Rollet, Brigitte - Tarr, Carrie - Cinema and The Second Sex - Women's Filmmaking in France in The 1980s and 1990s (2001, Continuum)

Cinema And The Second Sex
Film Studies: Bloomsbury Academic Collections
This set focuses on the development of European cinema throughout the last century. The seven
facsimiles are chosen from our imprints Cassell and Continuum and offer a broad variety of
viewpoints. Focusing on more than just the analysis of film, these titles range from the impact of
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Other titles available in European Cinema include:
Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930-1971, Stephen Bourne
Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, edited by Andrew Higson
Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood, Guy Barefoot
Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema
1945-51, edited by Ulrike Sieglohr
Straight Acting: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan, Sean O'Connor
The State of European Cinema: A New Dose of Reality, Angus Finney
Cinema And The Second Sex
Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s
Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet
Film Studies: European Cinema

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9077-7

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Cinema and the Second Sex
Cinema
and the
Second Sex
Women's Filmmaking in France
in the 1980s and 1990s
Carrie Tarr
with Brigitte Rollet
Continuum
New York • London
2001
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ine

370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SEI 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2001 by Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers,
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tarr, Carrie.
Cinema and the second sex: women's filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s/
Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Filmography: p.
ISBN 0-8264-4741-4 (hbd.)—ISBN 0-8264-4742-2 (pbk.)
1. Motion pictures—France—History. 2. Women motion picture
directors—France—Biography. I. Rollet, Brigitte. II. Title.
PN1993.5.F7T27 2001
791.43'0233'0820944~dc21
[B] 2001025333
Printed in the United States of America

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-8264-4741-4 hb
0-8264-4742-2 pb
For our mothers and sisters
Contents
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
Part One Personal Films
Chapter One Growing Up 25

Chapter Two The Age of Possibilities 54
Chapter Three Couples 82
Chapter Four Families 111
Chapter Five Work, Art and Citizenship 133
Part Two Genre Films
Chapter Six Comedies 165

Chapter Seven Crime Dramas 196
Chapter Eight Road Movies 228
Chapter Nine Historical Films 251
Conclusion 281
Filmography: Films Directed by Women 1980-1999 285
Supplementary Filmography: Films Directed by
Women 2000 295
Bibliography 297
Index of Film Titles and Selected Proper Names 307
Illustrations
Intro: 1 The Créteil International Women's Film

Festival, 1986. (C) Brigitte Pougeoise. 6
Intro: 2 The Créteil International Women's Film

Festival, 1993. (C) Brigitte Pougeoise. 9
1.1 Louise Vinsoumise. Supplied by and reproduced

with permission from the Ronald Grant
Archive. 29
1.2 Rouge Baiser. Supplied by and reproduced with

permission from the Ronald Grant Archive. 31
1.3 La Vie ne me fait pas peur. Supplied by and

reproduced with permission from Arena Films.
(C) David Verlant/Arena Films. 36
1.4 36 fillette. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Emmanuel Schlumberger,
French Films Production. 40
1.5 L'Ombre du doute. Supplied by and reproduced

with permission from the Ronald Grant Archive. 48
2.1 Les Gens normaux n'ont rien d'exceptionnel.

Supplied by and reproduced with permission from
Pierre Grise Distribution. 61
2.2 En avoir ou pas. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Cuel Lavalette Productions. 66
ILLUSTRATIONS
3 L'Age des possibles. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Agat Films. 72
4 Mina Tannenbaum. Supplied by and reproduced

1 Coup de foudre. Supplied by and reproduced

2 Post co'itum animal triste. Source: BIFI.

Reproduced with permission from Hubert
Balsan, Ognon Pictures. 97
3 Si je faime . . . prends garde à toi. Source: BIFI.

Reproduced with permission from Rezo Films. 99
4 Romance. Supplied by and reproduced with

1 Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noel? Supplied by and

reproduced with permission from the Ronald
Grant Archive. 114
2 Circuit Carole. Supplied by and reproduced with

permission from Pierre Grise Distribution. 118
3 Sinon, oui. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Pierre Grise Distribution. 124
4 Le Jour des rois. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Les Films du Losange. 128
1 Coute que coute. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Films d'Ici. 139
2 Zanzibar. Source: BIFI. (C) Gaumont 1988. 145
3 Mémoires d'immigrés: Yhéritage maghrébir.

Supplied by Bandits Longs and reproduced with
permission from Yamina Benguigui. 153
4 Demain et encore demain. Supplied by and

reproduced with permission from Pierre Grise
Distribution. 157
ILLUSTRATIONS
6.1 Trois hommes et un couffin. Supplied by and

reproduced with permission from the Ronald
Grant Archive. 173
6.2 La Nouvelle Eve (C) LOTHER/MPA. 178
6.3 Romuald et Juliette. Supplied by and reproduced

6.4 Gazon maudit. Supplied by and reproduced with

6.5 Le Derrière. Supplied by and reproduced with

7.1 Frequence meurtre. Supplied by and reproduced

7.2 Place Vendóme. Supplied by and reproduced with

7.3 Pas très catholique. Supplied by and reproduced

7.4 La Triche. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Productions du Daunou. 218
7.5 J'ai pas sommeil. Source: BIFI. (C) I. Weingarten/

Arena Films. 223
8.1 Sac de noeuds. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Josiane Balasko. 233
8.2 Sans toit ni hi. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

permission from Ciné-Tamaris. 236
8.3 Personne ne m'aime. Source: BIFI. Reproduced

with permission from Bloody Mary Productions. 244
8.4 No Sex Last Night. Supplied by and reproduced

with permission from Pierre Grise Distribution. 247
9.1 Chocolat. Supplied by and reproduced with

ILLUSTRATIONS
2 Moi Ivan, toi Abraham. Source: BIFI. Reproduced

with permission from Hachette Première,
(C) Benoit Bar bier.
3 Sous les pieds des femmes. (C) Sf Raymond/MPA.
4 La Piste du télégraphe. Source: BIFI. Reproduced

with permission from Liliane de Kermadec.
5 Artemisia. Supplied by and reproduced with

permission from the Ronald Grant Archive.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Susan Hayward, Diana Holmes and Genevieve

Sellier for their ongoing support and encouragement for this project; Gi-
nette Vincendeau and Pam Cook for their help and advice as the series
editors; Dominique Blùher, Hélène Borzykowski, Diane and Michel
Dincuff, and Mike Witt for their invaluable assistance in securing access to
video recordings; Martin Humphries of the Ronald Grant Archive; the staff
at the BIFI and the CNC, particularly Caroline Jeanneau and Chantal
Raynal who helped us complete the Filmography.
Carrie Tarr would like to thank Caroline Apergis, Dominique Blùher,
Richard Exton, Margrit Tròhler and Ginette Vincendeau for stimulating
discussions about films; Women in French, the Thames Valley University
Humanities Graduates Association and the Birkbeck Film Research Group
for the opportunity to try out some of the material in advance; Thames
Valley University for funding occasional research visits to Paris; Sue Tarr
and Gill Wood for their constant encouragement; and, above all, Frank
McMahon without whose critical advice and unflagging support this book
would never have been completed.
Brigitte Rollet would like to acknowledge the support of the British
Academy and colleagues and students at the University of Portsmouth,
especially Sue Harper, Alasdair King, Catherine Messem and Deborah
Shaw. She is grateful for help from people in France and in England,
including Corinne Guillaume, Ian Craig and Sarah Cruickshank. Special
thanks as always to Christine Bard for her constant presence and support.
Introduction
Women's filmmaking in France
Women's filmmaking in France is a source of both delight and despair. On

the one hand the sheer numbers of women directors working in the French
film industry in 1999, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Simone de
Beauvoir's groundbreaking analysis of women's condition in The Second
Sex (Beauvoir, 1949), are an indication of how far women have progressed
since the early postwar years. Whereas in 1949 Jacqueline Audry was the
only woman director making feature films (a handful of others were making
documentaries and shorts), in the three years up to 1999 over fifty women
directors had a feature-length film released. In 1999 alone, nineteen films
directed by women received a theatrical release, and even more have been
released in 2000. Women's films have been selected in unprecedented num-
bers for screening at international film festivals (Dacbert and Caradec,
1999), including various sections of Cannes in both 1999 and 2000. The
2000 French Cesar ceremony consecrated women's filmmaking by giving
four awards, including best director, to Tonie Marshall's Vénus Beauté
(Institut), the first award to a film directed by a woman since Coline
Serreau's smash hit, Trois hommes et un couffin, in 1985. It also gave a
lifetime award to actress-director Josiane Balasko, whose best known film
to date is the internationally successful Gazon maudit (1995). The presence
in strength of women directors seems to be a fait accompli, even if, as
Franchise Audé has pointed out, their work over the decade of the 1990s
as a whole actually constitutes only 14 percent of France's annual produc-
tion and is best described as 'progress, not a tidal wave' (Audé 2000: 73).1
On the other hand, despite the heritage of Beauvoir's work and the women's
movement of the 1970s, French women directors characteristically disclaim
their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking and their films lack
a critical engagement with feminism and feminist film theory as it has
INTRODUCTION
developed in Britain, Germany and the United States over the last twenty
years.
Both factors may come as something of a surprise to the majority of
English and American readers whose access to French women's filmmaking
has, until recently, been limited to the small numbers of films which have
been distributed outside France and to feminist criticism which has largely
focused on a handful of individual women auteurs. 2 These works have
consolidated a certain pantheon of French or French-language women film-
makers, in particular Germaine Dulac, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda,
Nelly Kaplan and Chantal Akerman, whose films have made an important
contribution to the history of European women's filmmaking as well as to
film style more generally.3 At the same time, over the last twenty years
several women directors have reached large, often international audiences,
either through intimate psychological dramas (often inspired by their own
experiences) or through the appropriation of popular film genres, particu-
larly comedy.4 Diane Kurys and Coline Serreau have been the subject of
critical attention (Rollet, 1998, Tarr, 1999a) and at the end of the decade
there have been major retrospectives of the work of Catherine Breillat and
Claire Denis. However, the vast majority of French women film directors
have not become widely known outside France.5
Not only have French films directed by women not been distributed
abroad in any quantity, but the extent and range of women's filmmaking in
France has consistently been underrecognized and undervalued in general
histories of French cinema.6 Only Frangoise Audé's Ciné-modèles Cinema
d'elles (1981) and Paule Lejeune's Le Cinema des femmes (1987) offer
comprehensive overviews of the history and range of women's filmmaking,
both of which need updating and are unavailable in English. Denise Bra-
himi's Cinéastes frangaises (1999) provides a more recent but rather selec-
tive overview of a century of women's filmmaking in France. And although
dictionaries and surveys of 'le jeune cinema franâis' ('young French cin-
ema') of the mid to late 1990s acknowledge the presence of individual
women filmmakers among the latest generation of young directors (Tré-
mois, 1997, Chauville, 1998, Marie, 1998), this information is not widely
available to an English-speaking readership.
The first aim of this book, then, is to redress gaps and absences in the
critical recognition of women's filmmaking in France by providing infor-
mation about the range of feature films and feature-length documentary
and essay films directed by women in the 1980s and 1990s. 7 Figure 1 charts
the evolution of women's filmmaking since 1980, showing how many films
per year were directed (or co-directed) by women, and what proportion of
France's total film production they were. Whereas there were 102 films by
women in the 1980s and their annual output was very irregular, reaching
2
INTRODUCTION
Figure 1: Numbers of French films (including majority

French co-productions) directed (or co-directed) by women
compared with total annual production 1980-1999
Year Ratio Year Ratio
1980 9:210 1990 15:112

1981 5:202 1991 14:122
1982 9:194 1992 15:129
1983 11:195 1993 13:122
1984 3:150 1994 16:117
1985 17:153 1995 24:113
1986 6:167 1996 16:125
1987 10:110 1997 18:136
1988 17:112 1998 16:127
1989 15:101 1999 19:110
Total 1980s 102:1594 (6.4%) Total 1990s 166:1213 (13.7%)
Total overall: 267/2807 = 9.5%

(Information supplied by the CNC. Figures are for films over 59 minutes.]
its nadir in 1984, numbers increased by more than 60 percent in the 1990s,
showing a stabilization from 1988 onwards and reaching a high point in
1995 of 24 films, 21 percent of France's production for the year. The corpus
of films on which this study is based (listed in the Filmography) thus
consists of over 260 films, 9.5 percent of France's total film production for
the period in question, but 13.7 percent in relation to the 1990s. Of the
more than 100 women directors involved, many have now achieved a
significant body of work. 8 Just how significant these figures are becomes
clear when compared with the lower proportion of women directors in the
United States, who in 1999 'accounted for 10.2 percent of the total days
worked, compared with 4 percent in 1985' (Trodd, 2000). 9
The second aim is to trace through and explore the evolution of the kinds
of films women have been making during a period dominated by 'postfem-
inist' assumptions. 10 The election of a Socialist government in France in
1981 may have promised the consolidation of many of the demands made
by the women's movement of the 1970s, but there was a strong backlash
against feminism in politics, culture and the media (Bard, 1999, Mossuz-
Lavau, 1999), and feminism in the 1980s quickly came to be perceived as
'a relic from the p a s t . . . a dinosaur' (Vincendeau, 1987: 4). Women direc-
tors did not always find it easy to get funding (even Agnès Varda's Sans toit
ni hi was refused the avance sur recettes, the advance on box office re-
ceipts11). And as the women's movement and the ideological framework
3
INTRODUCTION
Figure 2: Top box office films by women in France in the

1980s
Film (Director, Year of Release) Viewership
1. Trois hommes et un couffin (Coline Serreau, 1985) 10,251,400

2. Coup de foudre (Diane Kurys, 1983) 1,631,270
3. Rue cases-nègres (Euzhan Palcy, 1983) 1,284,100
4. Sans toit ni hi (Agnès Varda, 1985) 1,080,000
5. Les Keufs (Josiane Balasko, 1987) 1,071,400
6. L'Amour nu (Yannick Bellori, 1981) 941,000
7. Romuald et Juliette (Coline Serreau, 1989) 856,900
8. Chocolat (Claire Denis, 1988) 793,700
9. Un bomme amoureux (Diane Kurys, 1987) 786,500
10. Rouge baiser (Vera Belmont, 1985) 740,100
provided by feminism gradually disappeared from the public sphere,

women directors either gave up making films, turned to television as a more
hospitable but less prestigious alternative, or began making films with a
less overtly political feminist agenda than those of the 1970s.12
Certainly, individual filmmakers of the 1980s continued to foreground
women's issues and female points of view, particularly in intimate, often
semi-autobiographical psychological dramas, such as Diane Kurys's Coup
de foudre (1983), Catherine Breillat's 36 Villette (1988) and Claire Denis's
Chocolat (1988). In these films, as in many women's films of the 1970s,
'the male gaze has been displaced which allows for desire to be represented
differently' (Hayward, 1993: 258). However, a number of other, often
younger filmmakers, like Caroline Roboh with Clementine Tango (1983),
Juliet Berto with Havre (1986) and Virginie Thévenet with Jeux d'artifices
(1987), were seduced by the 'cinema du look', the stylish, youth-oriented,
non-naturalistic cinema of the 1980s associated with the films of Jean-
Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson and Léos Carax, with its fetishizing approach
to sexuality and eroticism (Vincendeau 1987: 16). Others, like Yannick
Bellon with La Triche (1984), Coline Serreau with Trois hommes et un
couffin (1985) and Josiane Balasko with Sac de noeuds (1985), made films
which attracted mainstream audiences through their appropriation of genre
filmmaking, especially comedies and crime dramas which had hitherto been
traditionally orientated towards men. Figure 2 sets out the most commer-
cially successful films by women in the 1980s, which include three come-
dies, four psychological dramas set in the past (based on childhood/
adolescence), and three more contemporary 'women's films', focusing on
the dilemmas of modern women.
4
INTRODUCTION
The shift from (relatively) small-scale feminist filmmaking on the margins

in the 1970s to more mainstream filmmaking in the 1980s, and especially
the appropriation of popular genres, raises a number of questions about
the impact women can make on cinema as women. In fact, although the
emergence of women directors in the 1970s was important both symboli-
cally and numerically, their influence on the film industry was fairly limited,
particularly due to the difficulties they faced getting their films funded and
distributed.13 Moving into the mainstream for some meant getting larger
budgets, working with major stars, and reaching larger audiences. Argua-
bly, however, it also meant a loss of freedom to work with issues explicitly
pertinent to women, especially in a male-dominated industry where French
women have felt obliged to disclaim their gender, and in a society where
issues relating to gender inequalities and sexual difference have been persis-
tently obscured by discourses on Republican universalism inherited from
the French revolution. The question, then, is to what extent films directed
by women in a 'postfeminist' climate in France continue to address
women's issues and, at the very least, remain informed by what Annette
Kuhn, drawing on Andrea Stuart (1990), refers to as 'popular feminism',
namely 'a type of feminism that does not name itself as such but which
nonetheless takes for granted issues and ideas put on the agenda by femi-
nists' (Kuhn, 1990: 230).
One of the consequences of the choice made by women directors in
France to work within the constraints of mainstream French cinema is their
decision not to have their films premiered at the Créteil International
Women's Film Festival for fear of their being ghettoized as 'women's films'.
Yet, paradoxically, the Créteil festival itself represents another major
achievement of feminism in France, and is now the largest women's film
festival in the world (recognized for its cultural contribution in 2000 by the
award of an Olympe).14 The mismatch between the ambitions of women
directors and the forum provided by the festival, which has itself been
obliged to broaden its outlook to attract a wider audience than in its early
feminist days, are further indications of the problems in foregrounding
gendered approaches to cultural production in France.15 The lack of public
debate about questions of representation is compounded by the ongoing
lack of legitimacy of feminism within the French academy, either through
the development of women's studies16 or as a critical practice within film
studies departments, and by the absence of feminist critical approaches
within French film criticism (with the honorable exception of Franchise
Audé at Positi f).i7
In the mid to late 1990s, however, there has been a further quantitative
and qualitative shift in women's filmmaking, as well as a shift in the
political climate in France. On the one hand, the decade is marked by the
5
INTRODUCTION
Agnès Varda, Charlotte Silvera, Irene Jouannet and Jeanne Labrune in

discussion at the 1986 Créteil International Women's Film Festival. (C)
Brigitte Pougeoise.
growing recognition of the work of a generation of women directors who

started making films in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside Catherine
Breillat and Claire Denis, women like Catherine Corsini, Nicole Garcia,
Jeanne Labrune, Tonie Marshall and Brigitte Roùan, many of whom were
originally actresses, have been making films which often center, unusually,
on the representation of older women's desires and identities. Women of
this generation like Josiane Balasko, Claire Devers, Philomène Esposito and
Coline Serreau are also now able to command big budgets for their star-
studded genre films.18 On the other hand, a new generation of women
filmmakers has emerged, born in the 1960s, many of whom trained at the
FEMIS (Institut de Formation et d'Enseignement pour les Metiers de
l'Image et du Son) and draw on a wide knowledge of film culture.19 This
'nouvelle "Nouvelle Vague" (Gillain, 1995), heralded in 1993 by Laurence
Ferreira Barbosa's Les Gens normaux n'ont rien d'exceptionnel and Agnès
Merlet's Le Fils du requin and followed in 1994 by Martine Dugowson's
Mina Tannenbaum and Pascale Ferran's Petits arrangements avec les mor-
tes, includes young filmmakers like Christine Carrière, Noémie Lvovsky
and Laetitia Masson. These women, working alongside male filmmakers
such as Xavier Beauvois, Arnaud Desplechin and Cédric Klapisch, have
found it easier to get funding than in the past even if, like the majority of
6
INTRODUCTION
films by women, their films are generally characterized by smaller than

average budgets.20 (According to CNC figures, 18 films directed by women
received the avance sur recettes in 1993 out of 55 successful applications,
compared with 7 out of 52 in 1986.) Furthermore, their films tend to center
on complex, restless young female protagonists who reject conventional
femininity, creating star roles for a new generation of actresses such as
Sandrine Kiberlain, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Karin Viard.21 At the same
time, as Anne Gillain has noted (1995: 24), a number of films of this period
are characterized by their identification with other marginalized figures,
particularly children and gay and/or ethnic minority men.
This development has taken place against the backdrop of an alleged
'retour du politique' (return of politics) at the end of the Mitterrand era,
symbolized by the transport strikes of December 1995 and by protests at
the treatment of the sans papiers (literally 'people without papers'), brought
to the attention of the public by the February 1997 demonstration spear-
headed by FEMIS graduates Arnaud Desplechin and Pascale Ferran.22 The
political climate of the mid to late 1990s was also marked both by the
revival of specifically feminist (or feminist-inspired) discourses, thanks to
the campaign for political parity23 and debates about the feminization of
work titles,24 and by the growing recognition of gays and lesbians,25 in
particular through the campaign for the PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité)
which resulted in the formal recognition of gay and lesbian couples (Holtz,
2000). 26 The influence of politics on the 'jeune cinema francos' may not be
as evident as in the filmmaking practices of their 1970s forebears, but their
films contrast with the designer films of the 'cinema du look' of the 1980s,
both in their topics, which take account of contemporary social issues such
as unemployment, drug abuse and AIDS, and in their style, which tends to
combine aesthetic and technical innovation with documentary forms of
realism.27 In addition, there has been a marked renewal of interest in
documentaries foregrounding social and political issues (Millet, 1998), evi-
dent in the work of filmmakers like Dominique Cabrera, Claire Simon and
Yamina Benguigui, and supported by television companies like the Franco-
German channel ARTE (Association Relative à la Television Européenne)28
and Canal Plus. Our exploration of the evolution of women's filmmaking
thus aims to assess the extent to which films of the mid to late 1990s,
particularly films made by the new generation of women directors, are
informed by the 'retour du politique', especially in their articulation of
female subjectivities and desires. Of the ten most commercially successful
films by women in the 1990s listed in Figure 3, however, only Y aura-t-il
de la neige à Noel?, a harsh yet poetic rural drama by newcomer San-
drine Veysset is typical of 'le jeune cinema francais'. The others are indica-
tive of the growing strength of women's genre filmmaking, including six
7
INTRODUCTION
Figure 3: Top box office films by women in France in the

1990s
Film (Director, Year of Release) Viewership
1. Gazon Maudit (Josiane Balasko, 1995) 3,990,100

2. La Crise (Coline Serreau, 1992) 2,350,100
3. Vénus Beauté (Institut) (Tonie Marshall, 1999) 1,326,800
4. Ma vie est un enfer (Josiane Balasko, 1991) 1,170,500
5. La Buche (Daniele Thompson, 1999) 1,139,700
6. Place Venderne (Nicole Garcia, 1998) 926,700
7. Le Derrière (Valerie Lemercier, 1999) 872,700
8. Y'aura-t-il de la neige à Noel? (Sandrine Veysset, 1996) 829,300
9. La Belle verte (Coline Serreau, 1996) 747,900
10. Le Fils préféré (Nicole Garcia, 1994) 747,000
comedies and one crime drama, alongside a male melodrama and Vénus
Beauté (Institut), a 'woman's film' which combines melodrama with ele-
ments of comedy.
Films by women/'women's films'
Before assessing the impact of 'postfeminism', mainstreaming and 'le retour

du politique' on the types of films directed by women of different genera-
tions in France, we need to examine more closely the implications (and
limitations) of a study focusing only on films directed by women, an ap-
proach which, arguably, relies both on an auteurist approach to film and
an essentialist approach to gender. As far as the question of gender is
concerned, our study is based not on the assumption of essentialist differ-
ences between men and women, but rather on the supposition that women
(itself a heterogenous category), experience different sets of socal relations
and discourses which potentially inflect their cinematic production. Even
though there have been significant social changes over the last fifty years,
women within French society (as elsewhere) are still in many respects posi-
tioned as the 'second sex', a fact we draw attention to through our use of
Simone de Beauvoir's terminology.29 Our selection of films enables us to
assess the impact of women's increased access to the film industry through
a set of texts which, as a group, provide an insight into the significance of
gender at a particular moment in French film history. We do not focus on
individual women auteurs, though an auteurist approach may be relevant
to discussions of specific films or sets of films. We do, wherever possible,
INTRODUCTION
Brigitte Roùan, Tonie Marshall and Magali Clement receive their bouquets
at the 1993 Créteil International Women's Film Festival. (C) Brigitte Pou-
geoise.
refer to the creative contributions of women other than directors, whether

as screenwriters, producers, cinematographers or actresses, as well as draw-
ing attention to women's productive collaboration with men.30 However,
we are aware that our study is far from exhaustive and trust that other
researchers will take up where it ends and produce other analyses of how
films made in France are inflected by questions of gender.
At the same time, there is a particular rationale for taking authorship as
a critical starting point in relation to 'cinema and the second sex'. Contem-
porary French cinema is still dominated by the 'politique des auteurs'
('politics of authorship') famously developed by Francois Truffaut in the
Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s (Truffaut, 1976). Auteur cinema can be
defined by its preoccupation with locating a film's source of meaning in the
originality and personal self-expression of its director, an approach which
was subsequently put into practice in the filmmaking of the French New
Wave. Arguably, it was an important strategy in developing a national
cinema which could be distinguished from indigenous and Hollywood com-
mercial studio productions. It has also become a key factor in the way
funding is organized and new directors are encouraged. Consequently
French national cinema is characterized by low-budget auteur films, includ-
ing large numbers of first films, and, as Figure 4 indicates, the system
9
INTRODUCTION
Figure 4: Number of first films per year compared with total

number of films directed by women 1980-1999 (including
non-French directors).
Year Ratio Year Ratio
1980 4:9 1990 6:15

1981 2:5 1991 6:14
1982 4:9 1992 3:15
1983 6:11 1993 8:13
1984 1:3 1994 4:16
1985 10:17 1995 9:24
1986 3:6 1996 5:16
1987 5:10 1997 5:18
1988 7:17 1998 6:16
1989 5:15 1999 8:19
Total 1980s 47:102 (46%) Total 1990s 60:166 (36%)
(Source: CNC bulletins. Figures are for films over 59 minutes, including documentaries.)
enables women as well as men to make their first film. According to René
Predai (1993: 54), the French auteur film with its diverse 'psychological'
preoccupations constitutes the 'typical French film' for overseas audiences
and still accounts for over half of France's annual production, despite the
growth of exportable French genre films like the 1980s heritage cycle,
typified by Claude Bern's Jean de Florette, 1986.
The privileging of auteur cinema in France did not initially open the
doors to women directors, despite the example of Agnès Varda's first fea-
ture film, La Potute courte (1954). There were no women among the 135
directors who made their first films in the period 1956-1962, the time of
the New Wave (Sellier, 1999), and the directors, producers and technicians
(and to a certain extent the stars) of French cinema have been over-
whelmingly male, as have its critics and historians. The figure of the auteur/
artist, as it has been constructed and valued in French universalist
discourses, is understood to transcend the particularities of gender, sexual
orientation and ethnicity, thus obviating debates on the lack of access to
representation on the part of women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minor-
ities. In this context, it is not surprising that French women directors
routinely reject the label of 'woman director' (see Gauteur, 1978, Hayward,
1993: 258), since claiming a supposedly gender-neutral auteur status is
often the best way to gain legitimacy and recognition within the film indus-
try. (Similarly, second generation North African filmmakers tend to disclaim
the significance of their ethnicity.) An acceptance of auteurism has enabled
10
INTRODUCTION
women to impose themselves as directors to an extent which is unique to

France. Whereas in the 1980s films directed by women were often ignored
or dismissed by film critics (Vincendeau, 1987), by the end of the 1990s
films directed by women (including documentaries) get reviewed in all the
French film journals, from Cahiers du Cinema to Première, and women's
presence within the industry is thus taken for granted. However, whereas
in the 1980s their films were often actively praised for not being feminist
films or films about women's condition (even when they were), in the 1990s
they are simply assumed to be gender neutral, an approach which allows
René Predai to concede that they also constitute some of the best French
films of the last five years (Predai, 1998: 13).
If directors and critics are to be believed, then, women directors have
achieved their successful incorporation into the French film industry be-
cause they have been able to set aside the question of their gender. For
feminist critics and spectators, however, the question of women's author-
ship cannot so easily be erased as a critical perspective. As Judith Mayne
points out, the assumption of literary criticism that, 'no matter how tenu-
ous, fractured or complicated, there is a connection between the writer's
gender, personhood and her texts', can still usefully be applied to the study
of authorship in films (Mayne, 1990: 90). Furthermore, as Charlotte Bruns-
don has argued, the generic characteristics of European art cinema, 'subjec-
tive voice, interior realism, unresolved narrative and marked formal
self-consciousness, e t c ' lend themselves to the expression of women's per-
sonal anxieties and desires (Brunsdon, 1986: 55). Although there is no
necessary link between films directed by women and films which address
women's concerns (let alone films which address women's concerns from a
feminist perspective), nevertheless it is evident that some, if not most, of the
films directed by women explore issues relating to women, often from a
woman's point of view. There are even a handful of directors in France who
are prepared to argue that women's films are different from men's, particu-
larly in their attention to telling detail. For Maria Koleva, it's the presence
of 'the hole in the shoe' as she puts it in her short film, Le Trou dans le
Soulier: A la sortie du film 'Jacques Rivette, le veilleur* de Claire Denis avec
Serge Daney (1993); for Emmanuelle Bercot, in an interview in Studio
Magazine, it's 'women's hairy legs' (Bercot, 2000: 118).
However, the notion of 'women's films' is as problematic in French
critical discourses as the notion of the 'woman director'. The term 'film de
femme' is normally used simply to indicate that a film has been directed by
a woman rather than to refer to particular types of films directed by women
(though it is often used disparagingly to refer to what are perceived as
overly sentimental or narcissistic female-oriented films by women). Within
feminist film criticism the 'woman's film' is used to refer either to a subset
11
INTRODUCTION
of Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s centering on women's issues and

addressing female audiences (Doane, 1987: 3), or to feminist-influenced
American films of the 1970s about the new independent woman (Kuhn,
1984). It is to be distinguished from the term 'women's cinema' (1990),
defined by Teresa de Lauretis as 'a cinema by and for women', the most
marked characteristic of which is its work 'with and against narrative,
shifting the place of the look, playing with genre/gender crossing and rever-
sal, image-voice disjunctures, and other codes of narrative destruction' (de
Lauretis, 1990: 9). Most of the films discussed here are not locatable within
the category of 'women's cinema', which refers primarily to the tradition of
experimental avant-garde feminist cinema which developed in the 1970s.
As already noted, most French women directors in the 1980s and 1990s
either work within the French auteur tradition or have ventured further
into the mainstream through their appropriation of genre filmmaking (or a
combination of the two). Both forms of mainstreaming require compro-
mises if they are to target a mixed audience but, as American filmmaker
Michelle Citron has argued (1988), they still offer possibilities for subver-
sion as well as recuperation. Many, if not most, of the psychological auteur
films discussed here center their narratives on female protagonists, displac-
ing the hegemonic male gaze and foregrounding female desires and subjec-
tivities in ways which justify the term 'women's films'. At the same time,
they rarely address their spectators as the autonomous or women-centered
women of feminist films (and their second films are often less female-
oriented than their first films). As Ginette Vincendeau (1994a) argues in
relation to the work of Coline Serreau, films by French women are generally
informed by the importance of the family and so address their spectators
as members of a (heterosexual) couple or as parents. On the other hand, the
auteur film also allows women to venture into other terrains. Although we
reserve the term 'women's films' for films which foreground female subjectiv-
ities (including films which focus on relationships between women), the in-
vestigation of masculinity is another key component of women's filmmaking
in the 1980s and 1990s.
A number of the genre films made by women can also be deemed
'women's films'. Genre cinema is often critically disparaged, both because
of its popularity and because it is associated with formulaic narrative pat-
terns and visual styles. Nevertheless, as Jean-Louis Bourget notes in relation
to Hollywood genres, 'whenever an art form is highly conventional, the
opportunity for subtle irony or distanciation presents itself all the more
readily' (Bourget, 1977: 62). Studies of the evolution of particular genres
suggest that, 'shifts in the film genre correlate to changes in the culture
outside' (Feuer, 1987: 143). In France, where the 'politique des auteurs'
explicitly claimed Hollywood genre directors like John Ford and Alfred
12
INTRODUCTION
Hitchcock as auteurs, there is a strong tradition of film genres being re-

worked and subverted to maintain the auteurist emphasis which constitutes
French cinema's trademark (as in Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard's
reworkings of the thriller). Not surprisingly, then, contemporary women
directors have both appropriated mainstream male-oriented genre filmmak-
ing and re-worked genre elements within more independent, low-budget
'auteur-genre' films which are not aimed at large audiences. A significant
number of them have done so by inserting a point of view informed by a
feminist (or at least a woman's) awareness.
For Predai, after auteur cinema (which can itself be treated as a genre,
distinguished by its heterogeneity and the individuality of the auteur's con-
cerns), French cinema only has two really recognizable national genres, the
comedy and the policier (crime thriller), other films offering 'a more or less
hybrid scattering of subgenres' (Predai, 1993: 50). Noting the relative ab-
sence of social realist, musical, western, science fiction and fantasy films in
French cinema, Predai also calls into question the validity of the historical
film as a genre, given its heterogeneity. His view is shared by Pierre Maillot
(1993), who deplores French cinema's reluctance to interrogate its troubled
recent past and its present social reality. Films directed by women over the
last twenty years broadly conform to the national pattern, over half being
intimate, psychological dramas, a significant number being comedies and
crime thrillers, and an important but diverse set of films being set in the
past, and so categorized here as historical films. Of some interest, however,
given its perceived absence as a French genre, is the emergence of a cluster
of road movies directed by women. However, women have to date made
little contribution to action, horror or fantasy filmmaking in France, al-
though the controversial Baise-moi, co-directed by Virginie Despentes and
Coralie Trinh Thi, and promptly given an X certificate on its release in July
2000 after protests from various rightwing family associations, suggests
that this may be changing. There might be some justification for including
sex films by women as a separate category, since the explicit sexual imagery
of recent films by Jeanne Labrune and Catherine Breillat (and now Despen-
tes and Trinh Thi) has catapulted them into the headlines and can be linked
with the libertarian preoccupations of many other post-68 women filmmak-
ers. Instead, discussion of women's treatment of sex and sexuality is inte-
grated here within other categories, bringing together films which address
similar issues in less sexually explicit ways. In any case, the categories used
to locate these films are not mutually exclusive because of the postmodern
propensity of films to straddle genres and cross boundaries. In many in-
stances, women have appropriated elements of genre films primarily as
catalysts or vehicles for psychological dramas about individuals and inter-
personal relationships.
13
INTRODUCTION
Our analysis of the ways in which films by women demonstrate the at

