and out of pathos, bouncing from pure comic moments to jarring, violent outbursts. As part of the new wave of
French provincial filmmakers (Marius and Jeannette's Robert Guédiguian is another), Poirier takes the metropolitan concerns of modern-day France and transplants them to the countryside, an
effort which focuses the comic elements while freeing characters to dawdle about without appearing to be in stasis. It helps, of course, that he's a wonderfully intuitive director, and also that both
Lopez and Bourdo -- on whom the film hangs -- are equally excellent in their sad-sack neo-Laurel and Hardy roles. Many have already heralded Poirier as the cutting edge of the new French
cinema, and while that may be overstating things a bit, it's worth noting that this is a road movie unlike any other you've yet seen. © Austin Chronicle  (10-16-1998)
 

Film 7 : 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
 

Film 8. Jeanne and the Perfect Guy

JEANNE ET LE GARÇON FORMIDABLE (1998) -  DIRECTED BY OLIVIER DUCASTEL & 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, Francois (Jacques Bonnaffe) who is gay and has recently lost
a lover to AIDS. Unbeknownst to Jeanne, Francois is Olivier's mentor in the Parisian division of Act-Up.

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

In its heart and soul, "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" ("Jeanne et le Garcon 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
 

Film 9 : My Life in Pink (Ma vie en rose) - A film by Alain Berliner

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 queje 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.
 

Film 10. 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
 

Film 11. 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.
 

Film 12 : Fat Girl (À ma soeur!  2001) - A film by Catherine Breillat

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 13: 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
 

Film 14 :  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.  REVIEWED ON 12/1/2004        GRADE: C +

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, 20)

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)
 

Possible addendum:

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.

Agnès Godard won the Best Cinematography award from the Village Voice.

Michel Subor also played Bruno Forestier in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film LE PETIT SOLDAT.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/beau_travail/

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

Some more controversial films

01. 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

02. 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