Tag Archives: Sexuality
Festival du Film Francophone d’Angoulême 2017
The Film Francophone d’Angoulême represents everything I love about French cinema. A cinema which focuses on characters unafraid of their reactions, and endings determined by their emotional truth, rather than a neat moral tidy-up. French cinema is considered by some to … Continue reading
Jeune & Jolie (Young & Beautiful)
François Ozon points the lens at bourgeois desire through the eyes of a young Parisian student and her complicated relationship with sex and prostitution. It’s a lazy summer, and seventeen year-old Isabelle (Marine Vacth) is on holiday at the ocean … Continue reading
Les Garçons et Guillaume, à Table! (Me, Myself and Mum)
Guillaume Gallienne’s face is pale, soft rising dough that’s been squished with an insensitive fist, in this comic exploration of sexuality, gender and self-acceptance. Written, directed and starring Guillaume Gallienne (as himself, and also his mother) Les Garçons et Guillaume, … Continue reading
Nathalie
Mutual desire rattles the loneliness in the lives of two women, one a prostitute the other a gynecologist. One is a shell of controlling sexuality and the other statuesque and supremely elegant. Both are under each other’s spell and falling … Continue reading
Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart)
If you’re a teenage boy in a post-war bourgeois family, struggling with a cold father, a Catholic education and two mischievous older brothers, there are three pleasures in life: a mother’s love, Jazz music, and the slow, self-conscious introduction to … Continue reading
Mon Roi (My King)
Maïwenn proves the fragility of liberated and moneyed romance by throwing it against a wall and letting it bleed. Continue reading
Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (Nelly and Mr Arnaud)
Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) is the muse and Mr Arnaud (Michel Serrault) is the man who loves from afar. Desire undeclared, is thus the soft wind that passes through the corridors and large rooms of Mr Arnaud’s smart Parisian apartment. Mr … Continue reading
21 Nuits avec Pattie (21 Nights with Pattie)
Like a grown-up Alice stepping into Wonderland, Parisian fortysomething (‘Caroline’ played by Isabelle Carré) arrives at her recently deceased mother’s country house in southern France to organise her funeral. She finds her mother’s corpse, resembling a man in drag, in … Continue reading
Pauline à la Plage (Pauline at the Beach)
Summertime fascination, Eric Rohmer-style, is a gentle flirtatious breeze, one that carries early-eighties sexuality and casual connections on the shore of a wild-Atlantic heart. Third in the ‘Comedies and Proverbes’ series, Pauline à la Plage follows fifteen-year old Pauline (Amanda … Continue reading