times conflicting influences of auteurism and mainstreaming, 'postfeminism'
and the 'retour du politique', is organized, not through a narrow, chrono-
logical approach nor by focusing on particular directors, but rather, taking
our material from the film texts themselves, by classifying the major themes
and genres which women directors have chosen to work with, and discuss-
ing how they have been inflected over the twenty years in question. The
'personal films' discussed in Part One have been categorized according to
the way they foreground (and interrogate) particular themes relating to
interpersonal relations, and comprise a mix of low-budget psychological or
realist dramas, often marked by auteurist touches, and the occasional big-
ger budget drama which has achieved mainstream success. The first four
chapters address childhood and adolescence ('Growing Up'), the period
between leaving home and settling down ('The Age of Possibilities'), sexu-
ality and the couple ('Couples') and other family relationships ('Families').
The fifth chapter ('Work, Art and Citizenship') brings together films which
address more overtly social and political concerns, and includes a consid-
eration not just of narrative films but also of feature-length documentary
and essay films. The 'genre films' discussed in Part Two focus on the genres
we have identified as the ones most frequently appropriated by women
('Comedies', 'Crime Dramas', 'Road Movies' and 'Historical Films') and
foreground the ways in which generic conventions are used and/or sub-
verted. Although many of them are also low-budget auteur films, their
juxtaposition with more obviously mainstream films enables us to evaluate
the extent to which feminist-influenced questions of gender and sexuality
can be articulated from a potentially more popular perspective.
The organization of each chapter is largely determined by the particular
groupings of films which have emerged as productive in relation to the
theme or genre concerned. These groupings are structured within a histori-
cal and generational perspective which enables comparisons to be made
between films and filmmakers of the 1980s and the 1990s, though less
attention is paid to films which uncritically reproduce male-centered narra-
tives and points of view. Discussions of films which are still in circulation
are combined with information about films which are not generally availa-
ble for viewing but are nevertheless important in mapping French women
directors' aesthetic and thematic preoccupations. Our decision to provide a
broad overview of women's film production evidently prevents us from
addressing the complexities of individual film texts and their potentially
multiple address to different audiences in as much detail as we would have
liked. On the other hand, the framework we have developed enables us to
identify elements which are specific to women's filmmaking practices as
they have developed over the last twenty years, revealing both their range
14
INTRODUCTION
and their limitations. It also enables us to begin to assess the extent to

which w o m e n as the 'second sex' (and not just individual women) have
been able to overcome continuing (if waning) structural disadvantages
within the film industry and at the same time interrogate dominant under-
standings of gender and sexuality (and their intersections with generation,
class and ethnicity). 31 In so doing, we hope to have established the para-
meters against which women's future achievements can be measured. 3 2
Notes
1. Audé calculates that women directed 174 films out of a total of 1242 (either
French or majority French co-productions) during the period 1989-99 (but see
Figure 1). Based on the numbers of filmmakers holding professional identity
cards, she also notes an increase in the proportion of women filmmakers from
8.65 percent in 1981 to 12.7 percent in 2000 (a total of 121 out of 951 overall).
Figures for earlier years indicate that 18 women directors began making films
in the period 1946-1969 and 67 in the period 1970-1980 (Annie Blondel
1981).
2. See for example, Flitterman-Lewis (1990), Margulies (1996), Smith (1998) and
Foster (1999).
3. Flitterman-Lewis also draws attention to the work of Marie Epstein in the
1930s.
4. Examples would include: Diane Kurys (Diabolo mentbe, 1977; Coup de foudre,
1983), Coline Serreau (Trois hommes et un couffin, 1985), Catherine Breillat
(36 Villette, 1988; Romance, 1999), Claire Devers (Noir et blanc, 1986), Claire
Denis (Chocolat, 1988), Josiane Balasko (Gazon maudit, 1994) and, possibly,
Christine Pascal (Le Petit prince a dit, 1992), Martine Dugowson (Mina Tan-
nenbaum, 1994), and Nicole Garcia (Place Venderne, 1998).
5. In the autumn of 1999, Tonie Marshall's Vénus Beauté (Institut), Catherine
Breillat's Romance and Catherine Corsini's La Nouvelle Eve were shown in
London, and a retrospective of Catherine Breillat's work was held at the NFT
(October 1999). Three other French women's films were shown in the London
Film Festival (November 1999). A retrospective of Claire Denis's work was held
at the NFT in July 2000.
6. Though see Siclier, 1993, for two chapters on women's filmmaking in the 1970s
and 1980s and Predai (1991) for a few pages on each period. See also Forbes
(1992), Hayward (1993), Austin (1996) and Powrie (1999) for discussions of
individual women filmmakers.
7. We have viewed approximately 75 percent of the films forming our basic corpus,
but it has been particularly difficult to view certain films from the 1980s which
predate the current trend of transfer to video. Though in many cases a film's
15
INTRODUCTION
lack of availability may be a sign of its poor quality or its lack of importance
within French film culture, this is not necessarily the case, and the fact that
certain films and filmmakers are not treated in depth may be due to the difficulty
of viewing their work. As a general rule we have not included consideration of
French language films directed by women from other countries, such as Chantal
Akerman and Marion Hansel from Belgium, Anne-Marie Miéville and Jacque-
line Veuve from Switzerland, or Agnieska Holland from Poland, though we
have included references to their work where appropriate. We also do not
address women's short and medium length films or television films, though
reference may be made to them in passing.
8. Josiane Balasko, Yannick Bellon, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Daniele Dub-
roux, Charlotte Dubreuil, Aline Isserman, Diane Kurys, Christine Pascal, Coline
Serreau and Nadine Trintignant had all made at least five feature films prior to
December 1999.
9. The relative paucity of women directors in Britain is clear from Sue Harper's
study of women in British cinema (2000).
10. See Cook (1994) for a discussion of similar developments in women's filmmak-
ing more generally.
11. The avance sur recettes is a state subsidy administered by the CNC (Centre
National du Cinema) on submission of a script, which is particularly helpful in
allowing directors to make their first films. There has been no equivalent in
France to Britain's Channel 4, with its original brief to support minority and
women's filmmaking. However, funding since the 1980s also depends on the
support of television companies, who have become more open to films about
'women's issues'.
12. The key women's films of the 1970s challenge dominant representations of
women as well as dominant forms of filmmaking. Women's documentaries
created visual testimonies and archives relating to women's lives (see Martineau,
1979) and campaigned for women's causes, as in the pro-abortion film, Histo-
ries d'A (Issartel and Belmont, 1973). Fiction films gave female characters a
voice and a gaze normally absent in dominant male-authored cinema (see Audé,
1981, Lejeune, 1987, Siclier, 1993: 45-58). For example, Yannick Bellon's La
Lemme de Jean/John's Wife (1974) centers on a female protagonist who breaks
free from her restricted existence as an anonymous wife and mother and takes
charge of her life; L'Amour viole/The Rape of love (Bellon, 1976) represents a
woman's distressing experience of rape; Agnès Varda's L'Une chante Vautre pas/
One Sings, The Other Doesn't (1976) foregrounds female friendship against the
background of the women's movement (and features feminist lawyer Gisèle
Halimi in a reconstruction of the 1972 Bobigny abortion trial); Marguerite
Duras's meditative, woman-centred films, Nathalie Granger (1973) and India
Song (1975), evoke an alternative 'feminine' film language at a time when
French feminists like Hélène Cixous were developing the notion of 'écriture
16
INTRODUCTION
feminine' or 'feminine writing' (Cixous, 1975); Belgian director Chantal Aker-

man's Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975) combines
a challenge to classic narrative with the representation of an ordinary woman's
sexual and economic oppression.
13. In fact, the 1970s was the golden age of the crime thriller, in which women
were largely peripheral, and the pornographic film, in which they were exploited
as sex objects (51 of the 118 French films released between August 1977 and
February 1978 were X-rated for 'showing explicit sex').
14. A new award named after Olympe de Gouges, the eighteenth century feminist
revolutionary.
15. The first Women's Film Festival in France was a 'women only' event which took
place in Paris in 1974, organised by the Musidora association, which aimed to
promote films and videos made by women (a function filled since 1982 by the
Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) and to stimulate research into the
representation of women in film (see Musidora, 1976). Subsequently, an Inter-
national Women's Film Festival was set up in Sceaux in 1979, organized by
Elisabeth Tréhard and Jackie Buet, which transferred to Créteil (on the outskirts
of Paris) in 1985. Largely ignored by the French press except when it fore-
grounds films of interest to cinéphiles (as in its 1990s focus on stars or its
excavation of treasures from the archives), it nevertheless provides an important
forum for screening French women's documentaries and short films, perhaps to
compensate for the absence of French women's feature films in competition
(and, since 1986, it also provides a selective panorama of French women's films
released during the preceding year). As Créteil, too, has attempted to address a
more mainstream audience, a separate lesbian film festival was set up in 1988,
initially called Quand les lesbiennes se font du cinema, then Cineffable, which
is now also a very successful international annual event.
16. In 1999, there were only three women studies' posts in the whole French
university system.
17. With the exception of Agnès Varda, who spent some time in the United Stated
in the 1960s, women directors in France were not directly influenced by feminist
film theory. Despite articles on film in Femmes en mouvement (between Decem-
ber 1977 and January 1982), the translation into French of Marjorie Rosen's
Popcorn Venus and Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape (in 1976 and
1977 respectively) and a special issue of CinémAction devoted to cinema and
feminism (Martineau, 1979), none of the major texts which were at the core of
early Anglo-American feminist film theory were widely known or debated in
France. Indeed, it was only in 1993, with the publication by Ciném Action of a
collection of texts by British and American feminists (Vincendeau and Reynaud,
1993) that Laura Mulvey's seminal 1975 text on film narrative and visual
pleasure was translated into French. As Ginette Vincendeau has demonstrated
(1986, 1987 and 1988), Anglo-American feminist film theory has often been
17
INTRODUCTION
heavily influenced by French schools of thought but has not been imported back
into France in this guise.
18. Coline Serreau's budget for La Belle verte (1996) was 80 million French francs.
The budgets for films made by Balasko, Devers and Esposito in 1991-1992
were estimated at more than 50 million French francs per film.
19. In 1986, the FEMIS replaced the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinéma-
tographiques) as France's national film school, and female recruitment into the
film directing option was strongly encouraged.
20. According to Dacbert and Caradec (1999), films directed by women still cost
less than average, even after a first, successful film. For example, in 1995 the
average budget for a French film was 28 million French francs (more than
double that of 1986), while the budget for Catherine Breillat's Parfait amour!
and Nadine Trintignant's Les Fugueuses was 24 million, Daniele Dubroux's Le
Journal du séducteur cost 21 million, and Tonie Marshall's Enfants de Salaud
20 million, even though they were all directed by experienced women directors.
Nevertheless, the funding of women's second films is much less problematic
than a decade earlier. Among directors who made their first full-length feature
film in the early and mid-1990s, the following have already made their second
(dates in brackets indicate the years in which their first and second or other
films were released): Judith Cahen (1995, 1999), Christine Carrière (1995,
1999), Martine Dugowson (1994, 1997), Pascale Ferran (1994, 1996), Laur-
ence Ferreira Barbosa (1993, 1997, 2000), Sophie Fillières (1994, 2000), Anne
Fontaine (1993, 1995, 1997, 1999), Nicole Garcia (1990, 1994, 1998), Valerie
Lemercier (1997, 1999), Noernie Lvovsky (1995, 1999), Laetitia Masson (1995,
1998, 2000), Agnès Merlet (1993, 1997), Brigitte Roùan (1990, 1997), Marion
Vernoux (1994, 1996, 1999), Sylvie Verheyde (1997, 2000), Sandrine Veysset
(1996, 1998), Yolande Zauberman (1993, 1997).
21. The working practices of some of them have given rise to the term 'films de
copines' ('films by girlfriends'), suggesting a new solidarity between women
(Bedarida, 1996: 25). For example, Noernie Lvovsky co-scripted Yolande Zaub-
erman's Clubbed to death, Dominique Cabrera has a cameo role in Judith
Cahen's La Revolution sexuelle na pas eu lieu (1999), as does Claire Denis in
Laetitia Masson's En avoir (ou pas) (1996) and Brigitte Roùan and Claire Denis
in Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauté (Institut) (1999), while Catherine Corsini
credits Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa for her assistance on La Nouvelle Eve (1999).
Also notable is the collaboration between women directors and women direc-
tors of photography, like Claire Denis, Agnès Varda, Catherine Corsini and
Noernie Lvovsky with Agnès Godard, Hélène Angel with Hélène Louvart, to
name but a few. The March 2000 issue of Studio Magazine further emphasized
solidarity and shared interests between women in its focus on French actresses
and women directors (Lavoignat and Parent, 2000).
22. The filmmakers' manifesto (Manifeste des cinéastes) called for civil disobedience
18
INTRODUCTION
against France's regressive immigration laws and especially against the require-
ment that French citizens providing hospitality to foreigners should report their
guests' arrival and departure dates to the authorities. It recalls other calls for
civil disobedience, such as the Manifeste des 121 during the Algerian war and
the pro-abortion Manifeste des 343 organised by the women's movement.
Women directors involved included Judith Cahen, Claire Denis, Pascale Ferran,
Jeanne Labrune, Tonie Marshall, Claire Simon and Marion Vernoux (see Po-
wrie, 1999: 10-18).
23. Shortly after the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of women's right to vote
(in 1994), the question of parity (equal opportunities and equal political repre-
sentation) emerged as an important feminist issue. With only 5 percent of
women elected representatives in Parliament, France is at the bottom of the
European league table, apart from Greece (Gaspard, 1998: 345). For an account
of recent debates about parity, see Vogel-Polsky (1998).
24. Other signs of the renewal of feminism in France include the massive pro-
abortion demonstration of November 1995 in protest at the rising number of
attacks by far-right fundamentalists on hospitals practising abortion (see Lesse-
lier and Venner, 1997); the successful international conference commemorating
the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second
Sex, organized at the Sorbonne in January 1999 by Christine Delphy and Sylvie
Chaperon (and recorded by the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir); and
the setting up on March 8, 1999 of a feminist watchgroup, 'Les Chiennes de
garde' ('Guard Bitches'), composed of high-profile women in the media, politics,
academia and publishing, following a series of violently sexist attacks on Dom-
inique Voynet, the Minister of the Environment. The group has been active on
various fronts, including taking the trade union Force Ouvrière to task for its
sexist treatment of the newly appointed director of France Culture, Laure Adler
(herself a feminist and a specialist in women's history) and criticizing the French
department store Galeries Lafayette for putting half-naked women on display
in its windows. The 679 signatories to its manifesto (as of September 1999)
include Yvette Roudy, Franchise Gaspard, Roselyne Bachelot and Genevieve
Fraisse, as well as 161 men.
25. The popular success in the early 1990s of writers such as Hervé Guibert and
film director Cyril Collard (whose Nuits fauves became a cult film in 1992)
made gays more visible in the French media (though their deaths from AIDS-
related illnesses, in December 1990 and March 1993 respectively, also rein-
forced the link between homosexuality and AIDS). The Gay Pride march of
1995, under the patronage of actress-filmmaker Josiane Balasko, made the news
headlines for the first time, while the Coordination Lesbienne Nationale
emerged in 1996-1997 following disagreements with the organizers of Euro-
pean Pride in Paris in 1996. In June 1996, the ZOO, an independent Paris-
based research group co-led by sociologist Marie-Hélène Bourcier, introduced
19
INTRODUCTION
seminars on gay, lesbian and queer studies, published in 1998 (Bourcier 1998),
while in 1998, sociologist Franchise Gaspard, a former MP, began a series of
research seminars on homosexuality with gay philosopher and writer Didier
Eribon at the prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. In a
totally different area, the coming out of tennis player Amelie Mauresmo during
the Australian Open in early 1999 finally gave French lesbians a public figure
to identify with.
26. Women on both sides of the political spectrum have been at the forefront of
debates about the PACS. Whereas rightwing pro-life ultra-Catholic MP Chris-
tine Boutin fiercely opposed 'gay marriages' (and also rejects parity), her col-
league Roselyne Bachelot voted for it (the only rightwing MP to do so), along
with Michèle Cotta and Minister Elisabeth Guigou. Bachelot has recently co-
written a book with feminist philosopher Genevieve Fraisse about women in
French politics (Bachelot and Fraisse, 1998).
27. See Konstantarakos (1998) for a discussion of the different strands of filmmak-
ing amalgamated under the homogenizing label of 'le jeune cinema franâis'.
28. Before Arte, which was created in 1993, films were commissioned by La SEPT
(Société d'Edition de Programmes de Television) which broadcast them on
Channel 3 (1987-91).
29. Fifty years after Beauvoir's denunciation of the patriarchal sex/gender system in
The Second Sex, women's situation in France has undergone significant changes,
including increased sexual and economic freedom, thanks in particular to the
invention of the pill and the liberal legislation of the 1970s (see Duchen, 1986,
Chaperon, 2000, Gregory and Tidd, 2000). If the heterosexual married couple
with children (and concomitant extended family) is still largely taken for
granted as the basis of French society (and the threat of AIDS has made casual
sexual relationships more problematic), the number of single women of all ages
is increasing, especially in Paris, and there is a growing acceptance of other
lifestyles, now legitimated by the PACS, which recognizes unmarried heterosex-
ual couples as well as gay and lesbian couples. Nevertheless, women still face
discrimination in many aspects of life. The distribution of gender roles within
the home shows little signs of change and women still take most responsibility
for domestic labor and childcare, even if they marry and/or have children at a
later age. Though young women have access to higher education and the work-
place, they still face discrimination in terms of equal pay and top jobs, particu-
larly when they try to combine work with motherhood. At the same time,
challenges to traditional sex and gender roles have produced what is often
referred to as 'a crisis in masculinity', with men unsure of their identities and
an increase in the level of violence against women (which is one of the highest
in Europe). Furthermore, women's (relative) liberation from conventional gen-
der roles does not necessarily mean liberation from other related forms of
oppression. Women in France accept a level of sexism and misogyny in the
20
INTRODUCTION
media and in academic and political life which would be unacceptable in Britain
and America. And, paradoxically, if the ideology of Republican universalism
makes it difficult to address the specificity of being a woman, there is still a high
premium on traditional 'feminine' elegance and seductiveness (Holmes, 1996),
demonstrating the extent to which women are dependent on male approval and
how far French culture is from endorsing recent Anglo-American theories about
the fluid, constructed nature of both gender and sexual identities (Butler, 1990,
Sedgwick, 1990).
30. The 2000 Créteil Women's Film Festival celebrated the work of women cine-
matographers in France, particularly Nurith Aviv, Caroline Champetier, Agnès
Godard and Dominique Le Rigoleur.
31. We have inserted brief biographical details of individual filmmakers where
available, as a context for discussion of their first films. Our sources include
Lejeune (1987), Predai (1988), Chauville (1998), Marie (1998) and various
newspaper articles. We apologize if we have inadvertently reproduced any in-
accuracies.
32. A translation of French film titles is given when a film is discussed, the original
title alone is used elsewhere. If the film has not been distributed with an English
title, the translation is by the authors. The translation of original quotations in
French is also our own.
21
PART ONE
Personal Films
CHAPTER ONE
Growing Up
One of the most frequently recurring topics of films directed by women in

France, from the 1970s through to the 1990s, is the representation of
childhood and adolescence, either through period films or through films
about contemporary social realities. Growing-up films set in the past often
tap into the collective imagination by evoking nostalgia and longing for a
lost, imagined world. But they are also capable of evoking anger and pain
at past disillusionments and, like films set in the present, may address fears
and anxieties about children and young people and their relationship with
the wider world. By focusing on childhood and adolescence, women direc-
tors are drawing on material which has conventionally been considered
appropriate for women's filmmaking. However, their foregrounding of the
perceptions of child or adolescent protagonists whose experiences are nor-
mally marginal and marginalized has the potential to challenge hegemonic
adult modes of seeing and displace the fetishistic male gaze of dominant
cinema.
The family is conventionally the site of the formation of identity, the
place where the child achieves a sense of self according to whether or not
s/he feels loved and valued, and a sense of identity in relation to others, in
particular in terms of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. For young girls,
however, the family is above all the problematic site of the production of
femininity. Growing-up stories are often modeled on the Bildungsroman, a
narrative of progression for its normally male protagonist towards a place
in society as an adult subject. But since in a patriarchal society women's
relationship to citizenship and subjectivity is problematic, a girl's socializa-
tion is far from straightforward. It is not surprising, therefore, that a num-
ber of women directors have chosen to revisit their childhood or
adolescence in semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narratives which rep-
resent the problematic rites of passage of girls towards adult femininity.
These films address the struggle for autonomy and/or the sexual fantasies
25
PERSONAL FILMS
or sexual initiation of their young heroines within the context of their often
conflictual relationships with their parents, and particularly their mothers,
who are conventionally understood to provide the role models on which
girls' expectations of femininity are based (Fischer, 1996: 198). Classic
French cinema depends on the centrality of the father figure and the father-
daughter pairing (Vincendeau, 1992b) and, in the postmodern era, main-
stream French cinema conventionally displays the nubile sexuality of the
young girl as the object of the spectator-viewer-voyeur's transfixed gaze
(Hayward, 1993: 292). Films by women tend to focus on the point of view
of their young female protagonists and thus call into question the domi-
nance of the father and hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality.
In French cinema, a key point of reference for films about childhood is
Francois Truffaut's semi-autobiographical New Wave film, Les 400 coups
(1959), which stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter ego, Antoine Do-
inel. The focus on the young boy is accompanied by a misogynist discourse
which clearly blames the figure of the mother for the boy's incipient delin-
quency and problematic relationship with women. In the 1970s, as the
women's movement gathered strength, a number of women directors chal-
lenged the androcentrism of French cinema by making films centered on
girls, whether as a child, as in Rachel Weinberg's Pic et pie et colégram
(1971), or as a young teenager reaching the age of sexual awareness, as in
Nina Companeez's Faustine et le bel été (1971) and Claudine Guilmain's
Véronique ou Vété de mes treize ans (1974). The most successful of these
was Diabolo menth e/Peppermint Soda, a semi-autobiographical first film
by actress Diane Kurys (born 1948), and the top-grossing French film of
1977. Tracing the lives of two young teenage sisters during the school year
1963-64 and their relationships with their separated parents, teachers and
schoolfriends, it focuses sympathetically on how the girls negotiate the
problems of growing up female, and deftly links their struggles against
authority figures with a critique of repressive French society in the early
1960s (Tarr, 1999a: 16-31). Diabolo mentbe does not hesitate to portray
adolescence with all its awkwardness and irritability, an unsentimental
approach which contrasts, for example, with the lyricism of Jeanne Mo-
reau's L'Adolescente (1979), which evokes the relationship between a
young girl and her grandmother during the German Occupation of France.
The period setting has been a key feature of films by women about
rebellious children and adolescents made in the 1980s and 1990s, and these
often semi-autobiographical narratives are discussed in the first section of
this chapter. However, childhood and adolescence have not just been
treated through historical reconstruction. The Lolita theme of the adoles-
cent child-woman as the subject/object of desire has also been re-worked in
films with contemporary settings, that either center on a young girl or take
26
GROWING UP
a sister-brother relationship as their main focus. The principal concern of

these two groups of films, which, like the films about growing up set in the
past, are mostly made by women who started directing in the 1970s, is the
exploration of teenage, usually female, sexuality. From the late 1980s on-
wards, however, a key motif of films by women, including women associ-
ated with 'le jeune cinema franâis', has been the effect on children or
adolescents of the inadequacies or failures of the contemporary family.
These films, discussed in the final section of this chapter, foreground the
consequences of parental neglect or abuse on young children in a society
which, since the end of the 1970s (the end of 'les trente glorieuses', the
thirty years of postwar prosperity), has been suffering from the effects of
the economic crisis (Mayol, 1996). Their more obvious concern with social
reality signals the 'retour du politique,' which to a certain extent informs
the new French cinema of the 1990s.
Growing up in the past
Films about childhood or adolescent experiences set in the past constitute

the largest clustering of women's films about growing up, perhaps because
they combine the conventional pleasures of period reconstruction with the
possibility of subversive reflections on women's histories and identities.
Given that they could equally be categorized as historical films, we have
decided to discuss films about growing up in the (former) colonies or
elsewhere in chapter 9, while films about growing up in metropolitan
France are discussed here. However, the period settings within which these
growing-up stories are embedded have not been selected just for the visual
pleasures they evoke but because they privilege an awareness of gender,
class and race at key moments in postwar French history: the immediate
postwar period in Un été cVorages (Charlotte Brandstròm, 1989), Le Cahier
volé (Christine Lipinska, 1993) and Péché véniel, péché mortel (Pomme
Meffre, 1995)1, the 1950s in Rouge Baiser (Vera Belmont, 1985) and La
Baule Les Pins (Diane Kurys, 1990), and the 1960s in Louise Vinsoumise
(Charlotte Silvera, 1985) and Mima (Philomène Esposito, 1991). Directed
by filmmakers who lived through the changes brought about by May 1968
and the women's movement, the periods prior to 1968 are infused with a
proto-feminist sensibility which highlights the restrictions on girls and
women's roles and the need for social change. Significantly, many of them
center on girls from working-class backgrounds whose situation is linked
to their ethnicity: Louise Vinsoumise represents a family of orthodox im-
migrant Tunisian Jews, Rouge Baiser a family of immigrant Polish Jews, La
Baule Les Pins, second generation secular Russian Jews, and Mima, an
27
PERSONAL FILMS
immigrant Italian family with Mafia connections. These films provide em-
powering stories of adolescent girls and their survival, which simultane-
ously draw attention, sympathetically, to categories of otherness within
postwar post-colonial France. In contrast, La Vie ne me fait pas peur (1999)
by Noémie Lvovsky, a director associated with 'le jeune cinema franâis', is
set in the 1970s, and offers an exuberant, post-feminist reworking of the
themes of Kurys's Diabolo menthe in its foregrounding of schoolgirls, fe-
male friendships and dysfunctional families.2
Louise Vinsoumise/Louise the Rebel was the first feature film to be writ-
ten and directed by Charlotte Silvera (born 1954). Silvera had been politi-
cized as a teenager by the events of May 1968 and then by the women's
movement, and began her film career in the 1970s by making videos on
controversial leftwing and feminist themes. Louise Vinsoumise, winner of
the Prix Georges Sadoul, took five years to complete from script to distri-
bution and provides a stark, realistic portrayal of a family of Jewish immi-
grants from Tunisia (drawing on Silvera's own family background). The
family is perceived through the eyes of rebellious young Louise (Myriam
Stern), the middle of three daughters, who bitterly resents the fact that her
authoritarian father has determined that his family will not mix with 'for-
eigners' (the French), and strives to maintain the lifestyle they have been
forced to leave behind. Louise is first seen squatting under the dining table
to watch television in secret. Her fixation provides her with a (temporary)
escape from the punitive severity of her embittered mother (Catherine Rou-
vel) and a lifeline to the outside world which allows her to be the life and
soul of her peer group at school. The use of TV inserts also contributes to
the film's convincing evocation of the atmosphere of the early 1960s. They
include a news item about three Arab women escaping from Fleury-Mongis
prison (this was at the time of the Algerian war), which provides Louise
with another model of escape, and a brief appearance by feminist writer,
Christiane Rochefort, whose best-selling novel Les Petits enfants du siede
was published in 1961.
The film demonstrates sympathetically the way Louise is pulled between
two cultures. The tight, claustrophobic mise-en-scène of her home life, with
its strict observance of Jewish customs and rituals, contrasts with the more
open mise-en-scène of her school life, where she can play freely with the
other girls. She is repeatedly framed at home staring out of the window in
her dowdy clothes, or tossing and turning restlessly in bed. But her troubles
are attributed not just to her ethnic background but also to her position
within a traditional, authoritarian family. Louise's father (who hides por-
nographic magazines in his car, as Louise discovers with shock) demands
complete subservience from his wife and children. He requires his daughters
to take off his shoes and put on his slippers when he returns home, and
28
GROWING UP
Louise (Myriam Stern) takes refuge from her parents in Louise Vinsoumise
(1985). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the Ronald
Grant Archive.
either refuses to talk to his wife or else simply ordering her about. Treated
as a chattel (she is constantly shot sewing, washing, cleaning, cooking and
helping her daughters recite their homework), the mother unsurprisingly
takes out her resentment on the children. The film contrasts Louise's family
with another Jewish family where the mother smokes, the father helps in
the house, the children are allowed to have friends around and a tin of
pork rillettes sits in the cupboard. Louise's discovery that there are other
ways of living, even as a Jew, licenses her to defy her parents by going off
to a schoolfriend's party, and so provokes the film's climax. Her mother,
hitherto confined to the home, appears at the door to fetch her back and
openly threatens her with violence. But Louise manages to run away, and
the film ends on a 360 degree panning shot taking in Louise's point of view
over the rooftops of Paris and freedom.
Louise Vinsoumise provides a remarkable portrait of an assertive, imagi-
native, 'unfeminine' little girl, who has not yet reached the age of sexual
awareness (instead the film privileges the pleasures of young girls playing
29
PERSONAL FILMS
together), and whose resistance to familial pressure lays bare the discipli-
nary power structure of the patriarchal family and in particular the suffer-
ing caused by a mother who is driven to act cruelly towards her daughters.
Its uncompromising stance contrasts with the more commercially appealing
Rouge Baiser/Red Kiss, written, directed and produced by Vera Belmont
(born 1938), already a well-known producer. Rouge Baiser was released
the same year and traces the trials and tribulations of a daughter of immi-
grant Jews through a sexy coming-of-age narrative with a star cast. Belmont
herself came from a family of Polish Jews, artisans in the Bastille district of
Paris and members of the French Communist Party, and had avoided fol-
lowing her mother into the rag trade by frequenting the cinema world and
setting up her own production company (Stephan Films). She later ventured
into directing with a short documentary about Portugal, followed by a
feature-length documentary, Les Prisonniers de Mao (1979), based on an
autobiography by Jean Pasqualini detailing the horrors of life in Chinese
prison camps. In Rouge Baiser, Belmont successfully reconstructs her 1950s
adolescence against a backdrop of growing disillusionment with the Com-
munist Party and a fascination with the nightlife of St Germain-des-Prés
and all things American.
The film opens with a brief black-and-white prologue set in 1937 in
which Moi'she (Laurent Terzieff), a Polish Jew and ardent communist,
leaves his beloved Bronka (Marthe Keller) in Paris in order to escape to
Moscow. It then cuts to 1952, in color, and the escapades of sexy, fifteen-
year-old Nadia, played engagingly by Charlotte Valandrey in her first screen
role. Nadia, a factory worker, is both a Communist Party activist and a girl
who enjoys having a good time (she hides clothes and makeup in the Pére
Lachaise cemetery to fool her bully of a father). A chance encounter with
bourgeois Stephen (Lambert Wilson), a photographer for Paris Match who
saves her from police violence during the demonstration against the pres-
ence of the American General Ridgeway, leads to the loss of her virginity
and her initiation into the nightlife of the Parisian Left Bank. It also leads
to the erosion of her political beliefs, for Stephen's physical attractiveness,
insolence and seductiveness are accompanied by a cynical approach to life,
which Nadia finds both shocking and exciting. Disillusion with Stalinism is
compounded for the audience by Moishe's return from Siberia, as a
haggard-looking drunk whose news about the persecution of Jews in Russia
falls on deaf ears. But the film is more concerned with the development of
Nadia's emotional life and her decision to run away from home when she
discovers that Moi'she is her real father. Accompanying Stephen on a glam-
orous photo shoot by the seaside, she actively consolidates their affair (to
the detriment of her older actress rival). But when she leaves to attend
Stalin's wake in Paris, she pays the price for her transgressive behavior, first
30
GROWING UP
Nadia (Charlotte Valandrey) discovers the pleasures of under-age sex with

Stephen (Lambert Wilson) in Rouge Baiser (1985). Supplied by and repro-
duced with permission from the Ronald Grant Archive.
by being expelled from the Young Communists (thanks to the jealousy of a

former boyfriend), then by losing Stephen, who is denounced by her father
and found guilty of abusing a minor. The film ends tearfully with Stephen
in uniform, about to leave for Indo-China. Notably, however, Nadia's
coming-of-age narrative does not end in the formation of the couple and
settling down, but offers a more feminist-influenced version of the female
Bildungsroman, leaving its heroine poised to aim for a career as a photog-
rapher.
The title Rouge Baiser, the name of a lipstick popular in the 1950s,
neatly indicates how the film's political theme is intermingled with and
subsumed by the themes of femininity and sexuality ('rouge' meaning red,
with its connotations of communism and danger, 'baiser' meaning both to
kiss and to have sex). Despite Nadia's devotion to Stalin, her role models
are Hollywood heroines Scarlett O'Hara and Gilda,3 archetypes of glamor-
ous femininity but also female characters who demonstrate an active, desir-
ing sexuality. The narrative of Rouge Baiser is primarily constructed from
31
PERSONAL FILMS
Nadia's point of view, focusing on her sexual initiation as both pleasurable

in itself and instrumental in her passage towards adult femininity (a big
close up of her red lips accompanies her seduction of Stephen in the photo-
shoot episode). Arguably, the film addresses a mainstream audience by
incorporating point-of-view shots which set Nadia up as the object of
voyeuristic desire, and by refusing to treat the question of underage sex as
in any way problematic (though Stephen is guilty of a crime in the eyes of
the law). However, it also emphasizes Nadia's narrative agency and her
awareness of the performance nature of gender, allowing her to transform
herself from street urchin to vamp through a variety of different costumes.
And, while it suggests that her life, like that of Bronka, her dressmaker
mother, is ultimately determined by love and passion rather than by politi-
cal principles or career choices, it also gestures towards the importance of
women's work, adroitly underlining women's need for fulfillment through
both sexual and economic independence.
La Baule Les Pins/C'est la vie, Diane Kurys's fifth film (Tarr, 1999a: 9 2 -
107), was shot in cinemascope with a big budget and major stars, and
enjoyed a similar commercial success to the earlier Rouge Baiser. Set during
the summer holidays of 1958, it is the third in Kurys's trilogy inspired by
her own childhood (following and reworking the semi-autobiographical
subject matter of Diabolo mentbe and Coup de foudre, discussed in chapter
3). Its episodic narrative oscillates between the points of view of two sisters,
teenage Frédérique (Julie Bataille) and younger Sophie (Candice Lefranc),
their cousins, and the various adults whose behavior impacts on their lives,
particularly Léna, their mother (Nathalie Baye), and Michel, their father
(Richard Berry). Its opening pre-credit sequence points to the imminent
breakdown of the parents' marriage as the children and their nanny (Valeria
Bruni-Tedeschi) prepare to depart for the holidays without their father (and
are then abandoned by their mother, too, at the train station). Once at La
Baule Les Pins, the film prioritizes the world of the children, with its
everyday events, quarrels, pains and pleasures. It is partially focalized
through a voice-over of Frédérique's diary, in which she muses on the events
of the summer and in particular her changing feelings towards her cousin
Daniel (which lead to a kiss, but then to disillusionment rather than sex).
However, the children's lives are punctuated by the comings and goings of
the adults, from the comic activities of uncle Leon (Jean-Pierre Bacri) to
Lena's affair with Jean-Claude (Vincent Lindon) and Michel's destruction
of Lena's newly purchased car, the symbol of her determination to leave
him and set up a new life on her own. The film documents the girls'
reactions to their parents' behavior, from the way they torment their nanny
and the proprietor of their holiday villa to Sophie's methodical destruc-
tion of her doll and Frédérique's threat to kill herself with a shard
32
GROWING UP
of broken mirror. It thus shows how they are caught up in and damaged by
the instability of their parents' lives. But time moves on, Frédérique grows
older and wiser, and at the end of the summer (and the film), her letter to
her now separated father, read in voice-over, indicates that she has managed
to suppress her turbulent emotions and enter a more repressed, self-
contained world of adult relations.
An apparently charming, nostalgic film, La Baule Les Pins makes less
play of the characters' Jewish origins and spends less time on relationships
between women and girls than Kurys's earlier films. Nevertheless, it still
has some bite. The failure of Lena's marriage and the presence of Aunt
Bella (Zabou) and her multiple pregnancies call attention to the difficulties
of women's lot, while the male characters are typically weak and inade-
quate (though Michel gives Frédérique a camera when he comes to visit, a
presage, perhaps, of Kurys's own future as a filmmaker). The film uses the
girls' point of view to call into question the patriarchal values of the 1950s,
at the same time as it offers visual pleasures to a mainstream audience
through its exquisite, nostalgic period reconstruction of the 1950s family
seaside holiday resort.
Le Cahier volé/Tbe Stolen Diary differs from the films discussed to date,
both because it is a literary adaptation and because it is the only period
film about adolescence to problematize teenage sexuality by foregrounding
bisexuality and lesbian desire. It was directed by Christine Lipinska, who
was born in 1951 in Algiers, but grew up in France and was also influenced
by the events of May 1968. After working as an assistant director (on
Sarah Maldoror's militant 1972 film, Sambizanga, among others), she
started directing her own films in the 1970s. Le Cahier volé is an adaptation
of the 1978 novel of the same name by Regine Deforges, reworked and set
at the time of the Liberation, and shot on location in the south of France.
Structured as a long flashback to the previous summer, the film centers on
motherless teenager and would-be writer Virginie (Elodie Bouchez), and
depicts her apparently carefree initiation into adult sexuality through her
relationships with three friends, Anne (Edwige Navarro), Jacques (Malcolm
Conrath) and Maurice (Benoit Magimel), who are all in love with her.
Virginie recounts her love affairs, particularly her sexual experimentation
with Anne, in a diary which gets stolen and circulated in the village, and
scandalizes the small-minded community in which she lives. Faced with the
hostility of Jacques, the villagers and her own father, Virginie secretly agrees
to run away with Anne. However, their families prevent them from leaving
and Anne protests by committing suicide.
Virginie's adventures take place in the aftermath of love and betrayal
during the Occupation, and her coming-of-age narrative explores the ado-
lescent girl's desire to be free and independent in the face of a bitter,
33
PERSONAL FILMS
unloving father who wants to impose set ideas about how girls should
behave (one of Lipinska's embellishments to the novel). However, her desire
to multiply her sexual experiences as a basis for her writing (a form of
polymorphously perverse permissiveness associated more with the 1960s
than the postwar period) is represented in an ambivalent manner. The tragic
outcome of her lesbian relationship with Anne contrasts with the represen-
tation of her heterosexual relationships (even though these are also prob-
lematic), and when the film was screened at the Créteil Women's Film
Festival, audiences expressed regret that Lipinska had made Anne a victim,
unlike the original novel. (Lipinska claimed to have been influenced by the
number of child and adolescent suicides in France, amounting to some
2000 per year out of 20,000 attempts.) Virginie, too, is punished for her
brazen behavior and avid curiosity about life by being publicly humiliated.
But in the long run, she seems set to achieve her aim of becoming a writer
(as, presumably, was Deforges). However, the film suffers from being un-
sure of whether it is offering a nostalgic, David Hamilton-style study of
adolescent eroticism and promiscuity in a picturesque rural French setting
(like Deforges's novel), or whether it wants to address more serious issues
like the reasons for Anne's suicide or the effects of Maurice's return from a
concentration camp. For whatever reason (it is also rather woodenly acted),
the film received very limited distribution.
La Vie ne me fait pas peurlYm Not Afraid of Life, co-written by Noémie
Lvovsky and Florence Seyvos, reprises the theme of rebellious female ado-
lescence in a 1970s setting. Lvovsky, a FEMIS graduate (whose first film,
Oublie-moi, is discussed in chapter 2), first addressed the topic in a
television film, Petites (1998), centering on the friendship between four
schoolgirls and loosely based on her memories of the Lycée Rodin and
those of three of her childhood friends. Subsequently she cut footage from
Petites and edited in a short prologue and additional material filmed with
the same schoolgirl actors a year later. The resulting feature-length film
won her the 1999 Prix Jean Vigo (and a Silver Leopard at Locarno) and
was described as a female version of Truffaut's Les 400 coups (though as
previously argued, it might be more appropriately viewed as an updated
version of Kurys's Diabolo mentbe).
La Vie ne me fait pas peur is the most technically audacious of the films
described in this section. It has no clear narrative structure, its organizing
principle being the kaleidoscope of sensations and feelings experienced by
the four friends, Emilie (Magali Woch), Inés (Ingrid Molinier), Marion
(Camille Rousselet) and Stella (Julie-Marie Parmentier). These are conveyed
in a very physical, disjointed way through a collage of short scenes and an
aggressive rhythm produced by fast editing, a handheld camera often held
very close to the actors' bodies, off-center framing and sweeping panning
34
GROWING UP
shots. (Lvovsky's cinematographer was Agnès Godard, who has also

worked with Claire Denis, Catherine Corsini and Agnès Varda.) Neverthe-
less, there is a development over time from the opening prologue sequence,
which includes a scene in which two tiny little girls, absolutely covered in
chocolate, grin together at the camera, to the agonies of early teen years
(the period of Petites) which ends with the four girls making a blood pact
together. A summer holiday in Italy follows (with attendant, disastrous
sexual experiences) followed by preparation for the bac and, finally (and
briefy), to a later reunion, brought about because Inés is ill, when the other
three end up throwing wine at each other. The fragmentation of the early
part of the film gradually gives way to more extended sequences based on
individuals as the girls' lives start to go in different directions. But an
epilogue brings the foursome together again in a curious fantasy sequence
in which they dance around dressed like Hollywood stars. A young man,
caricaturing Joe Dassin, sings to Emilie, dressed up as a grotesquely preg-
nant bride, 'Here's to you, to the little girl you once were, to the little girl
you often still are, to your past, your secrets, your former Prince Charm-
ings'. Arguably, the ending defuses the anger and aggression of earlier
scenes in favor of feel-good, postmodern irony. At the same time, it dem-
onstrates how Lvovsky cheerfully ignores cinematic conventions, incorpo-
rating different styles (the musical, animation) and different tones, using
humor to counter darker moments of realism.
La Vie ne me fait pas peur also looks different from other films discussed
in this section, its mid-1970s setting enabling it to revel in extraordinarily
garish costume designs, its vibrant clashing color scheme dominated first
by orange, then by outlandish punk-Gothic fashions. It is also different in
its representation of the female body, particularly in the period of the early
teen years where it emphasizes the physical vitality and violence of the girls
(who are not conventionally attractive). The foursome are shot running at
full pace in the school corridors, dancing to pop music until they drop,
cavorting in the nude, screaming with rage, hitting out at others, changing
in mood from despair to euphoria. They also play out imaginative games
(like pretending to make movies, and giving TV interviews as little old
ladies), are fascinated by the morbid (they steal a homunculus in a jar from
the science lab), and fantasize about boys (they make charms and invent
elaborate rituals to bring the boys under their spell). But boys themselves
remain distant, shadowy figures, unattainable objects of desire. Meanwhile,
glimpses of the girls' unsatisfactory home lives (Emilie's mother—a cameo
performance by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi—is mad, Marion is tormented by
her brother, Stella's parents are about to divorce) explain why the girls
reserve their most intense feelings for each other, an intensity which is
underlined by the close-up shots of their extremely messy blood pact.
35
PERSONAL FILMS
A girls' own world in La Vie ne me fait pas peur (1999). Supplied by and
reproduced with permission from Arena Films. (C) David Verlant/Arena
Films.
In the latter sections of the film, set three years later, the girls may look
more 'feminine' and sophisticated, but they are still physically exuberant
and sexually naive. The summer holiday sequence features a series of
alarming or humiliating encounters between three of the girls and various
would-be rapists and seducers (with an honesty reminiscent of Catherine
Breillat's 36 Villette, discussed below). These are intercut with scenes of Em-
ilie, on a drama course in Paris, being humiliated and then seduced by her
much older, sadistic teacher. (Later, Marion gets raped by her boyfriend.)
The girls survive and maintain a rebellious spirit (Marion spits in her boy-
friend's family's soup because they do not approve of her) but, with the pas-
sage of time, the group is no longer the central focus of their lives and the
film itself seems to lose direction at this point. Though the ending brings the
girls artificially together again, it also points to their future separation,
some dreaming of successful careers, others turning to romance and moth-
erhood. Nevertheless, the lasting impression of La Vie ne me fait pas peur is
its celebration of the girls' ability to put a brave face on their inner uncer-
tainties and their often brutal contact with others, and create a girls' own
world which is noisy, bright and imaginative. Although the film's technical
virtuosity may represent Lvovsky's bid for auteur status within French film
culture, it does not prevent the expression of a neo-feminist sensibility.
36
GROWING UP
These period growing-up films offer a particular appeal to female spec-

tators through their tales of female rebellion, and raise issues which are
relevant to women's filmmaking more generally, particularly the quest for
female autonomy in relation to family pressures and conventional patriar-
chal values. In the films set prior to May 1968 and second wave feminism,
the necessity for female defiance is more or less self-evident, though in La
Baule Les Pins it is the mother who challenges patriarchal values rather
than the young daughters who witness her rebellion. Louise of Louise
Vinsoumise seeks liberation from sectarian patriarchal values in secularism
and social integration; Nadia of Rouge Baiser exchanges blind, puritanical
political activism for sexual freedom and a career in the media; and Virginie
justifies rebellion against conventional expectations of feminine decorum in
Le Cahier volé in the name of female creativity. Arguably, these narratives
of female rebellion can afford to be optimistic in that the passage of time
has justified their revolt.4 The influence of feminism is also evident in their
concern with positive representations of relationships between women, be
it through female friendships {Louise Vinsoumise and Le Cahier volé),
relationships between sisters (Louise Vinsoumise and La Baule Les Pins) or
mother-daughter intimacy (Rouge Baiser and La Baule Les Pins). La Vie
ne me fait pas peur, made at the end of the 1990s and set at a time when
women appeared to have achieved a measure of sexual freedom and equal-
ity, paradoxically is more uncertain about the future of its protagonists.
However, its intense focus on female friendships, underpinned by its ener-
getic visual imagery and soundtrack, shows how a contemporary young
filmmaker can return to the topic of female rites of passage in a new,
challenging and exhilarating manner.
The pains of adolescence
The adolescent girl, a frequent trope of mainstream French cinema, is most

frequently represented as a Lolita-like child-woman, an object of sexual
desire designed to titillate the male voyeur and circumvent the challenge
and threat of adult female sexuality. Typical child-women of French cinema
of the 1980s and 1990s have been incarnated by stars such as Charlotte
Gainsbourg (UEffrontée, Charlotte Forever, La Petite voleuse) and Vanessa
Paradis (Noce blanche, Elisa). The treatment of the adolescent teenager and
her father in Mon pére ce héros (Gerard Lauzier, 1991) highlights the sexual
ambiguity of the father-daughter relationship, already identified as a domi-
nant paradigm in French cinema (Mazdon, 1999). The conventional repre-
sentation of the child-woman was challenged in the 1970s in Nelly Kaplan's
second feature film, Nea (1976), adapted from a short story by Just Jaeckin,
37
PERSONAL FILMS
which gives narrative agency to an adolescent girl who writes erotic litera-
ture (Colvile, 1993a). 5 Not surprisingly, a number of women's films of the
1980s and 1990s also explore adolescent female sexuality in ways which,
to a greater or lesser extent, foreground the subjectivity and narrative
agency of their adolescent protagonists. They include La Femme enfant
(Rachel Billetdoux, 1980), La Petite allumeuse (Daniele Dubroux, 1987),
36 Fillette (Catherine Breillat, 1988), La Barbare (Mireille Dare, 1989), La
Fille du magicien (Claudine Bories, 1990), Dormez, je le veux (Irene Jouan-
net, 1998) and C'est la tangente que je préfère (Charlotte Silvera, 1998).
Despite the interest shown by women directors in the topic, however, none
of these films has been a major box office success. The most successful was
La Fetite allumeuse, a comedy with a star cast, and the second film by
Daniele Dubroux (born 1947), a contributor to Cahiers du cinema, who
had previously worked as a lecturer in film at Vincennes and the IDHEC.
The topic of adolescent sexuality and, in particular, a young girl's sexual
initiation (usually, even in films by women, by an older man) can be worked
through in a variety of ways. La Femme enfant turns it into a tragedy by
having the male partner commit suicide when the girl leaves her home
village.6 La Fetite allumeuse treats it as comic, making fun of middle-aged
would-be lover Jean-Louis (Roland Giraud), who is surprised by his grow-
ing love for his friend's willful middle-class young daughter, Camille (Alice
Papierski). But Dubroux's film allows a tenderness to develop between the
couple, which is uncontaminated by any physical relationship (Camille
sucks her thumb in bed with Jean-Louis and finally loses her virginity by
seducing an unsatisfactory youth, a theme reprised in 36 Fillette). La Fille
du magicien s cartoon-like, fairy-tale universe centers on the visual fascina-
tion exerted by London Lili (played by kooky young star, Anouk Grinberg),
and offers only a very superficial take on adolescent feelings, brushing aside
themes like the father's attempted rape of his daughter. The unrealistic
'happy endings' of these two films run the risk of naturalizing male-centered
fantasies about the adolescent's desire for the ill-assorted father-daughter
couple. In contrast, 36 Fillette provides a provocative, more realistic ac-
count of an adolescent's loss of her virginity, which can usefully be com-
pared with Silvera's recent C'est la tangente que je préfère. Both these films,
despite their contemporary settings, are inspired by the personal experi-
ences of their director.
36 Fillette/Virgin was the third film to be written and directed by Cath-
erine Breillat (born 1949), who first made her name as a writer. She pub-
lished her first novel at the age of seventeen, and followed it with several
works of erotic literature, including the screenplay for David Hamilton's
Bilitis. Her first film, Une vraie jeune fille (1976), also centers on adolescent
female sexuality, but was not distributed until 2000, after the success of
38
GROWING UP
Romance (1999). In her second film, Tapage nocturne (1979), she focuses
on a woman filmmaker's masochistic need for humiliating sex, and 36
Villette proved to be an equally shocking, controversial work. The film
stars Delphine Zentout as suburban, working-class Lili, a physically ma-
ture but mentally confused fourteen-year-old, who doesn't quite know
what she wants, but swears like a trooper and is embarrassed at still be-
ing a virgin. According to Breillat, the experience of losing one's virginity
is never enjoyable, and Lili's angry, frustrated quest to lose hers certainly
calls into question normative soft focus representations of teenage girls'
first sexual experiences. (The shooting of the film reputedly brought out
Breillat's own aggressiveness in her relationships with the actors and tech-
nicians.)
36 Villette is set in Biarritz during a wet and windy summer vacation,
when Lili is stuck with her brother and her dull, indifferent parents in a
campsite outside of town. Bored and angry, she persuades her brother to
take her out for the evening, and they get picked up by Maurice (Etienne
Chicot), an older man who is also a bit of a playboy. Lili, dressed in her
most sexy outfit, throws a fit, screaming and shouting at him, while he in
turn provokes her with misogynist remarks about women being as inter-
changeable as cars. Later the same night they meet again in a nightclub
and, intrigued and fascinated despite himself, Maurice invites her back to
his hotel room. There follows a long, harrowing seduction scene, shot
mostly in real time with few ellipses, which is very uncomfortable for
spectators who are forced into being unwitting, self-conscious voyeurs. The
actions and expressions of both Lili and Maurice are presented to the
camera for observation in compelling detail, emphasizing how both protag-
onists feel desire at the same time as anger at feeling desire, Maurice
because he knows Lili is too young for him, Lili because something in her
head stops her giving in to him. Lili's alternating feelings of attraction and
repulsion, of desire and the refusal of desire, are renewed in subsequent
days, until eventually Maurice departs in despair, confused by his feelings
for her and his inability to penetrate her. Lili returns to the campsite and
casually makes out with the clumsy, unattractive youth staying in the next-
door tent, feeling no pleasure in the act whatsoever. When he has an orgasm
and she does not, she turns on him, calling him a 'con' (literally 'cunt' but
a term widely used in France to mean 'idiot'), as she does everyone else.
But the film ends on a shot of her grinning expansively to camera, presum-
ably because she has lost her virginity without losing her head.
The film includes a remarkable scene between Lili and a famous musi-
cian, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, whom she chances on in a cafe. He
allows her to express her anguish, her bitterness towards her family, the
lack of love in her life and her lack of direction, but also her spunk and
39
PERSONAL FILMS
Lili (Delphine Zentout) fails to be seduced by Maurice (Etienne Chicot) in

36 Villette (1988). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Em-
manuel Schlumberger, French Films Production.
sensuality, and her desire to become a writer. Lili is unappealing because

she is so rude and aggressive, but also admirable because of the strength
and ambivalence of her feelings and her courage in expressing them. The
film challenges the conventions of dominant French cinema by centering on
female subjectivity, making everything associated with the sex act awkward
and uncomfortable, and constructing men as unworthy, unappealing ob-
jects of desire. There is no passionate reciprocal love affair, and Maurice is
left to feel self-critical, guilty and responsible, emphasizing the incompati-
bility between the sexes that Breillat was to develop in her later films. 36
Fillette's sensitivity to the complexity of the child-woman's feelings makes
this a remarkable, if not necessarily pleasurable representation of female
adolescence.
Charlotte Silvera's third feature film, C'est la tangente que je préfère/
Love, Math and Sex, offers a significant and disturbing contrast to 36
Villette. Set in Lille, it centers on the potentially interesting character of
sylphlike adolescent, Sabine (Julie Delarme), who is brilliant at math and
wants to win a year's study in Brussels. The film allows her an intermittent
humorous voice-over, which reveals that she is constantly trying to reduce
her experiences and emotions to a calculation. Although her relationships
with her confused mother and her unemployed father are increasingly
strained, Sabine uses her mathematical talent to make money to assist her
40
GROWING UP
family's finances, and also steals waiters' tips. Her life is disturbed by a
chance encounter with attractive, lonely foreigner, Jiri (Georges Corra-
face), a man twice her age, who mistakes her for a prostitute, first because
he catches her stealing and then because she asks for money for mending
a fuse in his flat. After a certain amount of prevarication, the couple
embark on a very explicit sexual relationship in which Sabine, hitherto a
virgin, experiences physical pleasure (unlike when she tries sleeping with a
boy from school). After various plot complications, including Sabine's de-
nunciation of Jiri to the police (an act of jealousy which he later forgives
and which the police, conveniently, agree to ignore) and her decision to
walk out of the finals of her math competition (rejecting the advice of her
math teacher, played by Marie-Christine Barrault), Jiri—who turns out to
be a visiting theatre director—makes a deal with her money-grabbing fam-
ily. As the couple walk off hand in hand, Sabine's voice-over confirms that
this is what she wants.
Like Irene Jouannet's Dormez je le veux/1 Want You To Sleep,7 released
at the same time, C'est la tangente que je préfère creates an adolescent
with brains and then deprives her of their use. Though it ostensibly priv-
ileges the girl's point of view, it adopts a perspective which not only val-
idates the older man's choice of an adolescent girl as a sexual partner
and absolves him from feeling guilt (because he claims not to realize how
young she is) or being charged with a crime, but also turns the girl into
a commodity which he can purchase from her parents, with or without
her consent. The spectator is expected to feel sympathetic to the man
because he is a generous, caring artist who can give the girl pleasure,
unlike the callow youth. But the initially interesting, self-willed adolescent
finally accepts being turned into a dependent 'pretty woman'. The con-
trast with 36 Villette (or Silvera's own Louise Vinsoumise) could not be
more blatant.
Of all these films, 36 Villette best exposes the inadequacies of conven-
tional male fantasies about the child-woman. Others may provide different
inflections to the story, notably by foregrounding the girl's point of view.
However nearly all of them endorse the notion that a young girl's induction
into womanhood and sexual fulfillment can be painlessly achieved through
a relationship with a desirable, normally older male, whose presence pro-
vides a positive alternative to the oppressive, even abusive family. On the
other hand, though 36 Villette debunks men and provides spectators with a
rebellious female protagonist, it does not offer any form of liberation or
optimism about the future, but ends up simply scoring points in the war of
the sexes.8
41
PERSONAL FILMS
Sisters and brothers
The representation of adolescence and adolescent sexuality is also to be

found in a handful of films which focus on sisters and brothers, namely
Clementine Tango (Caroline Roboh, 1983), Jeux d'artifices (Virginie Thév-
enet, 1987), Nénette et Boni (Claire Denis, 1997) and Un frère (Sylvie
Verheyde, 1997), the only film in this section by one of the younger gener-
ation of women filmmakers. (The older sister-brother relationship of Cath-
erine Corsini's Les Amoureux is discussed in chapter 2.) The foregrounding
of a sister-brother relationship can function in various ways, but perhaps
works most obviously as a form of resistance to growing up, staving off
the formation of the conventional adult heterosexual couple. Clementine
Tango, Roboh's only full-length feature film to date, and Thévenet's second
film, Jeux d'artifces, loosely based on Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles,
are both heavily influenced by the 'cinema du look' of the 1980s and rely
more on their seductive visual appeal than on narrative or social realism.
Clementine Tango focuses on uptight young Charles and his fascination
with the magical, mysterious world of a Pigalle cabaret, to which he is
introduced by quirky young Clementine (his half-sister). The film allows
Charles to explore his ambiguous sexuality amidst the kitsch and glamour
of the cabaret, but neglects to develop the character of Clementine. Jeux
d'artifce constructs a similarly magical, mysterious world in which an
androgynous sister and brother, Elisa (Myriam David) and Eric (Gael Se-
quin), live out a potentially incestuous relationship, spending their time
creating and photographing fantastic tableaux vivants. However, their inti-
macy is shattered by the invasion of characters from the outside, leading to
Eric's departure with Stan, an American who had initially been fascinated
by Elisa, and to Elisa's suicide. Both these films construct seductive fantasy
worlds which are ultimately unable to accommodate active, desiring young
women. In contrast, Nénette et Boni and Un frère, discussed below, use
location shooting to construct more realistically observed social worlds, set,
respectively in the Canet district of Marseilles and in Arcueil, a working-
class suburb of Paris. Whereas Clementine Tango and Jeux d'artifce feature
privileged bourgeois worlds from which the parents have disappeared, the
brother-sister relationships of Nénette et Boni and Un frère (like Les Amou-
reux) are articulated in relation to a problematic, infrequently glimpsed,
fragmented working-class family.
Claire Denis made her name with Chocolat (1988), a semi-
autobiographical film about growing up in Cameroon (discussed in chapter
9). She wrote and directed Nénette et Boni after making US Go Home
(1994) for Arte's drama series, Tous les garcons et les files de leur age, a
film about teenage brother-sister relationships whose principal actors also
42
GROWING UP
star in Nénette et Boni. The film is set in Marseilles and crosscuts restlessly
between its two main protagonists in an episodic narrative which is loosely
constructed around Nénette's pregnancy. Boni (Colin Grégoire) lives, signif-
icantly, in his (dead) mother's house, works in a pizza van, keeps a white
rabbit, and has masturbation fantasies about sex with the local baker's wife
(Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) which he entrusts to a diary (and a voice-over).
His fifteen-year-old sister Nénette (Alice Houri) escapes from boarding
school because she is pregnant, possibly by her father, and holes up with
her brother because she has nowhere else to go. The camera also alights on
other characters with no relevance to the narrative, like the man in the pre-
credit sequence selling fraudulent telephone cards or the Chinese woman
talking on the phone, and cuts to other narrative strands, notably the
dubious affairs of their estranged father and the relationship between the
baker's wife and her manic husband. However, the film is ultimately most
interested in the character of Boni, both in terms of the time it devotes to
his narrative, and because of the camera's lingering fascination with his
young, often semi-naked body.
Initially Boni resents Nénette's presence and there is little communication
between brother and sister. However, things change when Boni takes Né-
nette to the hospital, where she discovers that she is seven months pregnant
and cannot have an abortion, but can have the baby adopted at birth.
Nénette's pregnancy enables Boni to transfer his desires from the sensuous
body and cakes of the baker's wife on to Nénette's equally fascinating
rounded belly (an orgasmic scene shows Boni kneading his pizza dough
into a shape that resembles both breast and belly). The growing bond
between brother and sister, already suggested when Nénette is forced to
share Boni's mattress, is formalized by the doctor's assumption that Boni is
Nénette's husband. However, whereas Nénette is consistently determined to
have nothing to do with the baby, tries to provoke a miscarriage, and
refuses to hold the baby after the (excruciating) birth, Boni discovers a
desire for parenthood, dashes to the hospital, and kidnaps the baby at
gunpoint. The film ends ambiguously with crosscutting between Boni hold-
ing the baby, and Nénette sitting alone on a swing in the garden, her face
giving nothing away.
Nénette et Boni offers an interesting take on conventional gender roles,
allowing the male youth to progress from narcissistic fantasies to concern
for a new life, and the adolescent girl to express her horror of maternity
and the body (the confusion of gender is played out stylistically through
the film's use of pinks and blues, with Nénette mostly wearing blue while
Boni combines blue jeans with a pink shirt). It is, surprisingly, the only film
in the corpus to deal with the theme of an underage girl having an un-
wanted baby (though Marie Vermillard's Lila Lili, discussed in chapter 2,
43
PERSONAL FILMS
similarly uses a young woman's pregnancy as its structuring narrative de-

vice). However, unless it can be argued that Boni is capable of understand-
ing Nénette's repressed desires (a problematic notion), or that Nénette is
poised to adopt a fathering role, as suggested by Georgiana Colvile (1998),
the film's refusal to adopt Nénette's point of view and accept her right to
choose is disconcerting.
Un frère/Brother, a first feature by Sylvie Verheyde (born 1964), is also
concerned with the ups and downs in brother-sister relationships. Like
Nénette et Boni, it also focuses more on the brother than the sister, but
Emma de Caunes's award-winning performance as Sophie (she won the
1998 Cesar for most promising actress) means that the sister's role received
greater critical attention that it would otherwise have done. The narrative
follows the trajectory of Loie (Jeannick Gravelines), a nervy young fashion
photographer on the brink of success (his first exhibition), who is torn
between his working-class roots in Arcueil, represented by his junkie friend,
Tony, and girlfriend, Virginie, and his trendy, new bourgeois media contacts
in the city, particularly his promoter, Vincent (Nils Tavernier). Loie finds
the strains of success too hard to handle, and when Virginie commits
suicide after he puts an end to their relationship, he takes refuge in the
country with his grandmother. His collapse is exacerbated by his inability
to handle Tony's demands on him, and by his jealousy of the affair which
develops between his schoolgirl sister, whom he likes to protect, and Vin-
cent. Loi'c's trajectory is intercut with scenes which establish Sophie's need
to establish her autonomy from her brother, both through her relationships
with others (including Virginie) and through her gradual involvement in
Vincent's world. The film ends rather abruptly, with Sophie and Vincent
visiting Loie in the country, and Sophie, who has repeatedly rejected Loi'c's
clumsy attempts at physical intimacy, telling Loie that she misses him.
The strength of the film lies, stylistically, in its elliptical editing and its
energetic use of colour and rhythm. It provides an interesting portrayal of
a cool but sexy schoolgirl, who makes her own decisions and is more
successful in negotiating the transitions between suburb and city than her
older brother. But, though Sophie is portrayed as an attractive, quirky
young woman with a mind of her own, she is not a rebellious figure except
insofar as she decides to have underage sex. The film suggests that girls'
lives are still fundamentally determined by their relationships with men,
and draws uncritically on the principal theme of the child-woman films,
namely that desirable young girls experience nothing but pleasure in their
sexual initiation by older men (even if Sophie does fall asleep the first time
Vincent tries to make love to her).
Films about sister-brother relationships are more obviously addressed to
a mixed audience than films focusing uniquely on female characters. Both
44
GROWING UP
Denis and Verheyde center on a young man who finds the transition from
youth to adulthood difficult to manage and whose relationship with his
sister is symptomatic of a form of regression. But whereas Nénette et Boni
is marked by a refusal of conventional gender roles on the part of both
brother and sister, in Un frère the sister ultimately demonstrates her willing-
ness to be initiated into normative heterosexuality and adulthood.
The traumas of childhood
The final section in this chapter focuses on films with a contemporary

setting which center on the social and emotional problems of young chil-
dren, seen primarily from the child's point of view. In the four films consid-
ered here, Embrasse-moi (Michèle Rosier, 1989), L'Ombre du doute (Aline
Issermann, 1993), Le Fits du requin (Agnès Merlet, 1993), and Victor . . .
pendant quii est trop tard (Sandrine Veysset, 1998), children are con-
structed as the victims of fragmented or dysfunctional families from which
they are unable to escape.9 The theme of child neglect and sexual abuse is
also to be found in certain films about family relationships discussed in
chapter 3, particularly Rosine (Christine Carrière, 1995) and Y aura-t-il de
la neige à Noel? (Sandrine Veysset, 1996).10 Clearly child abuse has become
a more prominent theme of women's films in the 1990s and can be linked
with the 'retour du politique', even if the films themselves have not enjoyed
huge box office success.
Embrasse-moi/Kiss Me was the third feature film to be directed by Mich-
èle Rosier (born 1930), a former journalist who began her film career in
the 1970s with two feminist films, George qui? (1973), a portrait of George
Sand, and Mon coeur est rouge (1976), a day in the life of a politically
aware woman market researcher. After making documentaries for televi-
sion, Rosier returned to the cinema with a film which took three years to
prepare, but which undeservedly went virtually unnoticed at the time of its
release. Embrasse-moi takes as its topic the solitude of an eleven-year-old
girl who suffers from the indifference of her divorced parents. Louise (So-
phie Rochut) lives in a comfortable bourgeois apartment with her mother,
Nora (Dominique Valadié), a brilliant concert pianist who is often away on
tour, and occasionally sees her father (Patrick Chesnais), an industrialist
who is always too busy to pay her attention. The film is set in Paris during
the summer holiday that Louise spends alone, roller skating through the
streets and trying in vain to break through the egoism of the adults. Rosier,
herself the daughter of journalist Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, denied any au-
tobiographical influences, but felt she was representing a common child-
hood experience.
45
PERSONAL FILMS
Embrasse-moi develops through a series of small incidents which furnish

Louise's empty life. It begins with her trying on her mother's stage clothes,
reflected in a series of mirrors, and humorously mimicking her mother's
voice. It ends with a similar scene, signifying her recognition that, despite
what she has gone through (which includes running away from home and
attempting suicide), she will continue, sadly, to have to make do with her
own company. Nora, a beautiful and sensuous woman, is obsessed with
her music and oblivious to her daughter's needs, bestowing her affection
instead on her new, young lover, Helmut, a German saxophone player.
Although Louise at first tries to adjust to the situation (a shot from her
point of view calmly pans along Helmut's naked, sleeping body), she also
looks to others for consolation. But her busy father fails to understand her
plea for help, her grandmother is distracted by her card games, her girl-
friend does not understand why she is so unhappy, and she finds comfort
only among strangers in the street, first a fortune-teller (Anouk Grinberg),
then a war photographer who has to return home to La Rochelle.11 Even
after her suicide attempt, her parents' attention falls short of the affection
Louise craves, and while she observes and judges them, she is forced to
realize that she cannot change them.
Rosier's study of an unhappy childhood is unsentimental, calm and mea-
sured, filmed like a reportage with no need for special effects, apart from
the occasional use of an evocative jazz accompaniment. It is sensitive to
and respectful of the emotional needs of a bright and intelligent but lonely
and unloved little girl, but does not indulge in a diatribe against the short-
comings of the parents. The result is a restrained but moving portrayal of a
child moving from childhood to adolescence without the support of a
loving family.
Aline Issermann had already made four feature films when she turned to
the controversial topic of incest in L'Ombre du doute/Shadow of a Doubt.12
(Her first two films, Le Destiti de Juliette and UAmant magnifique, are
discussed in chapter 3.) She spent two years researching the topic and co-
authored the screenplay with two therapists to authenticate her material.
She wanted to bring incest to the attention of the film-going public and, in
particular, to persuade spectators that reporting incest could be effective.
The taboo nature of the topic meant that she was refused the avance sur
recettes (the advance on box office returns) and had difficulty not only in
getting funding but also in casting the role of the abusive father (eventually
played by actor-singer Alain Bashung). The film subsequently suffered from
poor distribution and a lukewarm critical reception, though arguably this
was due not just to its exposure of incest but also to its structure, which
shifts from a focus on the fears and fantasies of eleven-year-old Alexandrine
46
GROWING UP
(Sandrine Blancke) to a more schematic, didactic narrative in which the

father is brought to justice (Tarr, 1998).
The film chooses to locate the issue of incest within an apparently re-
spectable middle-class family and begins with a scene of a family picnic
which creates a distinct sense of unease. Tracking shots of Alexandrine
playing with her little brother Pierre (played by Issermann's son, Luis) are
interrupted by the arrival of their father, Jean, wielding a video camera
with which he 'captures' his daughter, the film crosscutting between shots
of Jean and shots of Alexandrine running away from him. The sense of
something amiss is confirmed when Jean grabs at his daughter's upper arm,
and again when Marie, the mother (Mireille Perder), refuses to recognize
that Alexandrine's refusal to eat might be significant. It comes to a head
when Alexandrine's schoolteacher notices how she has rewritten the story
of Feau d'àne/Donkey skin, imagining that the fairytale princess fails to
escape her father's obsession with her and falls to her death in the thick,
black water of the moat. Thanks to the teacher's intervention, a series of
officials become involved in helping Alexandrine (including a sympathetic
social worker played by Josiane Balasko) and Jean, rather unconvincingly,
eventually breaks down and recognizes his guilt.
The strongest parts of the film are those which encourage the spectator
to engage with Alexandrine's point of view, sharing her dread of seeing her
father's shadow at her bedroom door and the fantasies by which she seeks
to escape his reach (like imagining herself as a bird trying to wing its way
to freedom). The construction of the mother is more problematic, for her
unquestioning belief in her husband's innocence and her coldness towards
her daughter is such that, even after Jean is apprehended, she continues to
provide opportunities for him to abuse Alexandrine (a crime for which she
later receives a suspended sentence). After the judge has ordered family
therapy, the mother's attitude is seen to be attributable to the lack of love
which she had herself endured as the child of unloving bourgeois parents.
However, the film is less interested in understanding and sympathizing with
her position than it is with the father, who, like Alexandrine, is linked with
the imagery of birds (Jean identifies with his namesake, the jean-le-blanc, a
type of eagle) and recovers memories of being sexually abused by his own
father as a child. Furthermore, the film provides an unconvincing 'happy
ending' by showing the (all male) forces of law and order (policeman,
lawyer and judge) to be entirely on Alexandrine's side in getting the father
brought to trial. In the process, it not only marginalizes Alexandrine's role
but fails to acknowledge the contradictions of a situation in which the child
depends on the patriarchal forces of the law to protect her from the violence
of the patriarchal family.
47
PERSONAL FILMS
Alexandrine (Sandrine Blancke) dreads the appearance of her father in

L'Ombre du doute (1993). Supplied by and reproduced with permission
from the Ronald Grant Archive.
L'Ombre du doute ends optimistically with Alexandrine apparently able

to enjoy life again. The prospects for the young protagonists of Le Fils du
requin/The Son of the Shark are somewhat bleaker. Le Fils du requin was
the first full-length feature to be directed by IDHEC graduate Agnès Merlet
(born 1959), who had made a number of short films in the 1980s. Based
on a fait divers, its study of two delinquent runaway boys, shown at Cannes
in 1993, was well received by French critics and (again) likened to Truf-
faut's Les 400 coups. (In fact, Les 400 coups is directly quoted in a scene
in which the camera focuses on a boy's face as he lies to the psychiatrist
about having had sex with a girl.) Shot at child's eye level, the film follows
the trajectory of two motherless street urchins, Martin, aged fourteen, and
Simon, aged twelve, played by two working-class boys, Ludovic Vanden-
daele and Erick Da Silva. However, rather than locate the antics of her
youthful protagonists within a starkly realist mise-en-scène, Merlet invests
her topic with a poetic resonance through beautiful photography of the
bleak Northern seaside town and surrounding countryside, self-conscious
camerawork, and allusions to the poetry of Lautréamont. Martin's voice-
over explains his belief that he is 'the son of the shark' of the title and the
film is repeatedly punctuated with insert shots of his visions of shoals of
48
GROWING UP
fish, providing a metaphor of escape from his predicament similar to the

theme of the birds of prey in UOmbre du doute.
The narrative of Le Fils du requin traces the lives of the two brothers
over a period of months. Having run away from their violent, alcoholic
father (their mother has already disappeared), they wreak havoc on their
hometown and evade the various agents of the state who try to have them
institutionalized. The film opens with the sounds of the boys stealing a bus,
which they then gleefully drive over a cliff, and recurrent sequences show
them stealing from local tradesmen, trashing shops and vandalizing the
streets. People willing to help them are met with abuse, for the boys them-
selves have been abused to the point that they are unable to give or receive
help or love. The film is sympathetic to their situation as, homeless and
unloved, they sleep rough, in an empty train carriage or a wrecked boat,
and get attacked by a gang of youths or by outraged townsfolk willing to
set a dog on them. However, their inability to relate to others takes a more
unpleasant turn when Martin becomes obsessed with a young girl, Marie
(played by Sandrine Blancke, the star of UOmbre du doute)^ and tries,
unsuccessfully, to take her into the sea with him. In an attempt to regain
his brother's affection, Simon captures Marie at knifepoint and forces her
to strip, paralleling an earlier moment when the boys force Marie's friend
to undress for them. This scene problematically exposes the young girl
protagonist not just to the violence and insensitivity of the boys, but also
to a voyeuristic camera. However Martin refuses the gift and gets knifed in
the thigh in a fight with his brother. The film ends with a shot of the boys
on the quayside, looking at a boat about to leave, following horrific shots
of fish being beheaded (intercut with shots of Depardieu being guillotined
in Wajda's Danton). Though the fishmonger says the fish do not suffer,
Martin, who identifies with them, suggests from his expression that they
do.
Merlet's film is set, unusually, in the North of France, and is associated
with the emergence of 'le jeune cinema francais'. It was one of the first to
address the topic of social exclusion, vividly drawing attention in this
instance to the problem of juvenile delinquents who lack the basic elements
of a satisfactory home life and who cannot be adequately dealt with by
society. It does so without either demonizing the boys or turning them into
victims, dwelling instead on their exuberance and desire for freedom.
A problematic childhood is also the topic of Sandrine Veysset's first
immensely successful feature film, Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noel?, a study
of the harsh life endured by a mother and her seven children living on a
farm in the south of France in the 1970s (discussed in chapter 4). Her
second film, Victor. . . pendant qu'il est trop tard/Victor. . . While It's Too
49
PERSONAL FILMS
Late, is set in the city and lacks the autobiographical resonance of Y aura-
t-il de la neige. However, it draws on similar themes, exploring the effects
of parental abuse on a young boy, Victor (Jeremy Chaix, who played Paul
in Y aura-t-il de la neige). Victor runs away from home and falls asleep
in a plane on a merry-go-round run by Mick and his eccentric mother.
Mick takes him to stay with a young woman prostitute, Triche (Lydia
Andrei), who also comes from an abusive background, and the two grad-
ually strike up an affectionate relationship based on the sharing of their
fears. The damage done to Victor is hinted at obliquely rather than ex-
pressed directly, linked in the opening sequence to his parents' perverse
sexual pleasures and reworked later in scenes representing his nightmares
and in his dressing up in female clothing to play. When Triche explains
how her sister was beaten and raped by her father and committed suicide
as a result, Victor reacts by cutting the image of the father out of Triche's
family photographs. His presence eventually enables Triche to free herself
from the past, burning her photographs, getting rid of her caged white
mice, refusing to carry on working as a prostitute and accepting the cou-
ple she forms with Mick.
The film derives a poetic quality from the mise-en-scène of Triche's home
and the magic atmosphere of the fairground, which is further enhanced at
the end of the film by the falling of snow (as in Y aura-t-il de la neige), as
the young couple and the boy play together. Even if, as the title indicates,
it is too late to save Victor from psychological damage and, realistically,
the couple will not be able to keep him (the police presence at the fair-
ground implicitly threatens their future happiness), the film still offers a
moment of respite and affection shared by children and young people from
the margins who have refused to join the normative adult world.
These four films expose the inadequacies of family life (rather than the
inadequacies of a society which produces such families) and invite audi-
ences to identify with the predicaments of abused children, be it young girls
trapped and isolated within dysfunctional middle-class families, or young
boys who run away from their deprived violent home backgrounds. (The
gender and class distinctions point to difficulties in imagining and repre-
senting the plight of young girls from abusive working-class backgrounds.)
Each of these films highlights the failure of parents to nurture their off-
spring and points the finger not only at violent, drunken and abusive
fathers, but also at neglectful, absent and abusive mothers. Indeed, the only
characters able to 'mother' the anguished child are childless women like the
social worker in L'Ombre du doute and the prostitute in Victor . . . pendant
quii est trop tard.u
50
GROWING UP
Conclusion
The large numbers of films about childhood and adolescence make this a
key theme in women's filmmaking, even if few of the films addressed here
actually enjoyed significant box office success (the exceptions being Rouge
Baiser and La Baule Les Pins, both of which received international distri-
bution). Period films about growing up offer empowering narratives for
female spectators in which rebellious young women challenge their families
and mark out a path towards autonomy; they also, in most cases, represent
the possibility of either female friendships or some sort of closeness with
the mother. However, films set in the present which focus on the adolescent
girl's trajectory towards 'becoming a w o m a n ' tend to reproduce a more
conventional narrative according to which the protagonist discovers her
sexuality by being initiated by an older man. These films rarely question
normative heterosexuality as a desirable goal (the expression of lesbian
desire in Le Cahier volé being both exceptional and doomed). At the same
time, they still d r a w on feminist-influenced discourses by constructing the
teenage girl as a sexual subject w h o discovers her power to attract and
manipulate men, and w h o uses it as a way of escaping her unsupportive
family and so being actively in control of her life. This is the case even
when the girl's sexual experiences are represented as a w k w a r d and unsatis-
factory, as in the more critically acclaimed 36 Villette and La Vie ne me fait
pas peur (though in Nénette et Boni the adolescent's relationship to her
sexuality is more problematic). The critique of family life implicit within
many of these films is taken further in films of the 1990s, which focus on
children w h o are subject to neglect and abuse within the modern dysfunc-
tional family. Arguably, these films are indicative of women filmmakers'
ongoing identification with marginalized others within French society, a
theme that surfaces in other sections of the book.
Notes
1. Un été d'orages, an adaptation of Pierre-Jean Rémy's novel Le Dernier été, set

in 1944, involves the rivalry between an adolescent youth and a young English
airman for the love of the youth's young cousin. Péché véniel, péché mortel
involves pedophilia and the sexual awakening of an eleven year old girl and is
set in a small French town at the end of the War. Neither film was available for
viewing.
2. Martine Dugowson's Mina Tannenbaum (1994) follows its childhood protago-
nists through to adulthood and is discussed in chaper 2. Sandrine Veysset's Y
aura-t-il de la neige à Noèl? (1996) and Christine Carrière's Qui plume la
51
PERSONAL FILMS
luneì (1999) evoke past childhoods in the context of a wider evocation of

family relationships, and are discussed in chapter 4.
3. Gilda is also a model for Ethel in Mina Tannenbaum (Martine Dugowson,
1994) discussed in chapter 2.
4. The continuing fascination in the 1990s with the period reconstruction of child-
hood and adolescence is clear from the series of television films commissioned
by Arte in 1994 under the umbrella title, Tous les gar cons et les filles de leur
age (see Padis, 1996), which specifically addresses the theme of adolescence
during different decades of the postwar period, told from the point of view of
the adolescents concerned and, to give the films a further common focus, involv-
ing the representation of a teenage party. The series includes films by Chantal
Akerman (Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60, a Bruxelles), Emilie
Deleuze (LTncruste), Claire Denis (US Go Home) and Patricia Mazuy (Travolta
et moi), none of which received a theatrical release (unlike André Téchiné's Les
Roseaux sauvages, for example).
5. Catherine Breillat's Une vraie jeune fille, made in 1976 and based on her novel
about an adolescent's sexual awakening, was not distributed because the pro-
ducer went bankrupt. Shown in 1999, in the wake of Romance, and released in
2000, it provides a shockingly brutal and disturbing exploration of the agonies
and ecstasies of adolescent female sexuality.
6. Les Jeux de la Comtesse Dolingen de Gratz (Catherine Binet, 1982), a self-
conscious art film, includes an episode in which a young girl commits suicide
when her desire for a beautiful Argentinian man is frustrated.
7. Dormez, je le veux, Jouannet's adaptation of Marie Nimier's novel, UHypnose
a la portée de tous, also traces the sexual awakening of an intelligent teenage
schoolgirl, Cora (Celine Milliat-Baumgartner), who falls for a fascinating older
man and happily consummates the (illegal, unequal) relationship. In this film,
the central character develops powers as a hypnotist, which she later relin-
quishes.
8. The theme of a young girl's desire to lose her virginity is also the topic of the
award-winning La Puce (1999), a medium-length film directed by FEMIS grad-
uate Emmanuelle Bercot, and of Caroline Vignal's first feature, Les Autres filles
(2000). In La Puce, Bercot, like Breillat, concentrates on the way the 14-year-
old girl (Isild Le Besco) seduces, manipulates and disorientates the (older) man
(Olivier Marchal), rather than shooting the girl from the man's point of view.
9. Two other films of the 1980s, not discussed here, address how children cope
with their parents' absence, namely Premier voyage (Nadine Trintignant, 1980)
and Papa est parti, maman aussi (Christine Lipinska, 1989).
10. Mention might also be made of Marion Hansel's Les Noces barbares (1987),
based on a Goncourt prize-winning novel by Yann Queffelec, a horrific drama
about a rape victim and her abuse of her unwanted son. Catherine
52
GROWING UP
Corsini's television film, Interdit d'amour (1993), starring Nathalie Richard,

also focuses on a mother's cruelty to her unwanted child.
11. Louise's wandering through Paris recalls that of Cléo in Agnès Varda's Cléo de
5*7(1962).
12. The topic of incest is also central to Lou Jeunet's television film, La Fille préférée
(2000), shown in the M6 series 'Combats de Femmes', in which an adult
daughter recovers memories of being sexually abused by her father.
13. Similarly in Isabel Sebastian's La Contre-allée (1991), a local prostitute becomes
a surrogate mother for a lonely little middle-class girl.
53
CHAPTER TWO
The Age of Possibilities
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir highlighted young women's strug-

gle to find a place in society on leaving home, noting how few alternatives
there were to the reproduction of the heterosexual family unit. Her analysis
emphasized how conflict between a young woman's aspirations for auton-
omy and society's expectations with regard to female sexuality and feminine
gender roles could lead to contradictions in young women's attitudes and
behavior. Even though the nature of the period between adolescence and
adulthood has been greatly affected by social and economic changes over
the last fifty years, many of Beauvoir's concerns are still valid. Women of
the 'baby boom' generation, who benefited from the thirty years of postwar
economic prosperity and participated in the social and cultural upheavals
of May 1968 and the women's movement, may have challenged the notion
of women's destiny as wife and mother and prioritized the desirability of
women's financial, sexual and emotional autonomy. But their daughters
born in the 1960s and 1970s, the 'orphans' of the 'trente glorieuses'
(Mayol, 1996), inhabit a society marked by the supposed death of feminism
and the long-term effects of the mid-1970s economic crisis in Western
Europe, high unemployment, social divisions, moral uncertainties and,
since the mid-1980s, AIDS. The representation of the dilemmas and anxie-
ties of this generation of young women at what Pascale Ferran has termed,
in her film of the same name, 'the age of possibilities', is the main focus of
this chapter.
In the 1970s, mainstream representations of young women as the sexual
objects of male desire and 'the male gaze' were challenged in films by
women which constructed complex, autonomous female characters unwill-
ing or unable to be contained within the conventional couple and anxious
to explore their own subjectivity and sexuality. In Nelly Kaplan's La Fian-
cee du pirate (1969), the joyfully anarchic Marie (Bernadette Lafont) uses
her sexuality to expose society's hypocrisy and claim her independence. In
54
T H E A G E OF POSSIBILITIES
Agnès Varda's L'Une chante, Vautre pas (1976), Pomme (Valerie Mairesse)
cheerfully negotiates an independent sexual and professional trajectory. In
neither case is the openly sexual, independent young woman punished for
her sexual transgressions. However, other women's films examined the
damaging effects of patriarchal oppression on female sexuality. In Catherine
Breillat's Tapage nocturne (1979), the adventures of the apparently liber-
ated heroine, herself a filmmaker, plumb the depths of female masochism,
while Christine Pascal's Felicitò (1979) also focuses on a woman's maso-
chistic sexuality (tracing its origins to her childhood and family relation-
ships). These two films highlight a central problematic of many women's
films, namely the contradiction between a continuing desire for (and plea-
sure in) relationships with men, and an awareness that those relationships
may also be transitory or experienced as demeaning and destructive.
Whereas feminist-influenced films of the 1970s interrogated women's
destiny as wives and mothers, constructed their female heroines as sexual
subjects and questioned the centrality and significance of women's relation-
ships with men, the early years of the 1980s, influenced by the 'cinema du
look', were characterized by a fascination with sexual ambiguity, not nec-
essarily expressed from a female point of view. Films such as Regine Des-
forges's Contes pervers (1980), Caroline Roboh's Clementine tango (1983)
and Dominique Crèvecoeur's Contes clandestins (1985) exemplify this
trend by 'taking on soft-core eroticism and androgyny, neatly combining
"post-feminist" attitudes to gender with a certain sexual explicitness' (Gi-
nette Vincendeau, 1987: 15). At the same time, mainstream French cinema
continued to construct young women in and through their relationships
with men, either as the enigmatic, fetishized objects of male desire or as the
embodiments of excessive, masochistic passion, experienced from a male
point of view. Typically, top box office star Isabelle Adjani is regularly cast
as a passionate young woman on the verge of madness (as in Francois
Truffaut's UHistoire d'Adele H, 1975, Jean Becker's UEté meurtrier, 1983,
Claude Miller's Mortelle randonnée, 1983, and Bruno Nuytten's Camille
Claudel, 1988). Similarly, Beatrice Dalle's Betty in 37°2 le matin/Betty Blue
(Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986) and Romane Bohringer's Laura in Les Nuits
fauves (Cyril Collard, 1992) associate female sexuality with disruption,
hysteria and loss of control (Tarr, 1999b).
A more specifically woman-centered exploration of the consequences for
young women of their liberation from earlier sexual norms is to be found
in two women's films of the 1980s, Marie-Claude Treilhou's Simone Barbès
ou la vertu (1980) and Virginie Thévenet's La Nuit porte jarretelles (1985),
discussed below. However, the 1990s have seen the emergence of a series of
films identified with 'le jeune cinema franâis', directed by young women
of the Mitterrand generation (those who voted for the first time in 1981),
55
PERSONAL FILMS
which focus on the unsettled lives of young women, often in their twenties
or early thirties (the same age as the filmmakers themselves). These films
are concerned less with exploring female sexuality and sexual difference
than with articulating young women's more generalized fears and anxieties
about their place in the world. Their reworking of the female Bildungsro-
man does not focus on young women settling down but rather shows a
concern with women's marginality, documenting the dilemmas and uncer-
tainties of young women without permanent jobs or relationships. In par-
ticular they illustrate women's difficulties in finding a place in society
through their disturbing representation of social spaces (spaces which are
not often represented in mainstream French cinema), where women's mo-
bility and independence does not guarantee them any sort of fulfillment.
Although most of these films have had limited success at the box office,
they have been well received critically because of their innovative stylistic
qualities. Like women's growing up films, they are also of particular interest
to a female audience. They are categorized here, first according to their use
of space and location, namely, Paris, the provinces and the banlieue (the
multi-ethnic working class city suburbs), then according to particular
themes, specifically the peer group, female friendship and maternity (the
latter being themes with a particular resonance for female spectators).
Out and about in Paris
Women in film are conventionally confined to domestic spaces and 'pun-

ished' for straying far from home except in the company of men. An early
model of a young woman who asserts her right to walk the streets of Paris
is to be found in Agnès Varda's classic woman's film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962),
where the heroine's encounters with others enable her, momentarily at least,
to overcome her fears about cancer, stop thinking about herself and start
thinking and caring about someone else. Clearly, the city of Paris can be
represented in a variety of ways, the topos for excitement, romance, liber-
ation, anonymity, or despair. In Marie-Claude Treilhou's Simone Barbès ou
la vertu (1980) and Virginie Thévenet's La Nuit porte jarretelles (1985), it
provides the location for young women's reclamation of the streets at night
but also, more problematically, for an examination of the sex industry and
how it impacts on their lives. In films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it
serves rather as the location for representations of young women's crises in
and indecisions about their unsatisfactory relationships with men, as in
Patricia Bardon's U Homme imagine (1989), Francesca Comencini's Anna-
belle partagée (1991) and Sophie Fillières's Grande petite (1994).1 The use
of geographical displacements within the city to exemplify women's restless
56
inability to find a place for themselves is best exemplified in Laurence

Ferreira-Barbosa's Les Gens normaux n'ont Hen d'exceptionnel (1993) and
Noémie Lvovsky's Oublie-moi (1995), both of which star Valeria Bruni-
Tedeschi (winner of the Cesar for most promising actress for her role in Les
Gens normaux).1
Simone Barbès ou la vertu/Simone Barbès or Virtue was the first feature
to be directed by Marie-Claude Treilhou (born 1948), who lived through
the events of May 1968 and was a Communist Party activist before begin-
ning her career within the film industry as an editor and continuity girl.
During a period of unemployment she took a job as an usherette in a porn
cinema, and was inspired by a woman she worked with to write her first
film script. The resulting film was shot on a shoestring budget with a group
of friends, and centers on the experiences of a young woman in the course
of a night spent in central Paris. It is divided into three distinct sections,
held together by the presence of the eponymous heroine (Ingrid Bourgoin).
The first is set in the hall of a porn cinema in Montparnasse where she
works as an usherette, the second in a lesbian nightclub where she waits
for her waitress girlfriend, and the third in a Volvo belonging to a passing
stranger, which she drives through the streets of Paris back to her home in
the suburbs just as dawn is breaking.
The film's first section seems to be providing a critical comment on the
sleazy world of male-oriented pornography and the men who frequent it.
In the yellow-lit space outside the two auditoria, the shifty, unpleasant-
looking males contrast with the two attractive young usherettes who take
their tickets and tips but otherwise ignore them, or else respond to them
with insults, ridicule and put-downs. (The scene in which they deride a
caricaturai Belgian porn director who expresses shock at the viewing con-
ditions in which his 'work of art' is being shown is particularly gratifying.)
The women's conversation takes place with some difficulty over the noisy
soundtracks of the films, and at one point Simone screams out in protest at
the stench in the cinema, and maliciously goes off to spray the auditorium
(though without managing to disturb the clients' concentration). The film
expresses the women's isolation through the emptiness of the mise-en-scène,
long takes and desultory silences, punctuated only occasionally by moments
of human contact with one or two of the more sympathetic, lonely punters
who frequent their space.
The construction of a more feminine world in the film's second section is
little more cheerful. The lesbian night club, bathed in red light, provides
live entertainment for its clientèle, but the cabaret acts fail to generate much
animation, even when Josse sings 'I am a man-girl' ('une nana-mec'). Close
ups of individual women show that the forced conviviality is unable to
redress their solitude. Simone has a desultory conversation with the bar-
57
PERSONAL FILMS
man, a waitress tries to sell her a cooker, her girlfriend goes off with a man
and, as she leaves, the (male) bouncer is stabbed and falls back into the
club, dead. The theme of solitude is confirmed by the final section in which
an old man with a false moustache, whom Simone nicknames the Baron,
tries to pick her up and ends up being driven by her through the streets of
Paris, in the blue light of the night. It is Simone who leads the conversation,
invites him for a drink (though nowhere is open), thwarts his attempt to
make their encounter a sexual one, tells him a joke, and expresses her sense
of the sadness of life.
The film evokes a sense of alienation, but combines it with the portrait
of a tremendously resilient young, working-class woman, whose Parisian
drawl and pointed language justify comparisons with Arletty. While the
Baron is quiet, passive and lachrymose, Simone is courageous and compas-
sionate, even though she, too, is suffering from lack of love. Her virtue is
that she knows how to hang on to her sense of self, even amidst the
economic, sexual and emotional misery evidenced in her night-time experi-
ences of Paris.
La Nuit porte jarretelles/The Night Wears Garters provides a very differ-
ent picture of Paris by night. It was directed by Virginie Thévenet (born
1957), who started her career in the cinema playing a young girl in the film
adaptation of Christiane Rochefort's feminist novel, Les Stances à Sophie
(Moshe Mizrahi, 1970). After working as a writer, painter, designer and
actress (including in Truffaut's L'Argent de poche and Rohmer's Les Nuits
de la pleine lune), she started writing a screenplay based on the lives of
young people around her. Her application for the avance sur recettes was
rejected twice, but she managed to finance the film herself, using a network
of friends. She also wrote the title song, which was used to market the film.
Its untranslatable title is a clever pun on the French proverb 'la nuit porte
conseiP, meaning 'sleep on it', and the word for garter, with its promise of
sexual teasing.
La Nuit porte jarretelles focuses on 24 hours in the life of sexy, liberated
Jezabel (Jezabel Carpi), a young woman in her twenties who works as a
market researcher. It begins with Jezabel asking men in the street, 'Are you
heterosexual, homosexual, both, neither, don't know? And how do you rate
yourself sexually?' The men's varied, often comical, sometimes violent re-
actions to her questioning indicate how transgressive it can be for a young
woman to take the initiative in sexual matters. Later, at a dinner party in the
company of an androgynous-looking girlfriend, she meets naive seventeen-
year-old Ariel (Ariel Genet), who is clearly ill at ease with his sexuality, and
takes him under her wing. After exposing his sexual inexperience (they try
to make love back at her flat), Jezabel takes him (and the spectator) on a
journey of initiation into the red light districts of Paris, exploring sex shops
58
and peep shows in the Saint-Denis area, strip joints in Pigalle and prostitu-
tion in the Bois de Boulogne. At the end of the night, the young man has
lost his virginity, his purse and his naivete, while Jezabel has demonstrated
her superior knowledge of life and her unstoppable joie de vivre.
JézabePs open-minded, uninhibited attitude towards sex and sexuality
does not distinguish between 'free love' and sex which is for sale. While
quiet, passive Ariel speculates on the importance of honesty in love, outspo-
ken, energetic Jezabel asserts the over-riding importance of good sex. Tak-
ing for granted the pleasures of sexual arousal at the sight of the eroticized
female body, she both displays her own body for Ariel to gaze at (she does
a striptease and purchases sexy underwear in a sex shop) and takes Ariel
out to contemplate the bodies of others: at a peep show (where she com-
plains at the limited time they get for their money), a strip tease (where she
is clearly turned on by the sensuous movements of the glamorous but aging
female stripper), gazing at prostitutes in the Bois de Boulogne, or watching
a porn movie. What is interesting, though, is that Ariel is ultimately unable
to satisfy her desire for sex or for vicarious sexual adventure (he refuses to
try out gay sex with her market research manager as she had hoped), and
in the light of day Jezabel simply dismisses him. The film thus sets up and
maintains a split between (negative) male passivity and indifference and
(positive) female energy and desire (and by so doing reworks the connota-
tions of the names Ariel and Jezabel).
When the film first appeared, its erotic displays, influenced by the 'cinema
du look', were seen to be treading the borderline between eroticism and
pornography. Unusually, however, they are mediated through the narrative
agency and controlling point of view of an exceptionally self-confident,
uninhibited young woman, whose interactive female gaze prevents the fe-
male body from being fetishized for male spectatorial pleasures. Further-
more, Jézabel's sympathetic, nonjudgmental attitude towards the sex
workers emphasizes their humanity (as when she gives a beautiful transves-
tite prostitute a lift back into Paris). Indeed, the film's refusal to espouse
early feminist criticism of the exploitation of women's bodies in the sex
industry can be seen in retrospect to prefigure later debates which construct
women's roles as sex workers as potentially empowering. It is also notable,
however, that its smorgasbord of sexual possibilities does not include spec-
tacles or activities aimed specifically at women.
The films of the 1990s considered here transfer the action from central
Paris to the periphery and focus less on the heroine's encounters with the
outside world than with the inner psychological consequences of the break-
up of a (heterosexual) relationship, expressed through her problematic
relationship with her environment. Les Gens normaux n'ont rien
d'exceptionnel/There's Nothing Exceptional About Normal People, the
59
PERSONAL FILMS
first feature to be directed by Laurence Ferreira Barbosa (born 1958), won

a number of awards, including the Prix Georges Sadoul. Ferreira-Barbosa
had studied film at Paris VIII University, made three award-winning short
films in the 1980s, and worked as an assistant director, on Michèle Rosier's
Embrasse-moi, among others. Les Gens normaux centers on Martine
(Bruni-Tedeschi), who has been inexplicably dumped by her boyfriend,
Francois, but more generally, has 'a problem with existence'. In the pre-
credit sequence, a dishevelled looking Martine, alone in the street, accosts
a stranger for a light, then throws away her cigarette as she gazes out over
the canal, a tear trickling down her face. Her desperation is confirmed in
scenes which show her getting hysterical at work (in telephone sales) with
a client to whom she is trying to sell a new bathroom, and screaming at an
obliging colleague, Jean (Frederic Diefenthal), with whom she has just spent
the night. After an unsuccessful confrontation with Francois and his new
girlfriend, Florence (Sandrine Kiberlain), the rapid movements of the hand-
held camera emphasizing her manic behavior, she starts screaming word-
lessly in the street and then slams her head against a shop window in
despair, leading to a black-out and amnesia. The rest of the narrative is
concerned primarily with her reactions to the staff and inmates of the
psychiatric hospital where she is taken for treatment. She refuses to con-
front her own problems (she gets angry with the doctor, her father and her
sister for raising the question of what she should be doing with her life) but
tries instead to sort out the problems of others, until she is eventually forced
to leave.
Martine is troubled by her inability to know who she is, symbolized by
her amnesia and demonstrated through her endless questioning of others
about herself. She is constantly on the move, repeatedly crossing the bound-
aries between hospital and outside world, regression and adulthood, unable
to find a place for herself (even her hospital bed is occupied by someone
else). The film uses her condition to explore the boundary between 'mad-
ness' and normality, suggesting, as the title indicates, that the difference
between those inside and those outside the hospital may be just a question
of degree. Martine's failed relationship and her vain attempts to organize
the love lives of the other solitary, mentally ill inmates, particularly Anne
and Pierre, are matched by the difficulties in forming or sustaining relation-
ships experienced by Francois, Jean, Pierre's brother, Martine's sister and
her husband, and the youth Anne fantasizes as her boyfriend, Germain
(Melvin Poupaud), who lives alone and has no relationship with anyone
else. The film underlines the desolation of their lives through the mise-en-
scène, which makes little distinction between the corridors and interior
spaces of the hospital and the gloomily lit streets and impersonal parks and
tower blocks at the periphery of the city. Their inability to communicate is
60
Martine (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) has difficulty communicating in Les Gens

normaux nont rien d'exceptionnel (1993). Supplied by and reproduced
with permission from Pierre Grise Distribution.
further signaled by the way the characters are positioned within the frame,
such that they are rarely centered or engaged with one another.
By the end of the film, after she has at last managed to get Francois to
talk to her about what she was like in their relationship and expressed her
regret at being so submissive, Martine is at last ready to go home. However,
the ambiguous final sequence shows her refusing to admit Germain, who is
hammering on the door as she herself has done previously. The film ends
on a long take of her sitting on the bed, momentarily still, but smiling and
laughing hysterically. A final brief close up of her face, sometime later,
shows her still in the same position. It is far from certain, then, that her
condition has been 'cured'. Bruni-Tedeschi delivers an extraordinary perfor-
mance as Martine, a character who would normally be an 'emmerdeuse' (a
troublemaker), egoistic, interfering and obstinate. Deploying brusque, dart-
ing physical movements and sudden changes of mood, she invests the role
with charm and grace, making Martine both a pushy and a fragile charac-
ter, so that the spectator is fascinated instead of being repelled. The film
also manages to suggest that she is not an individual case, but rather typifies
predicaments facing young people in the 1990s.
Oublie-moi/Forget Me, co-written with Sophie Fillières, was the first
feature by Noémie Lvovsky (born 1964), a FEMIS graduate who had
61
PERSONAL FILMS
already made a couple of shorts (including the award-winning Dis-moi oui,

dis-moi non, 1990, also starring Bruni-Tedeschi) and had contributed to
films directed by Arnaud Desplechin. Set in a Paris of railway lines and
night time settings, it centers on the self-destructive behavior of Nathalie
(Bruni-Tedeschi) who is unable to understand and accept that she has been
rejected by Eric (Laurent Grevill). She alienates those who care for her,
including Antoine (Emmanuel Salinger), who loves her, and Christelle
(Emanuelle Desvos), her one and only girlfriend, whose gloomy boyfriend
Fabrice (Philippe Torreton) she sets out (unsuccessfully) to seduce. The film
focuses almost exclusively on Nathalie from the opening pre-credit se-
quence of her dancing with Christelle (her strange, awkward hand and
finger movements pointing to her problematic relationship with her body),
to the ambiguous final scene when she attempts to phone Antoine from a
call box and finds herself making contact with a new man in his place
(although, as Lvovsky argues, the man might actually be Antoine himself).
Like Les Gens normaux, Oublie-moi provides another visually compel-
ling picture of a young woman's difficulty in establishing relationships and
finding her place in the world. Nathalie's own flat is never shown, she is
always shot outside or in other people's flats, most of the time in settings
which reinforce and symbolize her feelings of exclusion. The hand-held
camera follows her endless wandering in the gloomy, artificially lit corridors
of the underground, travelling around in various cars, buses and trains, and
knocking on or kicking at the doors of various houses and flats which
remain closed to her most of the time (including her mother's flat which
she visits as a last resort). The film pessimistically portrays the lack of
communication between people despite the emphasis on telephone calls and
the importance given to dialogue, and the lack of self-confidence which
leads the characters to sustain unfulfilling relationships. Nathalie, like Mar-
tine, is completely lacking in self-esteem and is constantly questioning oth-
ers about herself (even when she is having sex with a stranger in the gents).
Scenes of Nathalie in bed with Antoine or Fabrice do not show them having
sex, but rather express the sadness and absence of love in their lives, the
coldness and distance between their bodies emphasized by the choice of
white lighting. The emptiness of their existence is further intensified by the
intrusive, often discordant musical soundtrack (which includes Lou Reed
singing 'There is no time').
There is a marked difference between the (relatively) self-confident hero-
ines of the early 1980s and the neurotic, alienated heroines of the 1990s,
exemplified in the way in which they occupy the spaces of the city. Simone
of Simone Barbès and Jézabel of La Nuit porte jarretelles may experience
isolation, solitude and disappointment, but they walk the streets without
fear and remain in control of the situations in which they find themselves,
62
able to use language to comment on, attack or ridicule others. They may
not enjoy satisfactory personal relationships, but they do not experience
their own sexuality as problematic, and they respond to the world and
those around them on their own terms (with exuberant enthusiasm in the
case of Thévenet's Jézabel). In Les Gens normaux and Oublie-moi, how-
ever, young women seem to have lost control of their lives, their body
movements are awkward and diffident, their language is questioning and
hesitant, and they lack confidence in their attractiveness and powers of
seduction. Significantly, the Paris they frequent is no longer the familiar
Paris by night, but an anonymous, impersonal gray Paris closer to the
periphery.
Young women in the provinces
One of the characteristics of 'le jeune cinema franc,ais' has been the focus
on more realistic, working-class settings and concerns, accompanied by a
shift away from Paris to locations in the provinces, typically the North of
France (as in Erick Zoncka's La Vie rèvée des anges, Bruno Dumont's La
Vie de Jesus, and Thomas Vincent's Karnaval).3 Two women's films which
typify this trajectory are Catherine Corsini's Les Amoureux (1994), selected
for the 'Cinemas en France' section at Cannes, and Laetitia Masson's En
avoir (ou pas) (1995), whose star, Sandrine Kiberlain, won a Cesar for most
promising actress. Both these films portray the malaise of young women
seeking their place in the world without having any precise objectives, and
use their locations in the provinces not just to evoke working class life but
also to challenge representations of the provinces as the site of more stable,
traditional values. At the same time, they are marginally more optimistic
than the Paris-based films, allowing their central protagonist in each case
to find some sort of solidarity with others and hope for the future.
Catherine Corsini's first feature, Poker, was a crime drama set in the
Parisian underworld (see chapter 7). In contrast, Les Amoureux/Lovers is a
more realist drama, shot on location in the Ardennes, and set principally
within the confines of a sad little town dominated by the nearby sawmills
and its proximity to the Belgian border. The narrative is structured through
the development of an intense brother-sister relationship, cutting between
the adolescent angst of beautiful, innocent young schoolboy, Marc (Pascal
Cuervo), and the antics of his wild, uninhibited older half-sister, Viviane
(Nathalie Richard). Viviane has returned to town and unemployment after
years spent as a magician's assistant in Marseille (or so she says), and lives
by the philosophy that girls can get what they want through sex. Together,
brother and sister share a physical, almost incestuous intimacy, relying on
63
PERSONAL FILMS
each other for tenderness and emotional support. Marc is alienated from
his family and his best friend (who does not share his as yet unformulated
homosexual desire) and Viviane's self-destructive relationships mean that,
apart from her girlfriend, she is otherwise alone. (She is only able to visit
her father when he is at work.) A troubling scene set in a Belgian bar points
out the fragility of her position. Viviane, extremely drunk, takes over the
microphone and impudently croons a Claude Francois song (shot in one
long take) which exposes her contempt for one of the men in her life, a
local notable sitting with his respectable wife who had given her a false
ruby ring in exchange for sex.
However, their return journey through the forest is the setting for an
unexpected moonlit encounter, which opens up the possibility of redemp-
tion through love for Viviane and sexual freedom for Marc. They witness a
man, Tomek (Olaf Linde Lubaszenko), stripping off and going for a mid-
night swim in the glittering lake. Tomek, a Polish worker employed clan-
destinely at a local sawmill, invites them back to his hostel which is
inhabited by a sympathetically represented multi-racial group of illegal
immigrants. Realizing that Viviane's aggressive sexuality is merely a facade
for her lack of self-esteem, he embarks on a loving, caring relationship with
her which is quite unlike any of her other experiences. Although Marc
consequently finds himself separated from his sister, his chance vision of
Tomek, naked, triggers the revelation of his homosexuality. He is then able
to search for a sexual encounter with another man and even try and kiss
his much desired heterosexual school friend. The film ends with him disap-
pearing into a nightclub, after confessing to both his sister and his friend
that he is a 'pédé' (poof).
Marc's journey of self-discovery recalls that of the adolescent youths of
André Téchiné's Les Roseaux sauvages or J'embrasse pas, while Viviane
herself is an insolent, down-to-earth variation of the young prostitute with
the heart of gold (a welcome alternative to figures like Anouk Grinberg's
Marie in Bertrand Blier's Mon homme). Portrayed here in a realistic way,
Viviane's vulnerability and cynicism are attributable to her damaged past
and her class and family background. Furthermore, she is not punished for
her defiant, transgressive sexuality, expressed through her revealing clothes
(short shorts and mini-skirts) and her vigorous, sensuous androgynous
body. Rather, she is tamed by the romantic hero and allowed to find love.
However the film does not offer a straightforwardly happy ending, suggest-
ing rather that she has found a moment of respite in a bleak, uncompro-
mising world. Corsini's ability to capture the economic, moral and sexual
disorientation and despair afflicting young people in 'la France profonde' is
nevertheless tempered and enlivened by Richard's energetic and expressive
performance as Viviane.4
64
En avoir (ou pas)/To Have It (Or Not) is a first feature by Laetitia

Masson (born 1966), another FEMIS graduate, who had previously made
a series of shorts and worked as an assistant to Cédric Kahn. It was the
first of a series of films made by Masson with Sandrine Kiberlain, her alter
ego (the others to date being an autobiographical short, Je suis venue te
dire, 1997, and two more features, A vendre, 1998 and Love Me, 2000).
In En avoir (ou pas), whose ambiguous title can be read in relation to
sexual, philosophical, materialist and/or aesthetic concerns, Masson specif-
ically aimed to:
provide a portrait of an era and of my generation. A generation with no

illusions, no points of reference, no political ideology. I wanted to show
ordinary young people struggling to get out of the impasse. I wanted to
get a better idea of what was happening to-day. I didn't want to register
the failure of a lost generation, but inspire a bit of hope, encourage
young people not just to submit to things. To pay attention to their
survival instincts and find the energy to act positively on their own
destiny. Hope is other people. (Baudin 1995)
Shot on location first in Boulogne-sur-Mer, then in Lyons, the film opens

in quasi-documentary style with a series of women being interviewed for a
dead-end job as a receptionist by an unseen male interviewer. (Masson used
local, unemployed women, getting them to improvise responses to the
man's intrusive questioning.) Their plight is contrasted with that of women
working on the assembly line at a local fish factory, shot as a group through
a long tracking shot. The film then homes in on a particular young worker,
Alice (Kiberlain), who gets made redundant, and charts her reactions to her
predicament. She leaves her boyfriend (who, as her girlfriend tells her, might
find her redundancy a good opportunity for her to stay at home and have
a child), drinks champagne with her girlfriend (who works in a fast-food
van selling chips), moves back to her parents' home on a council estate
(they have been married for 28 years), and fails a job interview (where she
reveals that she would like to be a singer and is persuaded, reluctantly, to
sing to prove it). Comparing her life to her mother's (played by director
Claire Denis), Alice suggests that things were probably easier in the past.
However, she eventually manages to leave Boulogne in search of a new life
when she is given a wad of banknotes by the personnel manager who had
made her sing, after spending the night with him on the beach (at her own
instigation). The money is not just payment for sex but expresses the man's
desire for her to have hope for the future.
In anticipation of the romance plot to come, the film cuts abruptly from
Alice to Bruno (Arnaud Giovanetti), who works on a building site in Lyons,
65
PERSONAL FILMS
Sandrine Kiberlain's luminous performance as Alice in En avoir (ou pas)

(1995). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Cuel Lavalette
Productions.
and is shot wandering the streets in the rain, visiting a prostitute (his first
words are to ask how much, like Alice)5, and getting drunk. Rejected by
his girlfriend, Bruno tells his Arab friend, Joseph (Roschdy Zem), who
works in the ironically named Ideal Hotel, that he feels as alienated as a
black person. When Alice turns up at the hotel, her attraction to Bruno is
immediately signaled by a point of view shot which zooms in on his black,
curly hair and sleeping face. However, despite the efforts of the matter-of-
fact cleaning lady to bring them together, their tenuous relationship never
really gets going, since taciturn, doubting Bruno does not want to suffer
from emotional involvement, and impulsive, free-spirited Alice is not sure
she wants to be tied to someone as poverty stricken and unambitious as
Bruno. It is only consummated after Alice finds a job (as a waitress) and
leaves the hotel, and Bruno makes the effort to find her again. The last
sequence shows them walking hand in hand and disappearing into the
crowd, the symbolic use of bright daylight and external settings contrasting
with the darkness of the rest of the film. But, as in Les Amoureux, the film's
overall outcome is uncertain, and Alice even teases Bruno that they might
as well separate straight away.
Masson's 'girl meets boy' story is not just a romance, but rather a thread
on which to hang the portrayal of two social misfits, struggling to find a
66
place in life and be happy. However, the film moves away from the social
realism of the opening sequences and creates a temporary space of multi-
ethnic solidarity and community in the darkly lit spaces of the Ideal Hotel,
run by Joseph and his sister, where Alice can dance and sing for her own
pleasure. It elicits a luminous performance from Kiberlain as the strong-
willed but funny and vulnerable Alice. It also benefits from Caroline Cham-
petier's cinematography and the way Masson lets the action evolve in front
of the camera, giving the impression that events are being recorded 'direct',
but also judiciously mixing moments of seriousness and light-heartedness.
As a result, the bleakness of life on the margins gives way to a feeling of
optimism about the future.
Both Les Amoureux and En avoir (ou pas) demonstrate that young
people in the provinces face the same sorts of dilemmas and anxieties as
young people in Paris. In each case, however, they create tough yet vulner-
able working-class heroines who face up to the misery of their lives and
make the best of it (and assist the young men they know to do so, too).
Furthermore, they provide an unusual plot twist by turning to immigrants
as a fleeting source of the warmth and solidarity which French society is
otherwise seen to lack.
Young women in the banlieue
A more 'inbetween' space than Paris or the provinces, the banlieue (a

synonym for the troubled working-class housing estates on the periphery
of Paris and other major French cities) has given rise in the 1990s to a
genre which addresses the interconnected issues of social exclusion and
ethnic difference, epitomized by Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (Vincen-
deau, 2000a). Focusing primarily on the problems facing young men, male-
oriented banlieue films have rarely addressed issues relating to young ethnic
minority women, who have generally been constructed in stereotypical roles
(as victims of the Arabo-Berber-Islamic sex-gender system or as liberated
sex objects).6 Two women's features of the 1990s set in the banlieue tackle
the topic of social exclusion and interethnic relationships from a young
woman's point of view, Anne Fontaine's Les Histoires d'amour finissent
mal en general (1993) and Yolande Zauberman's Clubbed to Death (1997).
The first banlieue film to be written and directed by a 'Beur' woman, Zaida
Ghorab-Volta's Souviens-toi de moi/Remember Me (1997), also focuses on
a young woman's point of view, centering on Mimouna, a young woman
of Maghrebi origin (played by Ghorab-Volta herself). However Ghorab-
Volta's funding problems only allowed her to make a medium-length film.7
Dedicated to the director's Algerian cousins, Souviens-toi de mofs frag-
67
PERSONAL FILMS
mented narrative constructs an angry, frustrated heroine who is constantly

torn between her traditional Algerian immigrant family in the banlieue and
her friends, her dead-end job and her doomed love affair with a Frenchman
in the city, but who eventually achieves a certain calm and self-confidence
about her bicultural identity (Tarr, 2000).
Anne Fontaine's first feature, Les Histoires d'amour finissent mal en
général/Love Stories Usually End Badly, was the first French film to centre
on a 'Beurette' (as opposed to a 'Beur' youth). It was shown in the 'Semaine
de la critique' at Cannes in 1993, and awarded the Jean Vigo prize (the
first time it was given to a woman director). Fontaine (born 1959) had been
brought up in Portugal and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before
becoming an actress. In Les Histoires d'amour she focuses on perky young
Zina (Nora) and her problematic identity as a young woman of Maghrebi
origin living in France, symbolized by her problematic relationship with
men. Zina is torn between Slim (Sami Bouajila), her fiance, a respectable
young taxi driver from the banlieue and an aspiring lawyer, and Frederic
(Alain Fromager), a fascinating young (white) actor whom she meets
through her job as an usherette in a Parisian theatre, who becomes her
lover. Her conflicting desires are reflected in her geographical displacement
between the banlieue and the city, but her freedom of movement is progres-
sively reduced as the narrative develops (Tarr, 1997).
The love triangle is a structural device which functions to question Zina's
place within an often hostile French society. Zina is forced to choose be-
tween 'tradition', marriage and domesticity, represented by Slim and her
future mother-in-law (who expects Zina to have children as soon as she is
married), and 'modernity', excitement and danger, represented by the fickle
Frederic (and his possibly racist middle-class parents). Feisty, energetic
Zina, who has broken free from her own family (who have gone back to
Algeria), wants both to find her way as an actress (she has a non-speaking
part as a maid in a shoot for a photo romance magazine) and keep her two
relationships going. But she fails on both counts. Her attempt to break into
show business is doomed because of her ethnic origin (she is told that there
are no 'Beurettes' in rock music), and she escapes from her marriage cere-
mony with Slim only to be rejected by Frederic. (The most poignant shot
of the film shows her sitting, dejected, on a bridge between the banlieue
and the city, dressed in her torn wedding dress.) The film ends with Zina,
alone and homeless, grabbing a lift with a male stranger (a musician) in a
car going to Marseilles and disappearing from view. The film thus fore-
grounds Zina's problematic bicultural identity but in the end fails to find a
way of allowing her to settle in the city.
Clubbed to Death, co-scripted by Noémie Lvovsky, was Yolande Zaub-
erman's second feature after Moi Ivan, toi Abraham (see chapter 9), and,
68
like her documentaries (see chapter 5), draws attention to ethnic minorities
and social outcasts, focalized in this instance through the eyes of a young
(white) French woman. Clubbed to Death sets out to denounce racism and
celebrate multiculturalism in France through its construction of an interra-
cial love affair between Lola (Elodie Bouchez), an attractive but rather lost
young woman (who lists her past lovers as she walks in the city with her
girlfriend) and the older Emir (Roschdy Zem), a handsome but passive,
impotent drug addict of Maghrebi origin. The couple meet by chance at a
'rave' in the banlieue, and the film's vivid representation of rave culture,
achieved through documentary-style shots of people dancing combined
with shots (and a music soundtrack) which express the effects of taking
drugs, gave it a certain cult status. The film's distinctive look also owes
something to its stylized use of color (predominantly blacks, browns and
grays) and bleached-out lighting effects.
Despite its many aesthetic pleasures, however, the film's construction of
race relations is problematic for a number of reasons. First its mise-en-scène
of the (unspecified) banlieue constructs a poeticized and exoticized 'third
world' space which is completely 'other' to metropolitan Paris (Lola arrives
there accidentally after falling asleep on a bus late at night). Sexy and
exciting by night, an anonymous wasteland populated by street vendors
and drug pushers in the light of day, it purveys an atmosphere of confusion
and disorder. Second, the figure travelling between the city and the banlieue
is the white girl who, in the tradition of French colonial films, is enriched
by her encounter with the 'exotic other' and becomes the catalyst who
enables Emir to save himself from entrapment in a culture of drugs and
violence. Clubbed to Death thereby seems to endorse the eurocentric con-
struction of the ethnic other as the western woman's object of desire (Sho-
hat, 1991). And third, the film sets up a rival for Emir's affection in Sai'da,
a young woman of Maghrebi origin (hauntingly played by Beatrice Dalle),
a skeletally thin but fascinating dancer who is also a drug addict (and who
looks rather like an older version of Lola). The film's clichéd triangular set-
up has Sai'da rejected in favor of her younger, whiter rival. However sym-
bolically positive the representation of the interracial love affair (as in the
scene in which the camera repeatedly encircles Lola and Emir kissing on
the empty dance floor), such an affair is only possible because Saida's desire
has been denied. Although the ending shows Emir's apparent victory over
his addiction, however, it is unclear whether he and Lola will be able to
form a couple. The film is informed by a pervasive feeling of there being no
future, as its morbid title suggests. Lola's troubled existence (she seems to
have no family, no job and no ties other than the girlfriend she leaves
behind) clearly has something in common with that of the other rootless
young women constructed in this body of films.
69
PERSONAL FILMS
It is relatively unusual for women's films (as in French cinema more

generally) to address the presence of women of Maghrebi origin in France,
and it is telling that in Les Histoires d'amour and Clubbed to Death the
'Beurette' is eventually either evacuated from or marginalized within the
narrative. Only Ghorab-Volta's Souviens-toi de moi is able to envisage an
ending in which the 'Beurette' finds a place in the city (it ends with Mim-
ouna walking by the Seine with her (white) girlfriends). However, while Les
Histoires d'amour challenges dominant representations of the banlieue by
representing it as a place of stability and integration for upwardly mobile
'Beurs' like Slim (who know their place), Clubbed to Death does little to
counter stereotypical views of the banlieue as a dangerous place overrun
with drugs and violence which offers little hope for the future.
The peer group
Most of the films discussed so far focus on individuals but suggest that they
are representative of a 'lost generation'. Others incorporate a concern for
the group into their structures, as in Coeurs croiséslCrossed Hearts (Ste-
phanie de Mareuil, 1986), which centers on friends/neighbors living in the
same block of flats, and the more bourgeois Portraits Chinois I Shadow Play
(Martine Dugowson, 1997), featuring friends/couples involved in fashion
and the media.8 The most significant group film by a woman director is
Pascale Ferran's second feature, L'Age des possibles (1995), commissioned
by the Strasbourg Drama School and financed by Arte, where it was first
screened to widespread critical acclaim. The film's multiple narrative
strands offer examples of the various dilemmas facing young people, en-
acted and debated in ways at times reminiscent of Rohmer films.
L'Age des possibles/The Age of Possibilities is based on Ferran's individ-
ual interviews with drama students, re-worked as fictional characters by
Ferran and co-writer Anne-Louise Trividic. As its title suggests, the film is
about possibilities, about making choices (or not), becoming an adult (or
not). Its complex, fragmented narrative, which mixes sequences of very
different lengths, consists of a multiplicity of intertwining stories taking
place in unremarkable, everyday settings. The ten principal characters (five
women and five men) are presented in the credits in alphabetical order
(from A to E for the women, and from F to J for the men), each being
introduced by the soundtrack of a radio tuned to a different station. 9
However, some are more developed and present than others. Agnès (Anne
Cantineau) is an articulate, sexually-liberated postgraduate student who
has an unsatisfactory one night stand with Frederic (Antoine Mathieu), a
final year student and serial womanizer, who shares a flat with Jacques
70
(Jérémie Oler), a depressive painter. Agnes' friend, Beatrice (Christèle Tual),

has a temporary job in a Quick burger bar and is having an unsatisfactory
affair with Gerard. Frederic's friend, Denise (Isabelle Olive), a former
drama student doing market research, falls in love with unemployed Ivan
(David Gouhier), who plays chess with Henri and lives with Catherine
(Anne Caillère), who wants a child (which he does not) and whom he does
not love anymore. The appearances of the only three to have satisfactory
jobs, Catherine, Emmanuelle (an actress friend of Denise's) and Gerard, are
mostly limited to scenes with those who still have to find their way in life.
Though each character knows some of the others, their network of relation-
ships is loose and unstable, and they all lead relatively isolated lives,
(though there is a suggestion that same-sex friendships may be more sus-
taining than other types of relationships). The film conspicuously lacks the
presence of children or other 'adults', that is, people in stable jobs and/or
relationships who have managed to give their lives some meaning.
The camera follows the development of the characters' private and pro-
fessional lives primarily through their conversations. Typically, discussions
about serious (mainly emotional or sexual) matters alternate between same-
sex friends and couples, allowing fears or worries which have been hidden
or hinted at in one context to come to the surface in another. There are
very few time markers, but enough to imagine the narrative taking place
over a period of a few months. The film culminates in a very long sequence,
a party given by Ivan and Catherine, at which most of the ten characters
are present and undergo a transformative experience, but which does not
consolidate them as a group. Thereafter, fade-outs to black take the place
of cuts, the fragmentation of the editing making the final scenes feel like an
epilogue and underlining the film's overall pessimism (Ferran, 1996). By the
end, Agnès and Frederic have each completed their degrees and may be
starting an affair, despite their earlier hostility. However, Beatrice (who has
at last got a better job) is heartbroken to discover that Catherine has gone
back to Gerard and is now pregnant; and Denise's decision to go to Paris
to get a job in the theater leaves Ivan alone and devastated. While some of
the characters have made decisions which may enable them to move on,
others are shown to be still struggling with the provisional nature of their
friendships and relationships.
An authorial voice-over expresses Ferran's thesis that, whatever their
background, desires or expectations, young people in the 1990s are a lost,
depressed and fearful generation:
Today everyone is afraid. Of not getting a job, of losing their job, of

having children in a world full of fear, of not having children in time.
Afraid of committing themselves, of getting ill, of missing out on life, of
71
PERSONAL FILMS
Beatrice (Christèle Tual) and Agnès (Anne Cantineau) at the party in L'Age
des possibles (1996). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Agat
Films.
loving too much, or too little, or badly, or not at all. Fear is everywhere
and it creates disasters everywhere. It feeds on itself. The person who is
afraid today will be even more afraid tomorrow. The first thing to do,
the only goal to achieve, is to kill our inner fear.' (Ferran and Tridivic,
1996:58)
What is disturbing about L'Age des possibles is that, even when the char-
acters appear to have taken a step to kill their inner fear, there is little
reason to think that they can manage the transition to mature stable rela-
tionships and adult social roles.
Female friendships
Given the difficulties young women experience in forming successful hetero-

sexual relationships in these films, one might expect there to be a greater
emphasis on relationships between women. However, although a number
of women's films of the 1990s take female friendship for granted as an
aspect of the heroine's circle of relationships, female friendship (or even
72
solidarity or complicity between women) is only foregrounded as a narra-

tive structuring device in Martine Dugowson's Mina Tannenbaum (1994)
and Patrick and Lisa Alessandrin's Ainsi soient-elles (1995) (and in Lvov-
sky's La Vie ne me fait pas peur, discussed in chapter 1). Ainsi soient-elles,
the first (and so far only) feature co-directed by the Alessandrins (both born
in 1965)10, despite the promise of its title (an echo of Benoite Groult's 1975
feminist essay, Ainsi soit-elle,u itself a blasphemous play on 'Ainsi soit-il'/
'Amen'), shows how the theme of relationships between women can be co-
opted to provide a sexually titillating spectacle for a male audience rather
than a critical reflection on women's condition. Situating its protagonists at
an age when 'Saint Catherine is watching out for them' (a reference to an
old-fashioned French tradition according to which on November twenty-
fifth, unmarried 25 year old women are required to 'coiffer Ste Catherine',
that is, visibly identify their single status),12 the film explores the (limited)
aspirations of three attractive young Parisian women: a virgin who wants
to save herself for the man of her life but then immediately gets pregnant,
an executive who experiments with multiple sexual encounters, gets raped,
and decides that monogamy (and probably marriage) is a preferable option,
and a married woman who sells her body for money before (and after)
discovering that her husband frequents prostitutes. Their individual narra-
tive trajectories are punctuated with scenes of them meeting together at the
swimming pool to talk about their lives. But the potentially fascinating
contradictions between their desires and their often horrendous experiences
are never fully developed, since the film is terrified of offering any critique
of men and masculinity. Indeed, the film's publicity brochure insists that the
women 'suffer, laugh and grow with and thanks to men (sic)\ so clearly
undermining the theme of female friendship.
In contrast, Mina Tannenbaum offers a more in-depth study of female
friendship over several decades, in a way reminiscent of Agnès Varda's
L'Une chante, Vautre pas (1976). However, whereas female friendship
constantly informs the lives of the two protagonists of Varda's film, in
Mina Tannenbaum its ups and downs lead ultimately to tragedy. Martine
Dugowson (born 1958) had previously trained at the IDHEC and in the
1980s made a few shorts and a full-length feature, En faisant le ménage
j'ai retrouvé Albert, which was never distributed. Mina Tannenbaum, her
second feature, draws to some extent on her own background as a Jew-
ish woman and its setting in the past places it in the lineage of the
women's growing up films discussed in chapter 1. Its epic sweep (it traces
the interconnected lives of its female protagonists from their birth on the
same day and in the same hospital in April 1958 through to their early
thirties) and its discrete use of period detail to mark the passing of the
73
PERSONAL FILMS
years (particularly changing women's fashions and popular songs), offer

a nostalgic appeal which differentiates it from the other films about
young women discussed here, and perhaps accounts for its greater com-
mercial success.
The tone of the film, an innovative mix of melodrama and comedy, is set
by the way in which it is narrated. Opening after the suicide of its epony-
mous central protagonist (Romane Bohringer), the film is framed by and
punctuated with the interventions of an unnamed cousin who is apparently
making a film about Mina's life but whose main concern is her own narcis-
sistic performance (she talks directly to the camera, has an intermittent
voice-over, and pops up unexpectedly in order to comment on the progress
of the narrative). Semi-humorous interviews with people who knew Mina
establish that she was both a talented young artist and a woman who,
according to her mother's reading of the Talmud, was 'not human' because
she had never married. However Ethel Bénégui (Elsa Zylberstein), a young
journalist, is apparently too busy to do more than acknowledge that Mina
had been her friend. Their stormy friendship is then reconstructed in five
key stages, from childhood, adolescence and 'the age of possibilities'
through to their lives as young, professional adults (dated 1963, 1968,
1974, 1989 and 1991 respectively), ending, as it had begun, with Mina's
death.
The first three stages demonstrate how and why Mina and Ethel became
friends. Both have a problematic relationship with their Jewish families,
Mina because her Ashkenazi mother is haunted by the Shoah (a forward
tracking dissolve shot to 1942 shows the mother as a child in the family
apartment wearing a yellow star), Ethel because her larger-than-life Sefardic
mother is obsessed with the fear of her daughter marrying a goy. And both
suffer as five year olds from rejection and humiliation at not being suitably
'feminine' (Mina wears glasses and Ethel is fat). They meet at a dance class
in Montmartre in May 1968 at the age of ten (their grandfathers appear in
the sky and argue about the precise date), after which Ethel cautiously
approaches awkward, angry little Mina and a slow 360° pan from the
bench on which they are sitting cements their friendship and transports the
spectator forward to the 1970s (Dugowson's playful techniques are often
reminiscent of Truffaut's). The film then charts the shared pains and anxie-
ties of their teenage years, including the failure of their first love affairs,
due in each case to their fear of not living up to the feminine ideal (visual-
ized as Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance for Mina and Rita Hayworth in
Gilda for Ethel). However, rebellious Mina is more of a feminist than Ethel,
who wonders if she would be a feminist at all if she looked like Brigitte
Bardot, and Dugowson employs various humorous devices to underline
their potential for rifts. In one scene, for example, their voice-overs contra-
74
diet what they are actually saying to each other. In another, a quarrel results
in superimposed images of their alter egos, a glamorous vamp for Ethel, a
Jewish scholar for Mina, taking their side in the squabble but leaving each
literally alone with her self.
When the film cuts to 1989, the differences in their characters and situa-
tions are more apparent. Both are now attractive young women able to
form relationships with men, but whereas serious, independent-minded
Mina has established herself as a successful young artist (holding her first
exhibition), frivolous, more 'feminine' Ethel only carves out a career by
pretending to be Mina (to get an interview with a reclusive artist and thus
a job in journalism). Their relationship deteriorates dramatically when
Ethel elicits a marriage proposal from Mina's cynical friend, art gallery
director Patrick (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) (she wants a Jewish husband to
placate her dying mother), and Mina accuses her of wanting to take every-
thing from her. They stop seeing each other, and Mina gradually sinks into
a decline: her face is disfigured in a car accident, her lover leaves her, she is
reduced to copying paintings for a living and, two years later, she finds
herself completely alone, misunderstood by her mother and not even rec-
ognized by her mentally ill father. An attempt to renew contact with Ethel,
now married to her former goy lover, enables her to start painting creatively
again; but when Ethel casually postpones their meeting, Mina destroys her
painting, swallows some pills and curls up on the floor of her studio to die
(after a flashback of Ethel miming Dalida's hit song, 'II avait dix-huit ans').
The film closes with a poignant close-up of the Gainsborough picture of
two young women whispering together, which Ethel had stolen from Mina
when they first met and returned after their last row.
Although Mina Tannenbaum foregrounds women's experiences and de-
sires, 'Mina's descent into failure and loneliness . . . is a departure from the
classic women's coming of age picture' (Vincendeau, 1994b). Mina's death
implicitly suggests that the authentic but uncompromising, independent
artist will fail whereas the more superficial, pragmatic and conventional
woman will succeed (Ethel ends up with a man and a baby as well as a
job). At the same time, Ethel's survival shows the costs of women's entry
into the adult world (she knows herself to be inferior). The film's early
privileging of female friendship, underlined by its exuberant style and en-
gaging performances from both Bohringer and Zylberstein, is completely
undermined by the ending's message that childhood friendships cannot
survive into adulthood. All the film can do, in tune with its melodramatic
accompanying music, is encourage the spectator to sympathize with and
mourn for Mina's loss.
75
Ethel (Elsa Zylberstein) supports Mina (Romane Bohringer) in Mina Tan-
nenbaum (1994). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the
Ronald Grant Archive.
76
Young motherhood
Although since the 1970s women's films have explored alternatives to

women's roles as wives within the traditional couple, they have less often
called into question women's roles as mothers. Varda's UUne chante, Vautre
pas is a rare example of a film which promotes women's right to abortion,
but it also celebrates motherhood, whatever the woman's circumstances.
Endorsing the feminist slogan 'every child a wanted child', it does not
question motherhood itself as every woman's desired goal. Given the role
abortions play in many young women's lives, and the problems attached to
bringing up an unwanted child or a child which the mother is forced (or
chooses) to bring up alone, it is perhaps surprising that, even in the 1990s,
pregnancy, childbirth and childcare feature so little in films about young
women. Exceptions to this include Claire Devers's puzzling second feature,
Chimère (1989), shown at Cannes, which centers on a young meteorologist
(Beatrice Dalle) whose unexpected pregnancy and decision not to have an
abortion lead to the loss of her boyfriend and the death of her little sister,
but then culminate, anti-climactically, in a miscarriage; and Yannick Bel-
Ion's Les Enfants du désordre/The Children of Disorder (1989), a success-
ful, if didactic 'social problem' film, which centers on Marie (Emmanuelle
Béart), a young drug addict and single mother who goes to work with a
theater company on her release from jail and, after succumbing to drugs
again, eventually learns to take responsibility for her life (and by implica-
tion her little daughter, too). (The film was based on the work of the
Theatre du fil, a theater company which helps young offenders integrate
into society after prison.)
The theme of pregnancy is taken up most strikingly in Marie Vermillard's
low-budget feature, Lila Lili (1998), the structure of which can be com-
pared with Claire Denis' Nénette et Boni (discussed in chapter 1) and Claire
Simon's Sinon oui (discussed in chapter 4). Vermillard (born 1954) was a
social worker before making four short films (including the much acclaimed
Eau douce) and working as a 'continuity girl' for various directors, includ-
ing Cédric Klapisch. Lila Lili, co-written with Jacques Bablon, was inspired
by a young woman she had encountered as a social worker a few years
earlier. Set primarily in a hostel for young women and their children in a
dull, rainy Parisian banlieue, its cast consists of a mix of professional and
non-professional actresses from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, some of
whom were actually recruited from women's hostels. The film has a
documentary-like authenticity thanks not just to its casting and perform-
ances, but also to its low-key, vérité setting and style, the lack of
accompanying music and an often muffled soundtrack.
Lila Lili has no plot, it merely strings together a series of unconnected,
77
PERSONAL FILMS
impressionistic micro-episodes in the life of its heroine, Micheline (Alexia

Monduit), whose pregnancy is not at first obvious. It ends with her scream-
ing by the roadside near the Boulevard Périphérique in the banlieue as she
waits for an ambulance, shouting out girls' names for the baby to take her
mind off the pain of her contractions (the last two of which give the film
its title). In the course of the film, Micheline goes on outings with a
women's handball team (though she cannot play because of her pregnancy),
visits her grandmother in hospital, works in the Paris metro where she gives
out passenger announcements, develops a sort of friendship with Simon, a
man she meets in a local shop, and shares activities with her girlfriend,
Nadège (Genevieve Tenne), who also lives in the hostel. Whereas Nadège,
a mother of two, is openly sexy and likes men, Micheline is more brusque
and reserved, and disinclined to accept any nonsense. At times the film is
shot from her point-of-view, the shaky, handheld camera searching in vain
for a fixed image and point of reference. Elsewhere, she is shot watching
others and witnessing their crises, from the despair of Viviane who has had
an abortion to the arguments between the (mostly black) young mothers in
the hostel and the breakdown of a train driver who could not avoid the
death of a passenger wanting to commit suicide. Keeping herself to herself
(there is no question of giving the unborn child a father), she is nevertheless
caught allowing Simon to sleep in her room, a gesture of solidarity which
costs her her place in the hostel. Rather than insist on gloomy reality,
however, Vermillard invests the narrative with poetic, often humorous mo-
ments: the pizza delivery-boy's antics on his scooter, the picnic by the canal
after the baptism of Nadège's children, the moments at work when Miche-
line sends out loudspeaker messages arranging for couples to meet, her
vision of a stag in the church. As Micheline's pregnancy develops she
becomes more aware of her strength in relation to others and, if her reserve
finally gives way to screams, she is nevertheless constructed as able to cope
with whatever the future has in store, especially as she imagines that her
baby, 'the last of the Rodchenkos', will give her the family she otherwise
lacks.
Lila Lili is set in an institution for young mothers who by definition are
unable to cope with life on their own. However, Vermillard takes pleasure
in filming the women as they go about their daily lives and refuses to
construct them as victims. (Similarly she takes pleasure in filming old peo-
ple, like the old man whose work as a plumber is shot in real time.) The
film foregrounds their energy and vitality in contrast with the isolated,
marginalized men (including Zinedine Soualem's social worker), and hints
at the potentially empowering nature of both maternity and solidarity
between women.
78
Conclusion
Women's films about the age of possibilities, normally made by women of

the same age as their protagonists, provide a series of portraits of young
women which are very different from those to be found in mainstream
cinema. Their heroines tend to be rebellious, independent-minded charac-
ters whose hard, brittle surface belies an underlying vulnerability to what
the world has to offer them. With the exception of Jézabel in La Nuit porte
jarretelles, they are not conventionally glamorous, and the complexity of
their characterization and situation has provided young actresses like Val-
eria Bruni-Tedeschi, Sandrine Kiberlain and Nathalie Richard with some of
their best roles.13
Though these rebellious young women are often central to the narrative,
and the world is perceived in part from their point of view, they are not
normally narratives of rebellion. Their narratives have no clear goals and
are generally characterized by disconnected episodic structures and open
endings. The women themselves have no clear objectives, or if they do, they
are rarely achieved. Rather, the films explore their need to accommodate to
the world around them. Whereas in the two films of the 1980s discussed
here, the heroine of Simone Barbès is strong enough to withstand the
bleakness of her life and the heroine of La Nuit porte jarretelles actually
thrives on the new sexual freedom, the heroines of the films of the 1990s
are less able to maintain their independence. In the case of the films set in
the provinces or the banlieue (including Lila Lili), their alienation is linked
more specifically to differences of class and ethnicity, but it is implied that
their cynicism and humor may help them survive. In the case of the films
set in Paris, however, they seem to be doomed, either psychologically dis-
turbed (as in Les Gens normaux and Oublie-moi) or driven to suicide (as
in Mina Tannenbaum).
Though women are foregrounded in these films, their predicaments are
not necessarily linked to gender and sexuality (they take their sexuality and
sexual freedom for granted and are open-minded in their approach to
sexual and racial difference). Their problems, like those of the 'lost genera-
tion' which they represent, lie rather in how to live out their freedom
satisfactorily when there seem to be no rules. Young people in general are
represented as having no clear position in life, no family or little contact
with their family, no parental figures to provide moral or political guidance,
no jobs or only temporary jobs, and no easy ability to communicate. Young
men may be represented as even more anxious, lonely and inadequate
figures than the women, the most sympathetic often being ethnic others in
unspecified or precarious jobs. Relationships between the sexes, such as
79
PERSONAL FILMS
they are (a theme also addressed in women's comedies, discussed in chapter

6), are mostly transitory and unstable, characterized by a lack of affect
which can become psychologically damaging. The w o m e n have become
restless, nomadic subjects frequenting the periphery of public or institu-
tional spaces and unable to settle within the domestic (or professional)
sphere. Yet there are few references to alternative ways of giving life a
meaning (the subject of Judith Cahen's films discussed in chapter 5). Female
friendships are not necessarily reliable or adequate, and the prospect of
motherhood as the source of more stable, rewarding relationships is rarely
addressed and is potentially equally problematic.
The films of the 1990s typical of 'le jeune cinema frane.ais' do not intro-
duce an explicitly political agenda into their films, but they do address the
(negative) effects of contemporary social malaise on young people, and they
do so through styles which reflect the disorientation of their central protag-
onists. They opt for low-key realism in their choice of settings and situa-
tions, locating the action not in conventional middle class Parisian settings,
but in the margins of the city, the provinces or the banlieue (though their
realism is at times leavened with more stylized, fantasy elements). Their
frequent use of handheld cameras and off-center framing often produces a
documentary-like authenticity to the image. However, like the often intru-
sive soundtracks, it also underlines the anxieties and hesitations of a
generation for w h o m life has no easy answers.
Notes
1. More conventional films about women and their relationships set in Paris are
less concerned with the question of women's occupation of space. They include
Marion Vernoux's second feature, Love, etc. (1996), based on Julian Barnes'
novel Talking About Love, and Laurence Ferreira Barbosa's second, more comic
feature, J'ai borreur de l'amour (1997). Love, etc. is a disappointing represen-
tation of a triangular relationship in which two male friends are in love with
the same woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg), reducing the woman's role to that of
the object of desire and exchange between men. J'ai borreur de l'amour centers
on a woman doctor (Jeanne Balibar), who similarly finds herself at the intersec-
tion of male desires and anxieties, on the one hand a troubled HIV patient and
on the other a psychologically disturbed hypochondriac.
2. A few films directed by women provide an imaginative, offbeat view of Paris
through the portrait of a disturbed, dysfunctional male, e.g. Sophie Comtet's
experimental film essay, Les Bruits de la ville (1998), starring Pierrick Sorin,
himself a well known videomaker, and Anne Fontaine's Augustin roi du Kung
Fu (1999), starring Jean-Chrétien Sibertin-Blanc. Sarah Levy's Du bleu jusqu'en
80
Amérique (1999) is also a study of a disturbed youth, set in a hospital for the
handicapped (and shot in a very vivid, hallucinatory style).
3. It should be noted that Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni hi (1985), discussed in
chapter 7, sets a precedent for this trend with its bleak winter setting in the
South of France.
4. Richard also starred in Corsini's earlier television film, Interdit d'amour.
5. The role of money becomes even more significant in Masson's second film, A
vendre, discussed in chapter 8.
6. Exceptions to this are Hexagone (1994) and Douce France (1995) by Malik
Chibane (Tarr, 1995, 1999c).
7. 'Beur' women (second generation women of Maghrebi origin) began making
short films and videos in the early 1980s, the best known being Farida Bel-
ghoul's autobiographically-inspired C'est Madame la France que tu préfères?
(1981) and Le Depart du pere (1983).
8. Male-authored group films linked with 'le jeune cinema francais' include he
Ferii jeune (Cédric Kahn, 1995) and Comment je me suis dispute. . . ma vie
sexuelle (Arnaud Desplechin, 1996).
9. The film's knowing play with form recalls the work of French writer Georges
Perec, especially La Vie mode d'emploi (1971), in which the order of the various
stories told about the inhabitants of a particular building corresponds to moves
on a chess board. Perec's prize winning novel, Les Choses (1958), also features
a young couple trying to find a place in the consumer society and starting their
careers in market research, like Denise and Ivan in L'Age des possibles.
10. Lisa Alessandrin is the daughter of singer-actress Marie Laforèt.
11. Ainsi soit-elle constitutes a vigorous denunciation of women's oppression
worldwide.
12. The tradition was initiated in the French clothing industry at the end of the
nineteenth century.
13. The character of Chloé (Garance Clavel) in Cédric Klapisch's Chacun cherche
son chat (1996) is another example of a challenge to mainstream representa-
tions of young women in a male-authored film associated with 'le jeune cinema
francais'.
81
CHAPTER THREE
Couples
Whereas the construction of gender and sexuality in American cinema has

been an object of study since the development of Anglo-American feminist
film criticism in the 1970s, there is not yet a similar body of work on the
specificity of gender and sexuality in mainstream French cinema (though
see Burch and Sellier, 1996, Hayward, 1993, Sellier, 1997, Vincendeau
passim). Laura Mulvey's early work (1975) on sexual difference in classic
male-authored Hollywood films theorized the construction of a voyeuristic
male-identified spectator, who is alternately fascinated by fetishized images
of women, coded 'to-be-looked-at' in ways which allow the disavowal of
lack and castration, and reassured by sadistic narrative structures which
work to punish or contain the sexually transgressive woman. French cin-
ema is certainly dominated by scenarios which privilege the male as agent
of the narrative and the gaze (and thus address a male-identified spectator),
but its construction of sexual difference is both less extreme and more
misogynistic.
The product of a less puritanical society, French cinema has typically
been more open and less moralistic than Hollywood in its treatment of sex
and (mostly female) nudity. Indeed, scenes of soft core eroticism in which
women are both objects of the gaze but also subjects of the narrative are
the mark of a certain type of French art house cinema, from Edwige
Feuillère in Lucrèce Borgia (1935) and Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu créa la
femme (1956) to Catherine Deneuve in Belle de jour (1967) and Beatrice
Dalle in 37°2 le matin (1986). However, the banality of (male-constructed)
images of female sexuality mitigates the fascination with and fear of sexual
difference that has resulted in so many powerful images of femmes fatales
(and so many powerful female stars) in American cinema. It allows repre-
sentations of primarily young and sexually available women to be confined
to their sex and the gender roles traditionally associated with their sex. (It
is no coincidence that women were once referred to simply as 'le sexe' in
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COUPLES
French.) The misogyny of dominant French cinema is compounded by its

symbolic privileging of patriarchal father-daughter relationships at the ex-
pense of more egalitarian relationships between mature adults, and its
casual, often brutal, dismissal of female figures in so many of the fictional
worlds it evokes. Luce Irigaray's proposition (1985) that in dominant cul-
ture, 'hom(m)o-sexuality is played out through the bodies of women' and
that 'heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth
workings of man's relations with himself seems particularly pertinent
(Mayne, 1990: 119).
This is not to say that there are not a number of French directors (such
as Eric Rohmer or Jacques Ri vette) who deal sympathetically and insight-
fully with relationships between the sexes or foreground women's experi-
ences and dilemmas. However, it is women directors who have been most
concerned with reworking the representation of female sexuality and
women's roles in relation to the couple, particularly those from the genera-
tion who lived through May 1968 and the 1970s women's movement. The
films discussed in chapter 2 suggest that younger women filmmakers of the
1990s are more concerned with young women's existential anguish than
with sexuality and gender inequalities. However, there is a significant body
of films by women going back to the 1970s which foreground adult
women's desires and pleasures from a woman's point of view and demon-
strate the influence of popular feminism in their questioning of gender roles
within the couple and their expression of female sexuality.
Films which address women's heterosexuality are often characterized by
a reversal of gendered cinematic roles, positioning women as active agents
of desire and men as objects of a female gaze (Colvile, 1993a). To a greater
or lesser extent, they extend the limits of the way women's sexual desire is
represented in the cinema, appropriating a domain hitherto reserved to
men. Indeed, a key phenomenon of the mid to late 1990s has been the
increasingly explicit sexual imagery to be found in films by women, which
is often (mistakenly) accused of being pornographic, and which enables
them to make an impact on mainstream cinema. The somewhat surprising
success of Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999) is a case in point. However,
French women directors' fantasies about women and sex (often, in the
1990s, foregrounding sexually active women in their forties)1 do not specif-
ically aim to create pornography, either for women or for men, but are
incorporated within narratives which makes both male and female sexuality
problematic. 2 At the same time, the rarity of films about lesbianism or
bisexuality suggests that they are not interested in any fundamental chal-
lenge to what Adrienne Rich (1980) has termed 'compulsory heterosexual-
ity', despite recent theories which suggest that sexuality is as artificial a
construct as gender (Butler, 1990; Sedgwick, 1990).
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PERSONAL FILMS
The films discussed here are grouped according to various themes that
have emerged during the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The first sections
focus primarily on films made during the 1980s, broken down into films
which center on changing gender roles within the modern or traditional
couple, films which offer alternative lifestyles to the couple, and films which
address the question of lesbianism. The latter sections are concerned, first,
with women's more explicit representations of sexual desire, be it in relation
to films about 'amour fou' or more 'perverse' forms of sexual desire and
pleasure, then with their fascination with male homosociality.
Modern and traditional couples
In much mainstream (particularly Hollywood) cinema, narratives are con-

cluded in formulaic fashion by the formation of the couple and a marital
contract. These so-called 'happy endings' have been deconstructed by fem-
inists as strategies for removing women from both public space and the
space of spectacle (the spheres of economic independence and self-
assertion), keeping women captive and defined in relation to male desire
(Mellencamp 1995). 'Happy ends' deny the possibility that women might
find independence thrilling and gratifying, and refuse to analyze what hap-
pens once the couple has been formed. In the 1970s, however, the feminist
critique of women's subordination within marriage led to a number of
women's films which deconstructed the artificial allocation of gender roles
within the couple and the dreariness of women's lot.
In France, Yannick Bellon's La Femme de Jean (1976) focuses on the
anonymous wife of the title who comes to realize that she has lost her
identity as a consequence of her marriage and re-creates herself as an
individual able to achieve self-esteem through work. She is then able to find
equality within a different sort of relationship. 3 Agnès Varda's UUne
cbante, Vautre pas (1976) braids together the lives of two very different
women. One is a singer who decides to bring up one of her children alone,
the other is a family planning counselor who manages to find a new,
suitably pro-feminist partner; both, however, retain a primary attachment
to their female friendship. Paula Delsol's Ben et Benedict (1977) exposes
women's tendency to accept oppression within the couple by juxtaposing
Ben's 'real life' experiences as a young unhappily married woman with the
imaginary couple formed by her alter ego, Benedict, married to a wealthier,
more loving but, ultimately, equally patronizing man. In the early 1980s,
Coup de foudre (Diane Kurys, 1983) and Le Destin de Juliette (Aline
Issermann, 1983), discussed below, both build on feminist themes of the
1970s by deconstructing the way women can be trapped by marriage and
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the family. At the same time, other films of the early 1980s like L'Amour
nu (Yannick Bellon, 1981) and L'Homme fragile (Claire Clouzot, 1981)
demonstrate the influence of a post-feminist climate in their construction of
new egalitarian couples.
VAmour nu/Naked Love is a more mainstream film than Bellon's more
explicitly feminist films of the 1970s. It presages her other films of the
1980s in its combination of star cast, 'social problem' theme and conven-
tional narrative style, and did extremely well at the box office. Its romance
plot centers on Claire (Marlene Jobert), a UNESCO interpreter, and Simon
(Jean-Michel Folon), an oceanographer whom she met at a conference.
Claire is diagnosed with breast cancer and decides to end her relationship
rather than expose her lover to her potentially 'mutilated' body.4 The film
offers a quasi-documentary guide to the treatment of breast cancer (co-
writer Franchise Prévost had written two books on the subject). However,
it fails to provide a convincing portrayal of Claire's desperation, and opts
finally for a sentimental happy ending in which Simon realizes why she has
rejected him and decides to stay by her, even though she has had a mastec-
tomy. The film thus constructs the lover as heroic and self-sacrificing, while
the heroine becomes emotionally dependent on the couple for her life to
have meaning.
L'Homme fragile/The Fragile Man, a first feature by Claire Clouzot
(born 1933), also marked a departure from the feminist agenda of films of
the 1970s and caused a furor at the Sceaux Women's Film Festival (Lejeune
1987:104) because of its sympathetic portrait of a man. Clouzot's protag-
onists, Henri (Richard Berry, in his second major screen role) and Cécile
(Franchise Lebrun) are also both professional thirty-somethings, each with
a failed marriage behind them, who meet through their work at the news-
paper UEspoir (meaning Hope). Beneath his witty, macho exterior, Henri
is, as the title suggests, fragile and vulnerable, suffering from the break-
down of his marriage and dedicated to the weekends spent with his young
daughter, Katia. Similarly, beneath her independent, woman-centered exte-
rior, Cécile, an attractive blonde (a more 'feminine' woman than the cynical
mistress Henri casually rejects) is also fragile and cautious about a new love
affair. Their relationship develops against the background of an intriguing,
carefully documented study of how technological change is affecting life
behind the scenes of a newspaper. However, despite its recognition of a
certain shifting in gender roles, particularly in its portrayal of Henri as a
nurturing father figure, at heart it is an old-fashioned romance, mostly
focalized, like L'Amour nu, from a woman's point of view.
These two films demonstrate how women's filmmaking in the early 1980s
was beginning to abandon the interrogation of women's condition which
had characterized many women's films of the 1970s. Their narratives of
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two independent adults with troubled histories working out some sort of
accommodation to each other instead offer a 'post-feminist' celebration of
the new, modern couple, in which equality between working professionals
is more or less taken for granted. Men have become more sensitive and
caring, and ongoing inequalities in relationships between the sexes are set
to one side.5 Two years later, Coup de foudre and Le Destiti de Juliette
offer a serious, feminist-influenced deconstruction of marriage and the cou-
ple, but their settings in the past gesture nostalgically towards the condi-
tions which made second wave feminism necessary, rather than offering a
feminist purchase on more contemporary struggles.
Coup de foudre/At First Sight/Entre Nous was Diane Kurys's third film
(after Diabolo mentbe and Cocktail Molotov) and the first to be shot in
cinemascope with a star cast and a reasonably big budget. It was both an
international commercial success and well received by the critics, winning
a nomination as Best Foreign Film at the Academy awards. Coup de foudre
was inspired by the experiences of Kurys's own mother (Tarr, 1999a: 55-
71), and charts the growing friendship between Léna (Isabelle Huppert)
and Madeleine (Miou-Miou) after their meeting at a school concert in
1950s Lyons. A long prologue sequence knits together the two women's
traumatic experiences during the German Occupation of France and indi-
rectly accounts for the strength of their subsequent friendship which comes
to take precedence over their unsatisfactory marriages. Both women have
married out of convenience rather than for love; Léna with Michel (Guy
Marchand), the French (but Jewish) legionnaire who saved her from depor-
tation from the Rivesaltes detention camp, Madeleine with Costa (Jean-
Pierre Bacri), the father of her child, after her first husband is shot by the
French Militia. Both men are unsuitable, Costa because he is a lovable but
incompetent fool, Michel because, although he is a doting father, he is also
a rather obtuse, uncommunicative man who clings to patriarchal notions
of gender roles. Lena's investment in her friendship with Madeleine is
accompanied by her gradual assertion of independence from Michel, which
links with the film's feminist analyses of the importance of women's eco-
nomic independence as the basis for liberation. (The 1950s setting means
that Léna has no checkbook of her own, she has to ask permission for
driving lessons or getting a job, she depends on Michel to finance her setting
up a business.) The affectionate, intimate relationship between the two
women, expressed in particular through their shared 'feminine' activities,
especially their love of fashion, offers spectators a lesbian subtext (Straayer,
1990, Hulmlund, 1991, Powrie, 1998), and contrasts with the increasing
violence of Lena's relationship with Michel, which culminates in his de-
struction of her fashion boutique (the site of both her potential economic
emancipation and her commitment to Madeleine). However, Lena's subse-
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Léna (Isabelle Huppert) and Madeleine (Miou Miou) share a love of fash-
ion in Coup de foudre (1983). Supplied by and reproduced with permis-
sion from the Ronald Grant Archive.
quent decision to leave her marriage is not shown without an awareness of

the costs involved. In particular, the final poignant sequence, set by the
seaside at Cabourg where Léna and Madeleine have taken flight with their
children, emphasizes through crosscutting shots of the various individuals
concerned, Michel's pain and Lena's daughter's loss. An epilogue appearing
over the final image of Madeleine and the other children walking on the
beach indicates to the spectator that the daughter in question is Diane
Kurys herself, and the film is dedicated to all three of the main protago-
nists.6 Coup de foudre manages to question the desirability of the particular
marriages it evokes and to suggest, daringly, that female friendship can be
more important than marital ties, at the same time as it expresses nostalgia
for the imagined stability of the idealized, traditional couple.
Le Destiti de Juliette/The Destiny of Juliette was a first feature by Aline
Issermann (born 1948), who had been involved in the women's movement
and was one of the founders of the left-wing newspaper Liberation. After
working on children's comic strips and making a few short films, she
decided to tackle a full-length feature film with a realist topic, inspired by
interviews with a cleaning woman. She received the avance sur recettes on
the basis of her screenplay, but had difficulty finding a producer. The film
was subsequently selected for the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes, where
it received an enthusiastic critical response, won the Prix Georges Sadoul
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and was much praised by Marguerite Duras. Co-written with Michel Duf-
resne and shot by Dominique Le Rigoleur (who had earlier worked on
Marguerite Duras's Agathe), the film, set over twenty years from the early
1960s onwards, traces the history of a blacksmith's daughter, Juliette (Laure
Duthilleul), who falls in love with a shepherd (Hippolyte Girardot), but is
married against her wishes to Marcel (Richard Bohringer), a railway
worker and an alcoholic, in order to save her family from being thrown
out onto the streets. Initially passive in the face of fate, Juliette begins
slowly to resist the constraints of married life, then, after her daughter is
born, engages in a silent, nightmarish struggle with her hated husband to
the death. In the battle between the sexes, however, it is the man (also the
victim of their loveless marriage) who dies first, leaving Juliette a widow
and working as a cleaner in a Parisian suburb. The ending offers a glimmer
of hope as her faithful fiance arrives to see her again, but there is no two-
shot of the couple, and it is not certain that she has the energy left to start
a new life.
The depressing accumulation of misery is reminiscent thematically of
nineteenth century naturalism, accentuated by the portrayal of Juliette's
family's sliding into destitution, thanks to the father's alcoholism and the
mother's madness, and compounded by one of her brothers committing
suicide. Yet Le Destiti de Juliette is actually an exhilarating film because of
the unusual beauty of the mise-en-scène, lighting and camera work, the
subtlety of the narrative development, and the quality of Laure DuthilleuPs
hypnotic performance which enables the character to age from puberty to
maturity without jarring. The film proceeds economically through a series
of ellipses from one self-contained sequence to another, each demarcating
another stage in the drama of public and private events which lead to
hopelessness and alienation, traced through the subtleties of Juliette's looks,
gestures and silences. The camera lingers on the perfectly framed pictorial
imagery, particularly the awesome open spaces of the Beauce plain which
isolate the characters and efface the outside world of social reality. Instead
of crude documentary realism, the film's distancing effects produce a sort
of abstract hyperrealism, closer to inner reality.
Le Destiti de Juliette provides a useful companion piece to Kurys's por-
trayal of a woman's revolt within a bourgeois marriage, emphasizing as it
does the far greater difficulties faced by poor working class women in
establishing their independence. However, despite or perhaps because of its
austere formal beauty, the film was less successful than Kurys's more acces-
sible and empowering vision of women's ability to transcend the constraints
of marriage and (even more transgressively) find happiness in female friend-
ship. In both cases, however, the critique of marriage is softened by being
based on the representation of ill-matched couples brought together
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by unhappy circumstances. Like L'Amour nu and UHomme fragile, they

provide good arguments for the need for the modern, open couple based
on love and equality, rather than fundamentally calling into question the
institution of marriage.
Alternative lifestyles
A major aspect of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the sexual libera-
tion of the post 1968 generation was the quest for alternative ways of
living. In the late 1970s, at the same time as directors like Catherine
Breillat, Christine Pascal and Marie-Claude Treilhou were documenting
young women's individual quests for sexual fulfillment, Charlotte Du-
breuil's Quest-ce que tu veux, Julie? (1978) and Coline Serreau's Pourquoi
pas! (1977) were interrogating the possibility of relationships involving
communal living and/or more than one partner. The progressive loss of
belief in the viability of alternative lifestyles between the 1980s and the
mid-1990s can be traced through a comparison between Magali Clement's
La Maison de Jeanne (1988) and Diane Kurys's Après l'amour (1992), both
of which center on a woman with two male lovers. It is seen again in
Franchise Etchegaray's poignant evocation of an impossible community in
Sept en attente (1996), a theme which is also explored in Christine Citti's
Ruptures (1992).
Actress Magali Clement made three shorts before directing La Maison
de Jeanne/Jeanne's House. She received the avance sur recettes for the
screenplay in 1981, but took six years to put the film together. The film
focuses on the everyday life of a woman-centered family, which is also a
family business. Jeanne (Christine Boisson) runs a country restaurant some-
where in the Auvergne, aided by her two sisters, tomboy Martin (sic)
(Marie Trintignant) and Marie (Michelle Godet), who lives in Clermont,
and by her placid husband, Georges (Jean-Pierre Bisson) and Marie's hus-
band, Marc, who is writing a novel. Establishing shots of the household
show the sisters laying the tables, singing Schubert songs together, the men
working together in the kitchen, and the 'feminized' Georges looking after
the couple's three daughters. The extended matriarchal family also includes
Jeanne's glamorous, suicidal mother (Pascale Audret), who runs the local
pharmacy, and her journalist father (Jacques Richard), who is unable to
choose between his wife and his mistress. Jeanne's apparently charmed life
is disturbed by the arrival of a stranger, Pierre (Benoit Regent), the new
owner of the restaurant, who is seduced by the atmosphere Jeanne and her
family have created and falls in love with Jeanne. Jeanne eventually decides
to sleep with Pierre, but then goes a little mad and disappears. The men
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treat each other courteously as they wait for her return, and the film ends
ambiguously, with both Georges and Pierre expressing their love for her,
while she just smiles and says it is time to re-open the restaurant. Arguably,
the film suggests that Pierre can simply be integrated into the Jeanne-
centered household, thereby providing a rather more conventional version
of the transgressive triangular relationships represented in Serreau's Pour-
quoi pas!. However, the film is primarily an homage to the charisma and
energy of its heroine, whose behavior destabilizes both conventional gender
roles and the conventional couple.7
Après l'amour/After Love, Kurys's first film with a contemporary setting
(Tarr, 1999a: 108-124), also takes as its topic the nature of relationships
when the conventional couple is no longer the central given. Like Coup de
foudre, Après l'amour stars Isabelle Huppert, Kurys's alter ego, this time as
Lola, a successful novelist in her mid-thirties, at the center of a network of
relationships, juggling two lovers, David (Bernard Giraudeau) and Tom
(Hyppolyte Girardot), each with a partner or wife and children. The film
indicates that, despite Lola's apparent self-confidence and self-sufficiency,
her situation is far from satisfactory. Her inspiration has dried up and
neither of her lovers is willing or able to commit himself to her (typically
the men are tender fathers but weak and promiscuous, if charming, part-
ners). Her solution in the end is to go ahead with her unexpected and
unplanned pregnancy, which allows her to start writing again and recon-
ciles her with David, her long-term live-in lover who has gone to live with
the mother of his children. The film does not solve the problem of the
couple, rather it documents the difficulties of being involved in more than
one relationship at a time. It charts the shifting, unstable nature of contem-
porary relationships (and the absence of the extended family) which renders
all the women characters (apart from Lola) hysterical and neurotic.
Sept en attente/Seven in Waiting, Franchise Etchegaray's second film
(after the undistributed La Règie du je, 1992), is a much more marginal,
experimental film than those discussed to date, and received a very limited
distribution. Etchegaray, who worked with Eric Rohmer for over twelve
years, shot the film over a period of just 13 nights, working with a group
of actors (many more than the seven of the title) in a semi-improvised way.
Shown at the Créteil Women's Film Festival at the same time as Ferran's
more accessible group film, LAge des possibles, Sept en attente is organized
around a party of thirty-somethings and older, held in a vast, desolate,
virtually empty building which appears to be a squat. Despite the unity of
time and place, the film is highly stylized and fragmented, patterned by the
jazz soundtrack and the camera's return to the staircase and the other
labyrinthine sites of the party (the vast dance space, the kitchen, a room
full of TV monitors) where people attempt to make contact and have more
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or less satisfactory exchanges of fragments of conversation. It is never

apparent who is giving the party, and the only person who clearly lives in
the building is Galatée (Clementine Amouroux), a young woman whose
marriage has broken up and who is awaiting the arrival of the current man
in her life. While she waits, various men drop into her room and strike up
conversations, read to her or discuss her writings on the wall. But at the
end, she packs a suitcase, though she never actually leaves. Other characters
include a young woman (Myriam David of Thévenet's Jeux d'artifices) who
flirts with a good-looking man who turns out to be gay, and a young man
(who turns out to be the gay man's lover) who gets into conversation with
a pregnant older woman who turns out to be a friend of Galatée and is
distraught because her husband has just left her. A group of women chat
about women's lives, and whether or not to have children. These brief
encounters within an apparently collective event reflect the new 'désordre
amoureux', as the Cahiers du Cinema reviewer argues (Roth, 1996b: 123),
and hint at the failure of May 1968's Utopian project. Far from representing
the community as an alternative to the couple, this film points rather to its
impossibility, highlighting the disturbing lack of contact between people
who are waiting in vain for some sort of answer to the problems in their
lives.
Arguably, then, whereas films from the 1980s still toy positively with
alternative life styles, as in La Maison de Jeanne with its cooperative,
communal vision of the extended family, films of the 1990s chart the
disintegration both of the couple and of alternatives to the couple, leaving
the spectator with irresolution and confusion (as in Après l'amour) and a
sense of the fragility of the relationships between people (as in Sept en
attente).8
Lesbianism
It is striking in France that at the annual Créteil Women's Film Festival, as

at the Paris Lesbian Film Festival, there is always a significant audience for
overseas lesbian films, mostly because no such films get made in France.9
Indeed, even films about female friendships are relatively rare and under-
valued, Kurys's Coup de foudre providing an important exception.10 Clearly
this is because such films call into question women's reliance on men for
romantic and sexual fulfillment, offering access to an active desiring subjec-
tivity which is independent of men (Hollinger, 1998: 141). A new interest
in bisexuality and/or lesbianism in women's films of the mid to late 1990s
is evident in Pas tres catholique (Tonie Marshall, 1994) and La Nouvelle
Eve (Catherine Corsini, 1999), with their sympathetic secondary roles, and
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in Josiane Balasko's mainstream comedy, Gazon maudit (1995), which

centers on the formation of a loving, lesbian relationship as well as cele-
brating a more Utopian, polymorphous sexuality (see chapter 6). Apart
from Gazon maudit, however, and the rather more disturbing treatment of
lesbian desire to be found in Joy Fleury's Tristesse et beante (1985)11 and
Christine Lipinska's Le Cahier volé (1993) (see chapter 1), the only
woman's film to foreground lesbian sexuality and a lesbian relationship is
Genevieve Lefèbvre's Le Jnpon ronge (1987).
Genevieve Lefèbvre (born 1949) came from a mining background, partic-
ipated in May 1968 (filming the events on video), and began working in
the cinema in the 1970s, working her way up to becoming a producer. She
began writing the script of Le ]up on rouge/The Red Petticoat in 1982 but
had to struggle for four years to get it made, despite receiving the avance
sur recettes in 1984 (Lejeune, 1987: 166). Although it was selected for the
French Cinema Perspectives section at Cannes, Lefèbvre has not made a
feature film since. Le Jupon rouge is a rather slow-paced film featuring
three generations of middle-class women, Bacha (Alida Valli), a Polish
holocaust survivor who works for Amnesty International, her Italian friend
Manuela (Marie-Christine Barrault), a costume designer who is helping her
write her books, and the younger Claude (Guillemette Grobon), a Jewish
friend of Bacha who becomes, temporarily at least, Manuela's live-in lover.
Despite (or because of) its lesbian theme, the film reassures audiences that
all the women have previously been sexually involved with men. It opens
with Manuela saying goodbye to David, a male lover, at the airport, Bacha's
bookshelves are dominated by a photograph of her dead lover, also a
holocaust survivor, and Claude refers to a former lover called Stanislas.
However, the emotional and narrative focus of the film is undoubtedly on
relationships between women, specifically the twenty-year-old friendship
between Bacha and Manuela that is troubled by the new, loving, sexual
relationship which develops between Manuela and Claude. Bacha reacts to
the affair between her two friends by behaving badly, refusing to see them,
accusing Manuela of abandoning her, losing faith in her work, refusing her
hospital treatment and running away from her responsibilities. The excess
of her reaction enables both Bacha and Manuela to realize the extent to
which their apparently independent, work-oriented lives are in fact depend-
ent on their mutual friendship. Manuela finally (and rather abruptly) tells
Claude that they need to separate for a while, and goes to Brussels to
collect Bacha from hospital. The film's narrative thus reworks the structure
of the heterosexual triangle by expelling the sexy newcomer in favor of the
older, established couple.
Though Manuela appears outwardly calm, the final shot of her driving
back to Paris with Bacha is troubled by Claude's voice-over, asking Man-
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uela what she is afraid of. Until her sudden change of attitude, the two
younger women's love affair had seemed full of joy and beauty. The rarified
huis clos of Manuela's loft flat, full of kittens and paintings, provides a
romantic (if at times clichéd) mise-en-scène for Manuela's seduction of
Claude, which is built up through the use of sensuous music, expressive
lighting, the reading of love poetry and intense exchanges of looks. As
Manuela starts to caress Claude, she tells her, 'Everything is possible be-
tween women'. Cutting from their demurely shot embrace to the following
day when Claude is posing for Manuela to draw her, the film crosscuts
between their faces, expressive of their mutual desire. The sequence ends
with a long shot of Claude posed against a wall, wearing the red petticoat
of the title (and the film's poster), just visible below her naked torso, setting
her up as an object of desire for the film's (presumably mostly female)
audience, too. However, this foregrounding of passionate desire between
women is intercut with shots of Bacha, alone in bed, haunted by the past
and fearing for the future, then fainting in the hospital. Almost as soon as
the lesbian love affair has begun, then, it is presented as too self-absorbed
and isolating for, as Manuela declares in answer to Claude's question, she
is afraid of 'hurting others, suffering, and not having access to a vaster,
more subtle world'. The implication of her response is that their loving,
intimate lesbian relationship cannot be integrated into the normative world
of conventional patriarchal relationships and more acceptable forms of
friendship between women. But will Manuela be able to access such a
world through a more honest, openly loving relationship with Bacha? The
film's ending leaves the question open.
Le Jupon rouge is an important film in the history of women's cinema in
France because it is so rare for a lesbian relationship to be visualized so
centrally and, at first at least, so sympathetically. It is also important for its
validation of Bacha, the older woman who is still active in the world and
still desirable as a woman, as Manuela finally recognizes when she tells her
that she is beautiful (as she had earlier told Claude). So if the actively
sexual lesbian relationship is abandoned, the intense friendship between the
two older women survives. Nevertheless, the film's reluctance to envisage a
world which would validate both female friendship and lesbian sexuality,
is oddly disappointing and frustrating.
'Amour fou'
If Le Jupon rouge opts for the safety of duty and caring for others over the
risk of lesbian passion, the same is not true of films about heterosexual
passion in which the woman risks all in the pursuit of an impossible love.
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PERSONAL FILMS
The notion of 'amour fou' goes back to the surrealists and their idealization
of the elusive love object embodied in the perfect woman. Since, by defini-
tion, 'amour fou' is at odds with the world of bourgeois order and can
exist only if the 'real world' is temporarily abandoned, the woman who
embodies its excesses is often condemned to madness or death so that the
surviving lover can preserve his reified love (as in Beineix's 37°2 le matin).
Four films by women, Aline Issermann's UAmant magnifique (1986), Na-
dine Trintignant's La Maison de jade (1988), Brigitte Roùan's Post cotium,
animal triste (1997) and Jeanne Labrune's Si je faimes . . . prends garde à
toi (1998), challenge this scenario by centering on female protagonists who
resist being consumed by 'amour fou'. Despite differences in treatment,
UAmant magnifique, Post cotium, animal triste and Si je faime . . . all
shocked contemporary audiences and critics for their explicit engagement
with the representation of sex.
UAmant magnifique/The Magnificent Lover was Aline Issermann's sec-
ond film, and is actually based on autobiographical material. A doctor's
daughter, who spent her childhood in the Sarthe12 and her adolescence in
the Parisian banlieue, Issermann dropped out of University and went to
work on a farm in the mid-1970s, where she had an affair with Hippolyte
Girardot, subsequently the star of UAmant magnifique. The film's mise-en-
scène, which includes six long set pieces involving sexual intercourse, was
described in Liberation as 'gigantic hard-corps (sic)' (Lefort, 1986). How-
ever, Issermann's aim was to counteract mainstream representations of sex
as an act of violence with representations of sex as an act of mutual
pleasure shared by two human beings in tune with nature, with the poten-
tial for procreation, a theme reminiscent of the work of D. H. Lawrence. A
slow-paced film which eschews conventional narrative, UAmant magni-
fique portrays sexual intercourse in graphic detail. But, like the other films
discussed here, it does so from points of view which avoid placing the
spectator in the position of the (male) voyeur and refuse the objectification
of the female body characteristic of both pornography and mainstream
narrative cinema.
UAmant magnifique recounts the passion between Viviane (Isabel
Otero), the wife of Antoine (Robin Renucci), who runs the horse ranch
where the film is initially set, and Vincent, a young groom employed on the
ranch (Hippolyte Girardot), who owns his own horse. The first part of the
film establishes the beautiful, austere landscape and open skies which frame
the action (Issermann teamed up again with cinematographer Dominique
Le Rigoleur) and the expressive music and soundtrack which accompany
it. Links between human behavior and the natural world are foregrounded
by the close-up photography of the horses, whose pounding hooves accom-
pany the opening credit sequence, and who are shot being trained and con-
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trolled by Antoine, in particular through a graphic sequence in which a

stallion is brought in to mate with a mare. Viviane's unspoken passion for
Vincent, marked out as her object of desire through point-of-view shots
and haunting music, is kick-started when their eyes meet in the stable after
a horse has foaled and Vincent carries the bloody placenta to a bucket.
Images of the passionate sexual relationship which ensues are shot often
from unexpected angles, such as a two-shot from above the couple's heads
as they lie on the ground, the framing emphasizing the mutuality of their
pleasures and desires. Vincent's handsome young body is as much the object
of the gaze as Viviane's, and the film also, unusually, includes a scene
showing how Viviane's pleasure is obtained not from the brutality of pene-
tration (a cliché of dominant cinema) but from the slow stimulation of
desire. Cutaway shots to the fields and woods where they make love, or to
a close-up of a fly on Vincent's buttock, underline the link between sex and
the natural world.
However, their ecstasy is short-lived. Antoine's jealousy forces the lovers
to leave the ranch, and Vincent's surreal journey on horseback through
various industrial landscapes ends with his horse symbolically going lame.
When the lovers meet again at Viviane's brother's abode beside the sea,
they are no longer free to make love as before, and Vincent eventually
leaves to attend to his horse. In the final shot, Viviane is alone in the sand
dunes. But she has lost the haunted look she had at the beginning and is
wearing a red dress that recalls the color of the blood and placenta which
fuelled her sexual desire, suggesting that her passion has restored her to
life.
UAtnant magnifique surprised spectators at Créteil because of its unprob-
lematic celebration of heterosexuality. However it also shows a woman
able to put her sterile marriage behind her, invest herself fully in a passion-
ate affair, and emerge from it alone but enriched, the survivor and not the
victim of 'amour fou'.
Nadine Trintignant's La Maison de jade/The House of Jade (1988),
based on an autobiographical novel by Madeleine Chapsal, directly ad-
dresses the theme of survival in a film which centers on a woman's mid-life
crisis following her relationship with a much younger lover. In it, Jane, an
attractive, forty year old woman, who is also a successful author (Jacque-
line Bisset), is wooed by a young and beautiful man, Bernard (Vincent
Perez), and eventually succumbs to his protestations of love and the blissful
pleasures of sex. Without warning, however, Bernard announces that he
wants children with someone else. Devastated and angry, Jane physically
accosts him in scenes which provide a framing of the main narrative.
However, with time she recovers and writes a best-selling novel about their
affair. In a final scene, set in a foreign city, as he walks towards her
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clutching her book in his hand, she strides past him triumphantly without
even noticing his presence. The film's theme of a woman's survival after a
passionate but doomed affair was written off by critics as more appropriate
for the problem pages of women's magazines. But it has been taken up in
other women's films, notably Post coitum animal triste, and provides an
interesting twist on the conventional romance. Shot from the heroine's
point of view, La Maison de jade is also an admirable showcase for its star,
who, like the writer and director involved, may want to prove that she is
still a desirable and desiring human being. The film thus combines the
theme of 'amour fou' with questions about the aging female body and the
relation of the mature woman to sexuality, desire and procreation.
Post coitum animal triste/Post Coitum was written and directed by ac-
tress Brigitte Rouan, her second film after Outremer (1990) (discussed in
chapter 9). In it, Roiian herself plays the main protagonist, Diane, a confi-
dent, attractive and successful forty-year-old woman working in publishing,
who is married to Philippe, a lawyer (Patrick Chesnais), and has two young
teenage children. The film opens provocatively with images of desire, first a
cat in heat, caterwauling over the credits, then Diane masturbating on her
bed to the sound of music and crying with pleasure. A 'no man's land'
separates Diane's bedroom from Philippe's, confirming that their relation-
ship is no longer sexually satisfying. When Diane first sees Emilio (Boris
Terrai), he is immediately constructed as an object of desire, both a magnif-
icent, young male body and a humorous, tender individual, whose appear-
ance and behavior (almost literally) bowl her over. As their affair develops,
a fantasy sequence shows Diane (literally) floating on air, drifting on a
cloud into a boutique to buy sexy lingerie before their orgasmic hotel
assignation (though her lingerie catches fire on the bedside lamp as a
warning of the dangers ahead!).
Whereas the first half of the film charts Diane's happiness, the second
half documents her despair when Emilio suddenly puts an end to their
relationship (he is going to Africa as a voluntary worker, but is also re-
minded on a visit to his grandfather than he cannot have children with
Diane). Diane reacts, first, by physically harassing Emilio, depositing feces
on his landing and head-butting him at the development agency where he
works. Then she turns to drink, arriving home naked and unconscious,
neglecting her children, and inadvertently setting the mattress on fire in the
flat she has borrowed from work. Philippe abandons her, taking the chil-
dren with him, and her boss tells her to take an indefinite break from work.
Diane remains indifferent to others, and just carries on drinking and crying,
lying in her nightdress in a mess of bottles, food and dirty glasses, halluci-
nating images of Emilio, talking to herself in the mirror and scrutinizing
her body with disgust. (Rouan's extraordinary performance led to horrified
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'Amour fou' between Diane (Brigitte Roiian) and Emilio (Boris Terrai) in
Post cditum animal triste (1997). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permis-
sion from Hubert Balsan, Ognon Pictures.
accusations of exhibitionism.) She is rescued when her young protege,

Francois (Nils Tavernier), decides to celebrate his prize-winning second
novel with her (as his editor, she had advised him on how to write his
female character). He takes her to Lesbos where, according to an earlier
scene, Apollo once decreed that anyone who tried to kill themselves for
love would survive. Diane jumps off the cliff and the film ends with a very
long shot of her long fall, then briefly shows her resurfacing, not drowning,
but waving, jubilantly.
Diane's story is abruptly (and perhaps unnecessarily) intercut with a
fragmented counter-narrative involving Madame Lepluche, the local
baker's wife (played by Francoise Arnoul, a star of the 1950s), whose
sudden murder of her husband seems to offer some sort of commentary on
or counterpoint to (or relief from) the main action. Philippe, her defense
lawyer, comes to see a parallel between her situation and his own (she kills
her husband because he wanted a divorce after she had put up with years
of his infidelity, whereas he chooses to leave home). Arguably, however,
Philippe's lack of passion is partly responsible for Diane's readiness to fall
in love again. The film reveals the depths of unacknowledged sexual frus-
tration beneath the facade of the happily married, professional middle-aged
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couple, and underlines the extent to which the identity of the aging woman
is bound up with her sexuality. But, although it wallows in Diane's disillu-
sionment and suffering, it also shows her ability to survive 'amour fou'
and, hopefully, move on.
Si je faime . . . prends garde à toi/Beware of My Love (for which Cath-
erine Breillat was a script consultant) is Jeanne Labrune's most mainstream
film to date and also foregrounds a woman's mid-life crisis. It charts the
passionate relationship between Muriel (Nathalie Baye), a successful, inde-
pendent scriptwriter aged about forty, and Samuel (Daniel Duval), a mys-
terious older man she meets on a train, who turns out to be an oriental
carpet salesman and gambler. At first, Muriel rejects Samuel, even though
he makes her laugh and gives her sexual pleasure (in their first sexual
encounter the film deliberately strips and objectifies Duval's body while
discreetly showing only Muriel's face). In the series of passionate encounters
that follow, Muriel at first manages to keep her head, even though Samuel's
behavior is unpredictable, intense and occasionally frightening. When he
kidnaps and blindfolds her in order to take her to the top of the Arc de
Triomphe to drink champagne, she is thrilled. When he asks her what she
sees in the mirror after he has shattered a vase of flowers in her apartment,
she replies that she sees a woman wetting herself for him. However, their
relationship becomes increasingly destructive as Samuel's violence escalates,
towards himself (he cuts his arm so that it bleeds) and towards her (he
holds a knife to her throat and tries to strangle her). In the end, after she
tells him their affair is over and he tries to batter down her door, she is
forced to call the police to have him taken away.
Muriel had engaged in the affair, thinking that she could stand up for
herself. She tries to behave without invoking petty bourgeois prejudices,
but demands 'respect' and confidence and does not get it. At one point, she
runs away from Samuel and goes to a hotel with a man she meets on the
motorway. But she is unable to sleep with him since, even before he un-
dresses, it is clear that he does not share Samuel's dangerousness and charm.
Samuel at first compares favorably with the tame, overly civilized men in
her life (like her former lover, Philippe, or her colleague, Nicolas). But he
turns into a dependent, hysterical other, the object of the look who becomes
murderous like a conventional femme fatale. At the end, then, after Samuel
has been evicted from her workplace and her home, Muriel is still unable
to recover her peace of mind. Lying on her bed, she imagines Samuel either
dead from self-inflicted wounds or else exchanging looks with her while in
the company of another woman. However, the film's last shot shows Muriel
driving off alone, leaving everything behind, suggesting that she has less
control over her life than she has been willing to acknowledge. Though her
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The passionate relationship between Muriel (Nathalie Baye) and Samuel

(Daniel Duval) in Si je faime . . . prends garde à toi (1998). Source: BIFI.
Reproduced with permission from Rezo Films.
voice-over claims that the end of an affair is always the promise of a new
future, it is not clear what future Muriel has to look forward to.
The film's representation of a passionate affair reverses conventional
gender expectations, exposing the male body to the camera (including a
glimpse of an erect penis) rather than the female one. It allows the woman
to be the subject rather than the object of the gaze (except when she is
blindfolded), and presents the woman as the stronger of the two characters.
Yet, even though it is mostly focalized through the woman's point of view
and celebrates the way she handles her situation, its disturbing lack of
closure is a warning of the consequences of succumbing to passion.
These films construct heroines whose sexual desire takes the form of an
'amour fou' which is inherently doomed and puts their marriages, families
and/or careers at risk. They reverse the conventions of male-centered films
about 'amour fou' by constructing men as objects of desire and representing
sex from a point of view which prioritizes a female gaze. However, they
also demystify love and emphasize the vulnerability of their central protag-
onists. Whereas the younger heroine of UAmant magniftque is able to
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PERSONAL FILMS
benefit from her experiences, the attractive, older women of La Maison de

jade and Post coitum are completely destabilized and only just manage to
survive. Even in Si je faime . . . , where the heroine's instinct for self-
preservation pulls her back from total involvement, she is still unable to
simply walk away. These films thus dramatize women's active, desiring
sexuality, but also problematize it by showing how damaging it can be
when their objects of desire turn out to be fickle or dangerous. At the same
time, their representations of alternative sources of power, pleasure and
self-worth for women, through a career or within marriage and the family,
fail to generate the same intensity of feeling.
Perverse desires
There is a sense in which the representations of 'amour fou' discussed above

already include elements of perversity in the heroines' willing (if temporary)
destruction of their previous, relatively tranquil (and more socially accept-
able) lives. 'Amour fou' may even lead to murder, as in Daniele Dubroux's
Border Line (1992) (see chapter 4) and Catherine Breillat's Parfait amourl
(1996) (see chapter 7), each of which features a mature, middle-class pro-
fessional woman (and mother) who falls in love with a much younger man.
The problematic sexual desires of a middle-aged woman and mother are
also evoked in Agnès Varda's Kung Fu Master (1988), discussed below, and
Paule Muret's Rien que des mensonges/Nothing But Lies (1991). The latter
centers on a beautiful, idle, bourgeois Parisian housewife (a star vehicle for
Fanny Ardant), who has an affair with an old flame, the partner of one of
her girlfriends, as a way of rousing the interest of her (possibly unfaithful)
husband. Her perversion consists in paying a detective to follow her and
take photographs of her and her lover, suggesting that the pleasure she
demonstrates in his company is the product of exhibitionism and lies. The
film's study of her inner disintegration provides a critique of a woman
whose fragile sense of self is determined by her dependency on men.
However, it is not just the desires of mature women which are con-
structed as perverse. In the tradition of French iibertinage', Christine Pas-
cal's Adultere mode d'emploi (1995) offers a cynical portrayal of the sexual
mores of contemporary Parisian yuppies, while Catherine Breillat's Ro-
mance (1999), hailed as an example of women's appropriation and rework-
ing of potentially pornographic material, explores a young woman's
perverse personal quest for sexual satisfaction. The section ends with a
discussion of Tonie Marshall's Vénus Beauté (Institut), one of the most
successful films of 1999 (winning four Césars in 2000), which brings to-
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gether a number of the issues discussed in this chapter (and includes a

cameo role for Brigitte Roiian).
Kung Fu Master was based on an idea by actress Jane Birkin, conceived
during the making of Varda's documentary about her, Jane B. par Agues V.
(1988) (see chapter 5). Set in part in Birkin's own house in Paris, it evokes
a brief but provocative love affair between funny, loving Mary Jane (Birkin
herself), a single mother of forty with two daughters, Lucy and Lou (played
by Birkin's own daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon) and
Julien (played by Varda's son, Mathieu Demy), a small fourteen-year-old
schoolfriend of Lucy's and a Kung Fu Master fanatic with braces on his
teeth, whose parents have gone off to Africa. (Insert close-ups of the Kung
Fu Master pinball game show Julien overcoming obstacles in classic fashion
to rescue the damsel in distress.) Mary Jane's growing obsession with Julien
is documented by her voice-over commentary, but becomes a matter of
concern to others when their kiss is witnessed by a horrified Lucy. Mary
Jane's understanding English mother sends her daughter off to an idyllic,
deserted island with Julien and Lou, and the improbable mother-son couple
have a delightful time, including, it is understood (though not visualized),
sharing a bed (Julien is instructed to zip two double sleeping bags together).
However, on their return to Paris, Julien's parents threaten to take Mary
Jane to court, Lucy is taken away from her, Julien is obliged to change
schools, and a distraught Mary Jane becomes obsessed with Julien's failure
to get in contact.
Despite the lack of sexual chemistry between Birkin and Demy, Kung Fu
Master is a disturbing film because it cloaks in beautiful imagery an act of
what could be deemed sexual abuse. (Had Mary Jane's role been performed
by a middle-aged man, the film would have been accused of promoting
pedophilia.) It is not at all clear how the audience is meant to read the film,
though it is certainly positioned to be sympathetic to Mary Jane. Is Mary
Jane's love for Julien an extension of her mothering role, an expression of
her repressed, incestuous desires for a son? Is it an act of desperation on
the part of a lonely woman getting on in years and lacking relationships
with adults? Is it an extreme version of the French narrative of a boy's
initiation into adult sexuality through a relationship with an older woman
(as in Colette's Le Blé en herbe), told this time from the point of view of
the woman? Or are Birkin and Varda simply playing cinematic games with
their children? Whatever the case, the result for Mary Jane (as for the other
older women in this body of films) is solitude, tempered here eventually by
the support of her older daughter.
Adultere mode d'emploi/Adultery: A User's Guide, co-written by actress
Christine Pascal with her husband Robert Boner, who also produced the
film, was the last film directed by Pascal before her suicide at the age of 43
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in 1996. Her first film, the ironically named Felicità (1979), features Pascal
herself as its eponymous heroine, and demonstrates through a series of
flashbacks and dream sequences how perverse and self-destructive a young
woman's sexual desires can be. Adultere mode d'emploi is less obviously
shocking. It follows a day in the life of an ambitious young Parisian couple,
Bruno (Vincent Cassel) and Fabienne (Karin Viard), who are anxiously
awaiting the outcome of an architectural competition which will give them
their first state commission. In the course of the day each commits adultery,
Bruno by paying for sex with an unknown woman he encounters in a
private sex club, Fabienne by sleeping with their best friend, the older
Simon (Richard Berry), a sensuous Lebanese Jew who nurses an unrequited
passion for her. But at the end of the day, after winning the competition
and getting involved in a complicated drug-dealing subplot, they share a
bath back in their apartment and order is apparently restored. At the same
time, their couple is henceforth based on lies and infidelities (Bruno realizes
what Fabienne has done, while Fabienne remains ignorant of Bruno's activ-
ities).
The film's insistence on very long sequences foregrounding Bruno and
Fabienne's adulterous sex acts gives the film an awkward, uncomfortable
rhythm. Bruno's experiences in the sex club are shot as one long episode
with long takes and extremely explicit, disturbing close-ups. His excitement
derives from being tied up and sexually serviced by a beautiful, blindfolded
older woman, who in turn gets her pleasure from being humiliated in front
of him while her husband (like the audience) watches in the darkness. In
contrast, Fabienne's decision to let herself to be seduced by Simon, the
exotic, promiscuous other, is spun out in titillating fashion throughout the
film from the moment he first arouses her by giving her a massage. How-
ever, once the results of the competition are announced, Fabienne happily
ignores Simon, her passion for her career taking precedence over any other
feelings. The film thus satirizes the way in which the adulterous couple use
others for sexual gratification, and shows, with some cynicism, how banal
and inconsequential sex and adultery can be in the modern world of the
get-rich-quick yuppie.
Catherine Breillat's latest and, to date, most commercially successful film,
Romance, received enormous pre-publicity because it features Rocco Sif-
fredi, a well-known Italian porn star, the size of whose assets dominated
initial press reports. Paradoxically, its release in France consecrated Breil-
lat's status as an auteur and led to a retrospective of her work in Paris and
London in 1999 which included a screening of her hitherto unreleased first
film, Une vraie jeune fille (see chapter 1). Breillat originally conceived the
idea for Romance in the late 1970s and dedicated the film to the late
Christine Pascal. Despite its explicit representation of a series of sex acts,
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the film was not subjected to censorship, and most critics agree that Ro-
mance is not sexually arousing like a porn film. However, its woman-
centered meditation on sex and sexuality (the masochism of which recalls
Pauline Réage's erotic novel, Histoire d'O), make it a provocative and
difficult film which divides its audiences.
Romance, another of Breillat's ironic titles (like Farfait amour I), centers
on Marie (Caroline Ducey), a schoolteacher, and her 'romance' with Paul
(Sagamore Stévenin), a good-looking fashion model who is first seen being
made up as a toreador, an archetypal figure of dominant masculinity. How-
ever, Marie quickly reveals that Paul has stopped making love to her, even
though he still claims to love her. Thanks to an intermittent voice-over, she
explains that she loves Paul and cannot leave him, but feels 'dishonored' by
his lack of desire. The film constructs Paul's impotence (underlined by the
whiteness and frigidity of the mise-en-scène of his apartment) as both
disturbing and perverse, a way of actively controlling Marie and denying
her pleasure. When he refuses to respond to her attempts at fellatio, Marie
starts looking for other forms of sexual satisfaction. First, a chance encoun-
ter with Paolo (Siffredi) leads to a long, explicit, but very matter-of-fact
scene of sexual intercourse, centering on Siffredi's enormous erect penis,
which the characters contemplate while they talk as Siffredi puts on a
condom. Then Marie accepts the advances of her head teacher, Bernard
(Francois Berléand), who boasts of his sexual prowess with women and, in
the setting of his red-draped apartment, pleasures her by tying her up and
gagging her. Shot ritualistically in long, slow takes, Bernard rather matter-
of-factly immobilizes Marie's unresisting body and displays her directly to
the camera, putting his fingers in her vagina to demonstrate the strength of
her desire. Typically, Breillat's camerawork is still and concentrated, expos-
ing Marie's body to scrutiny through shots which include carefully com-
posed close-ups of her pubis and vagina. Uncomfortable as they are,
though, they avoid being fetishistic because of the lack of a mediating male
gaze. Marie also accepts a stranger's offer of oral sex in the stairwell of
Paul's apartment block, and finds herself being anally raped and humiliated.
It is only at this point that Paul gets aroused and manages to impregnate
Marie, even though he throws her off the bed before she can achieve
orgasm (in reaction to her assertion that she is the one fucking him).
The last section of the film explores the effects of Marie's virtually im-
maculate conception on her sense of self and her deteriorating relationship
with Paul. In a nightmarish hospital scene, a series of medical students are
seen poking around inside Marie's vagina, emphasizing the way a woman
is conventionally alienated from her genitals (and hence her sexuality).
Marie's alienation is further demonstrated in a sequence in which she imag-
ines being stretched out through a hole in a wall, with Paul standing by
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Marie (Caroline Ducey) subjects herself to masochistic pleasures in Ro-

mance (1999). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the Ron-
ald Grant Archive.
her head and various grotesque-looking men on the other side fucking her
at will. She explains, 'I just want to be a hole: the more gaping, the more
obscene, the truer it is; it's metaphysical, it's my purity'. However, the
shocking close-up of the baby's head emerging from Marie's vagina, which
fills the entire screen, demonstrates that Marie is more than just 'a hole'. It
is accompanied by an offscreen explosion which recalls that Marie had
turned on the gas taps in Paul's apartment after he got too drunk to take
her to hospital. The film ends on a curious dreamlike sequence of what is
presumably Paul's funeral, with Marie happily swaying to and fro with her
baby son who is also, ominously, named Paul.
Romance constructs a world of sexual stereotypes in which men are
reduced to impotence, violence or perversity and women have difficulty
breaking free from a puritanical legacy which dissociates mind from body
and invests the female body with shame and disgust. A narrative centered
on an active, controlling female who willingly and willfully subjects herself
to acts of masochistic sex has become part of Breillat's trademark, and
arguably betrays its origins in a certain type of 1970s feminist radicalism
which assumed that differences between the sexes were irredeemably antag-
onistic. The film's disturbing ending, which evacuates adult men and sug-
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gests that women can find alternative pleasures and power in motherhood,
implies that the war of the sexes is doomed to continue, even if women
have gained the upper hand. Though Breillat's aestheticization of perverse
heterosexual sex is both thoughtful and disturbing, Marie's quest for fulfill-
ment is not empowering for spectators of either sex who believe that gender
and sexuality are culturally constructed and subject to change.
Vénus Beauté (Institut), Tonie Marshall's fourth and most successful
feature film to date, incorporates a fascination with perverse female sexu-
ality within a more conventional romance plot. It stars Nathalie Baye as
Angele, an independent-minded woman aged around forty, who has been
emotionally scarred by love (her ex-husband bears the physical scars, the
result of a gunshot wound to his face). Angele works with two younger
women, Marie (Audrey Tatou) and Samantha (Mathilde Seigner), in the
Venus Beauty Salon run by Nadine (Bulle Ogier). The mise-en-scène of the
salon, with its pastel pink and blue lighting and decor (and a musical jingle
that plays when the door opens) sets it up as a place apart, a feminine space
which promises woman-centered pleasures. However, hopes that the film
might provide empowering representations of women are gradually dis-
pelled. Certainly, Angele displays concern for innocent Marie when she
becomes fascinated by a rich, heavily-scarred, older male client, and visits
promiscuous, loud-mouthed Samantha in hospital after her suicide attempt.
But the cameo portraits of the salon's aging female clients highlight each
woman's individual solitude and sadness rather than providing a substan-
tive critique of the way women are oppressed by the beauty myth. And
Angèle's independence and concern for other women is eventually subordi-
nated to the heterosexual romance plot and the concomitant theme of
female rivalry. (In fact it is Angèle's provincial aunts, played by Emanuelle
Riva and Micheline Presle, Marshall's mother, who provide the most posi-
tive representation of female solidarity.)
Angele gets her sexual pleasure from picking up strangers and having
one-night stands. She is first seen talking to one of her pick-ups in a station
buffet, and is humiliated and angry when he gives her the push. The scene
is observed by an attractive younger man, Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan), who
is moved by Angèle's vulnerability and sets about wooing and seducing her,
despite already having a younger girlfriend. Angele is initially hostile and
aggressive, but she gradually overcomes her misgivings and eventually falls
for the idea of love and romance. The film ends with Antoine going to the
salon with her Xmas present, a fairytale ball gown, and disarming and
dispatching his former girlfriend who, somewhat melodramatically, tries to
shoot them. The little pink lights of the salon flutter and go out, leaving the
couple to enjoy a magical happy ending (though the costumes and setting
emphasize that this is fantasy rather than realism).
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The film shrewdly mixes ingredients drawn from earlier films by women,
bringing together the theme of alienated sexuality (Angele treats men like
sex objects and takes pleasure in voyeurism, watching Marie being seduced
by her scarred client) and the theme of a woman falling in love with a
younger man. What makes it different is that, unusually for a 1990s film,
it allows its older heroine eventually to find happiness. But its 'happy
ending' undermines Angèle's independence of spirit and rejection of conven-
tional femininity. Though she may decline to use the salon's beauty prod-
ucts herself, washing in a basin on the landing instead, in the end her lover
restores her femininity, not only teaching her how to make love but also
how to dress appropriately. Two decades after Clouzot's UHomme fragile,
in which two independent adults negotiate the formation of the egalitarian
couple, the older, independent woman of Vénus Beauté finds herself disori-
ented by the rediscovery of love and romance.
The films discussed here construct female characters whose actively desir-
ing sexuality might be perceived as excessive and perverse, be it through
the pedophilic impulses of Kung Fu Master, the cynical adulterous acts of
Adultere mode d'emploi, the sado-masochistic pleasures of Romance, or
the self-alienating one-night stands of Vénus Beauté (Institut). However,
only in Kung Fu Master (and Rien que des mensonges) is the heroine
'punished' for her transgressive sexuality by finding herself condemned to
solitude. More importantly, each film contains a more or less implicit cri-
tique of men's inability to satisfy women, and so provides a justification for
their transgressive behavior.
Male bonding
As the previous sections have indicated, women's films about couples have
primarily cast men in secondary roles as partners and lovers, and con-
structed the male body as the object of desire. However, a significant body
of films by women actually focuses on men as desiring subjects, particularly
in relationship to other men. Their choice of topic reinforces the fact that
women do not want to be confined to making films about women, and is
consistently welcomed by the French critical establishment as evidence that
there is no female specificity to women's filmmaking practices. However, if
masculinity is a cultural construct in the same way as femininity (Neale,
1983), then films about men should allow women to deconstruct dominant
masculinity and establish a right of access to worlds which may otherwise
be denied them. What is most evident in women's recent dramatizations of
men's lives, however, is their empathy with male characters who are mar-
ginalized by their sexuality or ethnicity, inviting identification between
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women and other oppressed groups. In fact, male homosexuals and ethnic
minority men feature more prominently in women's films (as in French
cinema more generally) than lesbians and ethnic minority women.
A common narrative structure in women's films about alternative mas-
culinities is the bringing together of two men whose similarities and differ-
ences enable an exploration of the spectrum of homosocial and homosexual
desire (Sedgwick, 1990). For example, De sable et de sang (1988), written
and directed by Jeanne Labrune, investigates the spectacle, rituals and
violence of the masculine world of bullfighting. It confronts a bullfighter
(Patrick Catalifo), whose identity is entirely bound up with his profession,
with a doctor (Sami Frey), a man who has repressed his Spanish origins
and who (like the filmmaker and, possibly, the audience) is both fascinated
and repulsed by it. Their interaction leads to the breaking down of the
certainties of both men.13 A similar structure is to be found in Noir et blanc
(Claire Devers, 1986) and S'en fout la mort (Claire Denis, 1990), discussed
in chapter 7, and in UAutre coté de la mer (Dominique Cabrera, 1997),
discussed in chapter 5, as well as in Peau neuve (Emilie Deleuze, 1999),
discussed below.14 The danger of such a structure, however, is that, even if
it deconstructs masculinity, women remain a marginal presence, at times
even conventional objects of exchange between men.
Peau neuve/New Skin, shown at Cannes in 1999, is the first full-length
feature by Emilie Deleuze (born 1964, daughter of Gilles), who trained at
the FEMIS (and made L'Incruste for Arte's drama series Tous les gar cons et
les filles de leur age). It stars Samuel Le Bihan as Alain, a likeable, compe-
tent video games engineer living in Paris, who decides in a moment of
existential anguish to give up his job, and Marciai Di Fonzo Bo as Manu,
a vulnerable, childlike young man whom Alain befriends in the course of a
four month training course in Corrèze, where both men are learning to
drive enormous mechanical diggers.
At the same time as it explores the homosocial relationship between the
two men, the film takes care to establish Alain's heterosexual credentials.
Not only does he have a wife and daughter, he also sleeps with the beautiful
woman who works at the employment agency. Nevertheless, the Parisian,
family-centered aspect of his life is gradually phased out as Alain becomes
more and more involved both with mastering the machinery (there are
extended sequences of shots detailing the group of men at work and cele-
brating the power and mass of the primeval, phallic earthmovers) and
caring for his new friend. The film opens with an uplifting dream sequence
in which, thinking about giving up his job, he addresses his fellow travelers
on the metro and gets them to join in a protest chorus with him. Alain
gradually undergoes a metamorphosis from someone who wants to relin-
quish routines and responsibilities to someone who is willing to take on
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responsibility for someone else. In the final scene, after the inadequate
Manu has predictably failed the final driving test, Alain saves him from
committing suicide (dramatically positioned on the edge of an uncompleted
stretch of a motorway overpass) by offering to take him back to Paris and
build a life together.
Deleuze's sympathetic portrayal of the world of men in general and of a
conventionally masculine man who becomes 'feminized' by his caring rela-
tionship with another in particular, is undermined by her inability to insert
such behavior within the world of mature heterosexual relationships and
parenting. Alain's metamorphosis, represented as a shift from the world of
simulation and artifice (the video games, Paris) to the real and natural (the
outdoor life, the provinces), can be read rather as a retreat from the world
of the family dominated by his attractive, competent wife, a nurse, who is
represented as insensitive to his new life and able to cope without him
relatively easily. The film may be symptomatic of current concern about the
crisis in masculinity and the failure of the heterosexual couple, but it finds
its solution in regressive homosociality rather than in a new negotiation of
relationships between the sexes.
Conclusion
For the most part, these investigations of gender, sexuality and the couple
have been made by the generation of women who lived through May 1968
and the subsequent failure of feminism in France. They have not generally
been mainstream commercial successes, with the exception of films by well-
known directors with star casts like L'Amour nu, Coup de foudre and
Vénus Beauté (Institut), each of which is, in its way, a 'feel good' film. (It
should not be forgotten that sexuality and the couple are also topics which
are reworked in women's genre films.) Nevertheless, within the body of
films discussed here there have clearly been some interesting shifts of ap-
proach during the period in question. In the early 1980s, the after-effects
of second wave feminism allowed women to continue to provide feminist
deconstructions of the traditional patriarchal couple (as in Coup de foudre
and Le Destiti de Juliette) but also to envisage the possibility of new types
of couples and alternative lifestyles, based on more egalitarian principles
and changing gender roles. These films assert women's rights to economic
independence and professional careers, to sharing lives as equal partners
with men, and to assuming control of their body and sexuality. And if the
couple proves unworkable, they also posit female bonding as a positive
alternative, as in the female friendships of Coup de foudre and Le Jupon
rouge, and the mother-daughter relationship of Le Destiti de Juliette.
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COUPLES
In the 1990s, however, films about gender and sexuality are less optimis-
tic. Women may have achieved economic independence, but they are not
liberated from heterosexual desire. Though w o m e n are constructed as sub-
jects rather objects, they are still dependent on desirable but inadequate or
unattainable men for the fulfillment of their desires, and the growing num-
ber of representations of older w o m e n is a reflection of women's increasing
fear of being betrayed by their aging bodies and losing their powers of
seduction. Frustrated by the lack of passion in their everyday lives, w o m e n
in these 1990s narratives get carried away by love and desire or actively
seek pleasure in more perverse ways, but at the end of the day they rarely
find contentment. For though the men the w o m e n fall for or play their sex
games with (the heartless beautiful, younger man, the dangerous, sensual
older man) are depicted with some ambivalence, the films do not challenge
heterosexual expectations, nor do they provide women with other re-
sources. Forced to resign themselves to the failure of the couple, the w o m e n
survivors are not necessarily any the wiser or able to content themselves
with other pleasures in life. Instead, the majority of these films endlessly
rehearse the continuing failure of and desire for the (impossible) couple, a
desire that only Vénus Beauté (Institut) rather regressively dares to satisfy.
Notes
1. Films about much older women are still something of a rarity, honorable excep-
tions including Nelly Kaplan's Charles et Lucie (1979), Charlotte Dubreuil's La
Cote d'amour (1982), and Claire Devers's television film L'Embellie. A good
example of a sexy older woman is the figure of the mother played by Claudia
Cardinale in Dubreuil's Elles ne pensent qu'à ca (1994).
2. The case of Baise-moi (2000) is more problematic in this respect.
3. In L'Amour viole (1978), Yannick Bellon challenged conventional notions about
sexuality in a highly controversial film about rape, which made clear that rape
is about patriarchal power and violence towards women, not about sexuality.
4. The film can usefully be compared with Sólveig Anspach's more recent Haut les
coeurs! (1999), a first feature starring Karin Viard as a pregnant woman with
breast cancer whose partner is fully supportive of her.
5. A more transgressive version of the 'modern couple' is to be found in Charlotte
Dubreuil's La Cote d'amour (1982), in which Helle and Louis (sic), each in
their fifties and divorced, each with a good job and a complicated set of family
relations, still manage to find love and romance together.
6. Kurys further reworks the traumatic breakdown of her parents' marriage in La
Baule Les Pins (1990), discussed in chapter 1.
7. Clement developed the theme of the modern woman juggling roles and lovers
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PERSONAL FILMS
in her second film, Dieu que les femmes sont amoureuses (1994), a comedy
starring Catherine Jacob.
8. The equally fragmented narrative of Christine Citti's Ruptures, set in Belleville,
is structured around the reactions of a group of Bohemian friends to the suicide
of a young woman who had been one of their number.
9. For a history of lesbianism in film, see Weiss (1992).
10. In La Vie rèvée des anges (Eric Zoncka, 1998), as in Mina Tannenbaum (Mar-
tine Dugowson, 1994), discussed in chapter 2, the heterosexual imperative
produces a tragic ending to a story of female friendship.
11. The representation of sexuality in Tristesse et beauté, based on a novel by
Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, is heavily influenced by the glossy eroticism
of the 'cinema du look'.
12. Isserman's childhood was the inspiration for her later comedy Dieu, Vamant de
ma mère et le fds du charcutier (1995).
13. Labrune's earlier television film, La Part de Vautre (1985), shown at Cannes in
the Perspectives section, is a poetic investigation of a similar love-hate relation-
ship between twin brothers, played by Pierre and Laurent Malet.
14. See also Agnieszka Holland's period drama, Rimbaud Verlaine/Total Eclipse
(1997), a study of the homosexual relationship between the two nineteenth
century poets, analyzed by Edward Baron Turk (Turk, 1998).
I 10
CHAPTER FOUR
Families
Women's representations of gender, sexuality and the couple are often

bound up with critiques of the traditional family, as is already clear from
films discussed in chapters 1 and 3. Growing up films generally provide a
critical view of family life from the point of view of the adolescent/child,
while films about couples explore the contradictions between women's
aspirations for economic and/or sexual autonomy and their roles as dutiful
partners, wives and mothers. As family ties have changed and loosened
over the last few decades, as a result, in part, of second wave feminism,
women's films increasingly take as their topic the insecure, unstable rela-
tionships between members of the fragmented family other than wives and
husbands. The negotiation of such relationships constitutes the dominant
theme of the films discussed in this chapter, but also informs a number of
women's genre films, especially comedy.
There are, of course, occasional films which provide positive representa-
tions of the conventional nuclear or extended family, one example being
L'Eté prochain (1985) by veteran director Nadine Trintignant (born 1934).
L'Eté prochain/Next Summer stars members of Trintignant's own family
(ex-husband Jean-Louis and daughter Marie), and pays homage to family
life by evoking a decade in the lives of three generations of a large family
living in a villa in the hills behind Nice. Its 'happy ending' is achieved by
glossing over troubling events like the father's philandering, and reuniting
the family after his life-threatening operation for a brain tumor. More
typical of women's appraisal of family life is an apparently light-hearted yet
actually rather disturbing film by Charlotte Dubreuil (born 1940), Elles ne
pensent qu'à ga/Women Have Only One Thing on Their Minds (1994), co-
written with Georges Wolinski. The failure of both the modern couple and
the extended family is foregrounded through the problematic relationship
between the heroine (Carole Laure), whose recurrent near fatal accidents
may be suicide attempts, and her glamorous, sexually-liberated mother
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PERSONAL FILMS
(Claudia Cardinale), who sleeps with her son-in-law as well as her ex-
husband; the film ends with the daughter's decision to depart with an
attractive stranger, walking out on both husband and family. Though Du-
breuil, too, comes from an older generation of filmmakers (she started
making films in the 1970s), René Predai argues that the breakdown of the
couple and the family is a common theme of 'le jeune cinema frangais'
(Predai, 1998: 19). Arguably, it is a theme which allows women writers
and directors to appropriate terrain specific to women's experiences and to
engage with aspects of family life which have been relatively neglected by
their male peers, particularly the representation of mothers and daughters.
A common assumption of Anglo-American film theory has been the
absence of complex, realist representations of motherhood and the mother-
daughter bond in dominant male-oriented cinematic representations of the
family. As E. Ann Kaplan has demonstrated, such maternal figures as are
present have tended to be idealized or demonized according to the 'angel/
witch dichotomy' (Kaplan, 1992: 183), and feminists have called for rep-
resentations which get away from 'tales of maternal malevolence and mal-
ice' which hold mothers responsible for the psychic damage done to their
children (Walters, 1992: 229). As Beauvoir asserted in The Second Sex
(1949), motherhood need not be conceived as woman's destiny but only as
one aspect of a woman's identity (and not always that). The question, then,
is to what extent films by women challenge the notion of motherhood as
women's destiny, and manage to situate mothering in a socio-historical
context which recognizes how motherhood is culturally and socially con-
structed.1
The representation of mother-daughter relationships is equally signifi-
cant. Whereas Oedipal logic has insisted that mother-daughter intimacy is
somehow regressive and requires mother and daughter to separate for their
own good, feminist theory has underlined the significance of pre-Oedipal
mother-daughter unity in the establishment of women's sense of self (Cho-
dorow, 1978) and their desire both for connection with children and for
nurturing relationships outside the adult heterosexual couple. The mother-
daughter bond can be seen in particular as the source of women's ability to
enjoy ongoing, meaningful relationships with other women, including
women of different generations (the desire for which has been part of a
feminist project of drawing women together). Women's representations of
relationships between mothers and daughters thus offer an opportunity for
assessing the changing importance of relationships between women in
women's filmmaking in France.
Women's films which foreground motherhood and family relationships
are discussed here in three sections: films which are tributes to the lives of
the director's own mothers, films which focus on mother-daughter relation-
I 12
FAMILIES
ships, and films which question the ideology of motherhood through figures
of women who are not actually mothers at all. The chapter concludes with
a section on representations of fatherhood and a section on relationships
between adult siblings.
Tributes to the mother
Several films by women have been inspired, if indirectly, by the past expe-
riences of the director's mother (or surrogate mother), including Diane
Kurys's Coup de foudre (discussed in chapter 3) and, in the late 1990s,
Rachida Krim's Sous les pieds des femmes (discussed in chapter 9), Sandrine
Veysset's Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noel? (1996) and Myriam Boyer's La
Mère Christain (1999), discussed below.2 For the most part, these films pay
tribute to the mother's courage and determination in overcoming the diffi-
culties in her life. In Coup de foudre, for example, the mother breaks away
from a stultifying marriage and defies social expectations in order to live
her life free of patriarchal constraints in the company of her intimate female
friend and their children. However, the film also registers the daughter's
ambivalence about her mother's refusal to sacrifice herself to a conventional
marriage and family life and, in fact, Kurys's other films are divided be-
tween those which construct loving, admirable mothers (La Baule Les Pins,
Un bomme amoureux) and those informed by hysterical, repressive mothers
(Cocktail Molotov, A la folie). In Sous les pieds des femmes, Krim draws
on the memories of her Algerian immigrant mother and other Algerian
women living in France at the time of the Algerian War of Independence,
and subverts stereotypical images of the downcast, subservient Algerian
mother. Her heroine is a courageous, intelligent woman who participated
in the FLN resistance but also identifies the Islamic subordination of
women as a key factor in the contemporary crisis in Algeria. Krim writes
herself into the narrative through the role of the fictional daughter whose
own daughter is strongly attached to her grandmother, thus incorporating
an homage to her mother and their Algerian roots into the film.
Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noèlì/Will It Snow For Xmas? was one of the
most successful films of 1996, winning the Louis Delluc Prize and the 1997
Cesar for Best First Film. It was directed by Sandrine Veysset (born 1967),
who had been introduced to cinema by working on the set of Leos Carax's
Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991). Set in a vague not too distant past,
possibly the late 1970s, it details the energetic resistance of a mother (Dom-
inique Reymond) and her seven children to the treatment they receive at
the hands of a tyrannical patriarchal figure (Daniel Duval), who is their
employer as well as being the mother's lover and the children's father, and
I 13
PERSONAL FILMS
The devoted, loving mother (Dominque Reymond) and her children in Y

aura-t-il de la neige a Noel (1996)? Supplied by and reproduced with
permission from the Ronald Grant Archive.
who has another legitimate family elsewhere (Tarr, 1998). Its fascination
lies in part in its style, which combines a quasi-documentary, unsentimental
approach to the material reality of farm life and women's labor with a
more timeless and, arguably, more sentimentalized fairytale narrative based
on the mother-centered family. The film charts the progressive deterioration
in the relationship between the (anonymous) couple through the passing of
the seasons, from summer through autumn to Christmas (each season shot
separately) and reaches a climax when the predatory father makes a pass
at his eldest daughter, Jeanne. As a result, the mother cuts off communica-
tion with him and envisages taking the lives of both herself and her chil-
dren, a tragedy which is only averted by her awakening on Christmas
morning to the arrival of snow and the acceptance of life. However, the
status and significance of her awakening (is it real or is it just a dream?)
remain deliberately ambivalent.
Y aura-t-il de la neige a Noel? constructs a devoted, loving mother who,
from the beginning, is in tune with the needs of her children and ready to
defend them from harm. Yet her long term acceptance of and complicity in
her apparently intolerable situation continues to put her children at risk.
Her reluctance or inability to escape her situation was condemned by
feminists in France, and raises the question of whether the film actually
I 14
FAMILIES
idealizes a rather reactionary image of a self-sacrificing mother. However,

Veysset provides several explanations for the mother's apparently fatalistic
behavior: her teenage dream of losing a wager with God, resulting in her
having seven children as a forfeit, her background as a war orphan which
suggests she finds being abandoned by her partner familiar and 'natural',
and her inability to imagine providing for seven children on her own or
living on a council estate instead of on the farm. The mother compensates
for the hardship of her children's lives by creating an alternative, magical
world in the spaces left available to her, and it is this aspect of the film
which is most appealing. It opens with a fast cut sequence shot by a playful,
handheld camera which, like a home movie, tracks the children messing
about in the womblike, maternal spaces of the barn. It then incorporates a
series of scenes which show how the mother makes the father's harshness
and indifference bearable, speaking to her children with endearments and
bringing magic moments into their lives, like doing gymnastics on Sunday,
or watching the summer fireworks or, in a wonderful slow motion se-
quence, making their way out in the rain together under a sheet of plastic,
or, indeed, enjoying a last candlelit Christmas meal. In such scenes of
collective pleasure, the father is necessarily peripheral or absent.
After a narrative of maternal devotion, the mother's attempt at both
suicide and infanticide (she turns on the gas in their shared bedroom) comes
as a shock and suggests that her (temporary) inability to recognize the
boundaries between herself and her children is little better than the father's
(persistent) blurring of the boundaries between the self and the other in his
daily exploitation of them. The film's ending glosses over the mother's
continuing predicament in her relationship with the father, but its visuali-
zation of the children's separation from her as they go out to play in the
snow sets up hope for the future, a future confirmed by the dedication to
Veysset's mother which follows. The final image of mother with baby at
the window behind the falling snow may resemble a universal, idealized,
Madonna-like figure, but in the course of the film the mother has been
shown to be not just a devoted mother, subservient mistress and exploited
worker but also a fierce defender of her children's rights, a maker of
miracles, and a potential child-killer. Her complexity and contradictions
mean that spectators can read in her the mother figure they most want to
see. But the film's provision of both a psychological and a socio-economic
rationale for her behavior suggest that her complicity in her situation can-
not just be attributed to her 'destiny' as a mother.
La Mère Christain/Mother Christain, written, directed and produced by
actress Myriam Boyer, is dedicated to her adoptive parents, though their
identity is only clear thanks to the press reviews. The film is set in the 1950s
in the Mulatière district of Lyons, and strives rather ponderously to recap-
I 15
PERSONAL FILMS
ture the atmosphere of 1930s working-class poetic realism. It centers on an

ungainly, grieving woman, played by Boyer herself, whose little girl is dead
and who is prepared to murder the man she suspects is responsible, one of
the wretched clients of her dismal riverside bar. In the meantime she acts as
a substitute mother to the man's young daughter, Gigi (based on Boyer
herself as a child). A happy ending of sorts is achieved when her daughter's
death is revealed to have been an accident, and she becomes aware that
both Gigi and Gigi's father are in need of her mothering. The film ends as
the camera tactfully withdraws from the scene of the new family about to
be constituted, centered on the non-biological mother. Though it received
limited distribution, La Mère Christain is a salutary reminder that the
activity of mothering can usefully be distinguished from the act of giving
birth.
These films inspired by 'real life' mothers do not just offer idealized
celebrations of motherhood, but also locate their mother figures within a
more or less clearly delineated historical context. There is nevertheless a
dichotomy between the representation of mothers capable of murderous
violence in defense of their children ( Y aura-t-il de la neige and La Mère
Christain), which risk naturalizing motherhood as women's destiny, and
mothers who privilege passion for others and for their own autonomy
{Coup de foudre and Sous les pieds des femmes), which offer daughters
(and spectators) the legacy of strong women capable of taking charge of
their own, multi-faceted destiny.
Mother-daughter relationships
Three films by women address the need for mother and daughter to find a
balance in their relationship between identification and separation, Ma
chérie (Charlotte Dubreuil, 1980) and, fifteen years later, two first features
written and directed by filmmakers associated with 'le jeune cinema fran-
cos', Circuit Carole (Emanuelle Cuau, 1995) and Rosine (Christine Carri-
ère, 1995). 3 All three intensify their dramatization of the mother-daughter
relationship by locating it within a single parent family at a time when the
teenage daughter is old enough to contemplate leaving home and when the
mother, therefore, is forced to confront differences in age and aspiration
which have been obscured by earlier sisterly similarities.
Ma chérie/Sweetie was the second feature to be written and directed by
Charlotte Dubreuil, and is the most obviously feminist-influenced film of
the three. It opens with the apparently liberated, professional Jeanne
(Marie-Christine Barrault) taking her teenage daughter, Sarah (Beatrice
Bruno), to the doctor to get her a prescription for the pill. A number of
I 16
FAMILIES
sequences stress the likeness and solidarity between mother and daughter,
as when they are taken for sisters in the street, shop and sing together, and
share a birthday party. At the same time there are increasing tensions
between them as Sarah seeks to establish her own identity while Jeanne
uses her relationship with her daughter as an excuse not to commit herself
to other aspects of her life, including the possibility of a new relationship
with a man. At the end, when Sarah moves out to live with a group of
girlfriends, Jeanne is forced to realize that she must face the future without
relying so exclusively on intimacy with her daughter. At the same time,
there are indications that it is still possible for mother and daughter to
remain in touch, particularly as Jeanne is still in contact with her own
mother.
In contrast, Circuit Carole centers on a mother-daughter relationship in
which the mother's inability to face separation from her daughter leads to
tragedy. Circuit Carole was directed by Emmanuelle Cuau (born 1964),
who graduated from the IDHEC in 1986 and had previously directed a
number of shorts. The film opens with scenes of apparent complicity and
intimacy between Marie (Laurence Cote) and her mother, Jeanne (Bulle
Ogier), an office worker; but differences surface on an otherwise enjoyable
shopping expedition when Jeanne is shocked by her daughter's shoplifting.
Ironically, it is the mother's assumption of her daughter's identity to get her
a job interview which precipitates the drama. After her interview at a
factory in the Parisian banlieue, Marie discovers the thrills of the Circuit
Carole (a motorcycle track), meets a biker, Alexandre, who becomes her
boyfriend, and eventually starts racing herself. As a result, she neglects her
mother and eventually moves out of her flat, after warning her that she
should love her less and be less attentive and placid. Jeanne continues to
smile, the gentle trembling of her mouth betraying her uncertainty and
despair; but after venturing out to the racetrack herself, she becomes ob-
sessed with the possibility of Marie having an accident. When a week goes
by without a phone call from her daughter (or anyone else), she assumes
that Marie must have been taken to the hospital, by which time she is so
disturbed that she has to be hospitalized herself. When Marie eventually
calls and visits her (and tries, desperately, to take her away with her),
Jeanne has become catatonic and incapable of responding, leaving Marie
to go out alone into the night.
Circuit Carole is beautifully acted, the mother's softness (made more
poignant by extra-textual knowledge of the tragic death of Ogier's own
actress daughter, Pascale) contrasting through minute shifts in expressions
and gestures with the daughter's hardness. 4 It is also beautifully shot, con-
trasting the cozy, womblike red spaces of the mother's flat with the wide,
open spaces of the racetrack (named after a twenty-year-old girl who died
I 17
PERSONAL FILMS
Mother-daughter intimacy: Marie (Laurence Còte) and her mother (Bulle

Ogier) in Circuit Carole (1995). Supplied by and reproduced with permis-
sion from Pierre Grise Distribution.
on the racetrack at Rungis). Whereas at the beginning Marie had filled the
flat with her singing of 'What if love?' from The Marriage of Figaro, after
her departure the mother faces silence and emptiness, exacerbated by the
absence of family, friends or colleagues. And whereas the racetrack is full
of excitement when viewed through Marie's eyes, it is full of danger when
perceived from the mother's point of view via tilted angles and an exces-
sively noisy soundtrack. The mother's overinvestment in her mothering role
is represented as pathological to the extent that she has no resources left to
invest in herself and is unable to see her daughter as an independent other
person. Nevertheless, the film also represents Marie's desire for separation
as extreme, even if it is understandable. Marie brutally walks out on the
lunch her mother has lovingly prepared for her, describes herself as 'une
garce' ('a bitch') when she is invited to dinner, and makes no attempt to
bring her two worlds together. However, at the end, when she has to be
forcibly separated from her mother by the nursing staff, she seems to
become aware of what she has lost. The ending does not reintegrate Marie
into the adult world of the heterosexual couple, but rather leaves the
spectator with her guilt, pain and loss.
Rosine addresses the mother-daughter relationship through a growing-
I 18
FAMILIES
up film which focuses on the love of an exuberant fifteen-year-old girl for

her neglectful, vulnerable working-class mother, and is shot primarily from
the point of view of its eponymous heroine (Eloise Charretier). Directed by
Christine Carrière (born 1960), who studied at the FEMIS and had previ-
ously made a number of fictional and documentary shorts, Rosine is set in
the North of France, in a small industrial town on the road to Calais. Its
opening sequence expresses the emptiness and monotony of Rosine's life as
she cycles past a row of houses intoning their numbers (part of a composi-
tion which she delivers to her schoolteacher). Rosine is obsessed with her
mother, Marie (Mathilde Seigner), a factory worker who was only fifteen
herself when she got pregnant, and still behaves as though she were a
childless young woman. In the home, it is Rosine who acts as the mother,
cleaning up after Marie and listening to her troubles with men (as when
she is nearly raped by her lorry-driver 'friend'). Their unequal, but in its
own way, caring relationship, is disrupted by the unexpected return of
Pierre (Laurent Olmédo), the man who had abandoned Marie (Rosine's
father). Rosine invites Pierre back into the home, partly out of curiosity
and partly to make her mother happy. But Pierre brings with him a baggage
of macho notions about his paternal rights, and as his relationship with
Marie goes from bad to worse (he starts to hit her), so he becomes inter-
ested in Rosine as a potential substitute. The drama comes to a head on
Christmas Day, when Pierre waits for Rosine to come back from her carol
service and rapes her. Traumatized and unable to tell Marie what has
happened, Rosine quickly realizes that she must get away. Only once she
has left home does Marie begin to realize how much her daughter means
to her, and whispers to her bullying partner that he has to go.
Rosine stresses the value of love between mother and daughter, a love
which, as in Circuit Carole, is only recognized when it is probably too late,
this time by the mother rather than the daughter. It also critiques conven-
tional notions about the desirability of the nuclear family, since Marie's
deluded desire for a man in her life leads only to violence and rape (and
her neighbor, Chantal, whom she mocks, is seen to be better off single).
Though the film's social realist topic is grim, it is rendered bearable by the
performances of the two actresses, particularly Charretier as the alternately
vulnerable and aggressive Rosine, who looks to be a survivor, even though
her disappearance from the image track at the end of the film leaves some
doubt as to her future.
These films explore models of mothering and mother-daughter relation-
ships and accept that separation from the mother is necessary for the
daughter to achieve autonomy. However, whereas Ma cbérie affirmed the
possibility of working out an amicable, adult relationship between (middle
class) mother and daughter, the (lower middle and working-class) mother-
I 19
PERSONAL FILMS
daughter relationships of the 1990s are only truly valued as a consequence

of narratives of separation and loss. In each case, however, these films
appear to be issuing a warning about the dangers of underestimating the
importance of mother-daughter intimacy in a society which normally over-
values women's relationships with men.
The ideology of motherhood
In the last year of the millennium a number of films by women end with
pregnancy or childbirth, as if to affirm women's commitment to an un-
known and uncertain future. In Breillat's Romance, Marie gives birth to a
son, marking a new stage in her relationships with men; in Corsini's La
Nouvelle Eve, Camille finds herself happily pregnant after the failure of her
marriage and love affair; while in Vermillard's Lila Lili, Marie is in labor,
but refuses to make a big deal out of her condition or to reveal the identity
of the father of her unborn child. Pregnancy and motherhood are thus
represented as more or less empowering for women, and do not confine
them to traditional caring, nurturing roles. In contrast, in Haut les coeursl
(1999), a first autobiographically-inspired feature by documentary film-
maker, Sólveig Anspach (born 1960), the heroine Emma (Karin Viard), a
happily married but childless double bass player, has to make a choice
between herself and her unborn child. Diagnosed with breast cancer when
she is already pregnant, she opts for a risky treatment which will allow the
baby to be brought to term rather than starting immediate treatment and
having an abortion. The film, a star vehicle for Karin Viard, never really
questions the rightness of Emma's choice, which is confirmed by her ecstatic
bonding with her newborn baby. However, the film's ending crosscuts be-
tween shots of Emma, alone amid the pure white mise-en-scène of the
hospital isolation ward, and her supportive husband (Laurent Lucas), who
is left nursing the baby. The strains of a double bass over the closing credits
suggest that Emma will survive, but the film's underlying message seems to
be an affirmation of the value of maternal self-sacrifice.
Women's acceptance of pregnancy and childhood in films by women is
rarely countered by representations of women who refuse their maternal
role. In Claire Devers's Chimère (1989), the heroine welcomes her un-
planned pregnancy, even though it leads, perversely, to various tragic mis-
understandings and a miscarriage; in Diane Kurys's Après Vamour (1992),
it enables the heroine to get writing again. Ada's offscreen abortion in
Martine Dugowson's Portraits chinois (1997) is extremely unusual and
glossed over very quickly, as is Nénette's resistance to having a child in
Claire Denis's Nénette et Boni (discussed in chapter 1). In this context, the
120
FAMILIES
sympathetic treatment of mothers who walk out on their children in Brigitte

Roiian's Post co'itum animal triste, Tonie Marshall's Pas très catholique and
Nicole Garcia's Un weekend sur deux (discussed elsewhere) seems particu-
larly subversive, as does the deconstruction of the ideology of motherhood
in Daniele Dubroux's Border Line (1991) and Claire Simon's Sinon, oui
(1997), both of which could also be classified as crime dramas.
Border Line was Daniele Dubroux's third film after Les Amants terribles
and La Petite allumeuse and received unanimous critical acclaim. However,
it undeservedly suffered from poor distribution and advertising because its
opening date was delayed (the independent art cinemas were unable to
screen it as planned). The title is a psychiatric term which refers to the
boundary between sanity and madness, and the film, like Hitchcock's Ver-
tigo, traces the progression of an obsession which transports the spectator
out of the comfortable suburban bourgeois world inhabited by its central
character, Hélène (played by Dubroux herself), and into a world in which
apparent certainties are questioned and overturned. In particular, Dub-
roux's complex and at times comical Oedipal thriller explores the hypothe-
sis that a woman might be unsure of whether or not she is a mother.
The film initially takes the form of a bourgeois drama. Hélène, a glam-
orous but neurotic middle-aged woman who restores paintings for a living,
is comfortably married to Alexandre (André Dussolier), an eminent doctor,
but drops everything—dinner party, husband and home—to start an affair
with Julien (David Leotard), the son of her former, now dead, lover,
Charles. However, when she discovers that Julien's date of birth coincides
with the end of her affair with his father, she starts believing that he might
actually be her son. Her behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, including
keeping Julien's fridge stacked with bottles of milk. Treating his body like
a painting to be restored, she photographs Julien in his sleep (providing
odd-angled extreme close-ups of fragments of his chin, the sole of his foot,
his ankle, his curled-up hand) and deliberately cuts him while shaving to
take a blood sample (which cannot be tested without his permission). She
becomes pathologically jealous of Julien's 'real' mother, Irene (Manuella
Gouray), a cheap and vulgar pedicurist, whom Alexandre tracks down in
the hope of retrieving his marriage. Despite being found with Irene's dead
body, Hélène, under observation in a psychiatric hospital, convinces the
psychiatrist that she is innocent and that there is reason to think that Julien
might be her son (she explains that she had a car accident in Corsica when
she was pregnant, and that Charles told her the baby was dead and took it
away). Although Alexandre, watching Hélène on video, thinks she is mak-
ing it up, the psychiatrist affirms that there is nothing clinically wrong with
her. At the closing dinner party, held to mark Hélène's release, a philosophy
teacher argues that people are motivated not by love but by the drive to
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procreate. At this point, an insert flashback shows how Hélène deliberately

suppressed her perceived rival by causing her to electrocute herself in the
bath. When she then shows Julien's photograph to her guests as though he
were 'her' son, Alexandre hypocritically confirms her story. What Hélène
has demonstrated, however, is not the drive to procreate but rather the
pathological desire to be acknowledged as one who has procreated. The
final replay of her first passionate embrace with Julien adds a further twist
to the way in which Hélène's 'border line' behavior is to be understood.
Border Line's intriguing, suspenseful narrative and visual style open up
layers of meanings which highlight the difficulty of providing a single,
rational explanation for Hélène's obsession with Julien and her tranquil
ability to commit murder to keep him to herself (a plan which misfires
inasmuch as Julien then leaves for America). The resurgence of her madness
(Charles hints at earlier manifestations) can be read simultaneously as the
sign of a midlife crisis and the need to escape a frustrating bourgeois
marriage (the theme of Rouan's Post coi'tum animal triste), and, more
interestingly, as a displacement of her repressed desire for a child. Alterna-
tively, her projection of herself as Julien's mother may simply be a strategy
to avoid guilt about fulfilling her adulterous sexual desires. Whatever the
case, Hélène calmly defies the attempts of the men in the film to subject her
to analysis, as she does the spectator, who is left uneasily enmeshed in her
unhealthy self-delusions.
In Border Line, the heroine's obsession with her (presumably imagined)
maternal status is a symptom of her disturbed state of mind. In Sinon, ouil
A Foreign Body, the heroine's desire to project herself as a mother-to-be is
less obviously pathological, but rather a reflection of the strength of familial
and social pressures. Sinon oui is a first feature film written and directed by
Claire Simon (born 1955), who had previously worked in documentary
films (see chapter 5). Based on a fait divers (and subtitled Reconstitution
d'une histoire vraie), the film took ten years of research and documentation
to reach fruition. Set in Nice, it stars unknown actors in the central roles of
Magali (Catherine Mendez), who gives dancing lessons in a school run by
nuns, and her husband Alain (Emmanuel Clarke), who works at night for
a local radio station. It traces the course of Magali's improvised, Active
pregnancy from the moment the idea is put into her head after a night time
car accident, through the ways in which her family react to the news, her
decision to participate in the fiction (wearing a theatrical prosthesis which
once belonged to the Victorine film studios), and the inadvertent complicity
of various health officials. After creating suspense as to how long she can
prolong the deception, the film reaches a climax when she steals a newborn
baby from the hospital and convinces her father's doctor to examine her
and sign the birth certificate.
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If Magali's ability to sustain such a deception seems improbable, Simon

makes it convincing through a mix of documentary and art cinema tech-
niques which are expressive of Magali's state of mind but which also
frustrate the spectator's desire to see what is going on. It is obvious from
the start that the film will not provide an easily readable, realist narrative.
It begins with surveillance camera shots of night time traffic, searching for
a meaningful image, at the same time as it gestures towards the cinema of
Jean-Luc Godard in its opening credit sequence, spoken by Simon herself.
Throughout most of the film, fragmented images produced by a wandering
handheld camera circulate like a medical scan and refuse to center on the
characters. The spectator's awareness of action and voices offscreen under-
lines the fact that what is seen cannot necessarily be trusted, or does not
constitute the full story. The image track is also accompanied by an expres-
sive, almost aggressive jazz soundtrack by Archie Shepp, mixed with the
anguished cries and voice of Catherine Ringer.
Although Magali at various points attempts to tell or even demonstrate
the truth, she is caught up in the need to perpetuate the lie by those around
her. Alain, who at first orders her to get an abortion because he has
arranged a posting abroad, alone, in Canada (and has not even told his
personnel officer that he is married), gradually becomes absorbed in the
idea of becoming a father; Magali's father, who is recovering from a serious
operation, finds his health improving as he starts to anticipate the birth of
a grandchild; Alain's sister, who bitterly regrets having had an abortion, is
deeply envious and protective of her sister-in-law. Magali, whose previous
hesitant existence had had little meaning, thus finds herself the center of
attention, while both families participate in the illusion that a baby will
bring about transcendence and regeneration. The illusion is sustained even
when Magali produces someone else's baby, as when her reluctant and
inevitably fruitless attempt to breastfeed it is immortalized in a family
photograph. A postscript sequence indicates that it is only three years later,
after the death of her father, that Magali is denounced by a neighbor,
arrested and has the child taken away from her, and that Alain realizes the
truth.
Magali is represented as a young woman who does not belong to herself,
the passive agent of a story being determined by others (as in the opening
sequence, when a man's voice—her father's—urges her to carry on driving
in the dark when her lights have failed, even though she wants to stop).
However, from the moment of 'giving birth' and starting to care for her
'daughter', a series of more stable, centered images suggest that Magali's
'motherhood' provides her with a more focused sense of self. In contrast to
the darkness and confusion of the opening scenes, the film ends on a note
of sunshine and light, as it cuts from little Emilie at her nursery school to
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Magali (Catherine Mendez) is the centre of attention in Sinon, oui (1997).

Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Pierre Grise Distribution.
her point-of-view shot of Magali's childlike, smiling face appearing out of

a leafy shrub in the garden outside, a shot which persists over the closing
credits as the camera zooms in to a possibly more disturbing extreme close-
up of her smile. This image can be read simply as the last trace of a young
woman who has discovered the love of a child, regardless of familial or
biological imperatives. But for Jean-Marc Lalanne (1997), it is the face of
'the bad mother', leaving 'a trace of terror, the inexhaustible matter of
nightmares'.
Sinon, oui is clearly an allegory about belief systems in the modern
world. It exposes how a patriarchal society conflates femininity with sexu-
ality and procreation, and sanctifies the myth of the fertile womb. It desta-
bilizes the ideology of motherhood by showing Magali's mothering role to
be socially constructed and also a matter of successful performance. At the
same time, it suggests that if procreation is the only means to transcendence
in the modern world, then, paradoxically, the desperate acts of childless
women who act with the unwitting connivance of men are justifiable.
These two disturbing, challenging films expose and problematize the
ideological pressures on women to consider motherhood as women's des-
tiny by representing childless women who resort to crime in order to
preserve the fiction of their assumed, false identities as mothers. At the
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FAMILIES
same time, paradoxically, their critique of the ideology of motherhood is

ambivalent in that they also represent the reality of the power and emo-
tional return which their heroines derive from their simulation (or perfor-
mance) of a mothering role, and so justify the women's continuing
investment in it.
Fathers
It has been repeatedly argued that the dominant paradigm of classic French
cinema is the father-daughter couple. However the patriarchal father is
most frequently represented by women in films about childhood and ado-
lescence, shot from the child's point of view, a problematic figure whose
unacceptable behavior, ranging from absent and neglectful to uncaring,
autocratic, violent and cruel, accounts for the child's trauma or propels the
adolescent daughter into the arms of a lover. The abusive, incestuous father
is a key theme of the 1990s, explored in L'Ombre du doute, Rosine and Y
aura-t-il de la neige a Noel? (Tarr, 1998), and the adult daughter's need to
escape the power of the father is also a thematic preoccupation of certain
historical films like Milena (Vera Belmont, 1991) and Artemisia (Agnès
Merlet, 1997).
However, women have also contributed to the development of new rep-
resentations of fathering in French cinema through films like UHomme
fragile and La Maison de Jeanne (discussed in chapter 3) and, more impor-
tantly, through comedies like Trois hommes et un couffin (Coline Serreau,
1985) and La Fete des pères (Joy Fleury, 1990), discussed in chapter 6, and
in Christine Pascal's Le Petit prince a dit (1992), discussed in chapter 8,
which charts a father's concern when he discovers his young daughter is
dying of a brain tumor. The question is whether caring father figures are
employed to show that men can do what women do just as well if not
better, or whether they are able to demonstrate the fluidity of gender roles
for both sexes and give equal value to non-traditional roles for women. 5
Two film dramas which foreground fathers and their relationship with
their children are Jeanne Labrune's Sans un cri (1992), in which the
mother's role is secondary, and Christine Carrière's Qui plume la lune?
(1999), which is predicated on the mother's death. Sans un crì/Without A
Sound, shown at Cannes in the 'Cinemas en France' section in the same
year as Le Petit prince a dit, provides an unexpectedly brutal picture of
father-child relationships. It centers on Pierre (Remi Martin), an unrecon-
structed young lorry-driver, who finds himself unable to break up the dyad
constituted by his wife, Anne (Lio), and their son, Nicolas (Nicolas Prive).
The narrative is introduced by a sequence in which Nicolas as a young
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man, jogging alone through the countryside, claims directly to the camera
to have survived an unhappy childhood. The film's long flashback provides
an explanation of his statement, first by showing Pierre and Anne as a
happy, united couple (Anne accompanies Pierre in his work), then by show-
ing how the couple is destroyed by the intrusion of the child. The principal
narrative strand is shot primarily from Pierre's point of view and traces his
growing hatred for his baby son, his alienation from the family unit (based
in an isolated, disused station house whimsically decorated by Anne), and
his substitute relationship with Molosse, an enormous dog, who terrifies
his sickly son but keeps him company when he is alone on the road.
Interwoven with Pierre's story is a narrative strand centered on the un-
wanted child, who returns his father's hatred and gradually overcomes his
fear of the dog, implacably weaning it away from Pierre so that, in a
gruesome ending reminiscent of a Ruth Rendell plot (the film could also be
categorized as a crime drama), he eventually gets it to savage his father to
death. Labrune thus challenges the notion that the arrival of a child is
automatically to be welcomed and, though all the characters suffer eventu-
ally (Anne takes to drink), posits the uncomprehending young father as the
main victim.
Christine Carrière's second film, Qui plume la lunef/Who Plucks the
Feathers Off the Moon?, shown at Cannes in 1999, focuses on two girls,
Suzanne and Marie, and their changing relationship with their mentally
disturbed father (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) over a period of some twenty
years. As in Rosine, the film is set in the North of France and the subject
matter is grim: the father, distressed by the death of his wife, repeatedly
tries to commit suicide; Marie (Elsa Dourdet) runs away from home and
turns to prostitution; Suzanne (Garance Clavel) makes an unhappy mar-
riage. However, Carrière infuses the period drama with a light-hearted tone
through the bizarre antics of the distraught father (a star vehicle for Dar-
roussin) who, seen from the point of view of the daughters, is not just an
oppressive, domestic tyrant but also a vulnerable, child-like figure. The tone
is set by the opening sequence in which father and little children caper
around the living room to the 1960s dance tune, 'the Letkiss', a sequence
which is reprised at the end when, as adults who have undergone traumatic
experiences, they manage to dance together again.
Both these films in their different ways emphasize the vulnerability of
husbands and fathers who are unable to adjust to the loss of their wives
(be it through motherhood or through death) and take out their feelings on
their children. But whereas Sans un cri stresses the potential destructiveness
of the nuclear family, Qui plume la lune? glosses over the emotional dam-
age caused to the daughters and ends on a note of reconciliation.
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Adult siblings
Family life cannot be reduced to relationships between parents and chil-

dren, and a number of films by women emphasize the legacy of family
through their construction of ongoing, emotionally-charged relationships
between adult siblings. These range from crime dramas like Elisabeth Rap-
peneau's Frequence meurtre (1988) and Hélène Angel's Feau d'homme,
cozur de bète (1999) to comedies like Tonie Marshall's Enfants de salaud
and Daniele Thompson's La Buche (1999). In each case, the siblings are
bound together by events from the past, and the films explore the possibility
of their being able to break free and move on. Three film dramas which
exemplify this theme are Le Jour des rois (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1991),
Le Fils préféré (Nicole Garcia, 1995) and Fetits arrangements avec les
morts (Pascale Ferran, 1994).6
Treilhou's Le Jour des rois/Epiphany Sunday, a bittersweet drama in-
fused with comedy, showcases star performances from a cast familiar from
classic French cinema. It portrays a day in the lives of three elderly sisters
living in the suburbs of Paris, Suzon (Paulette Dubost), Germaine (Miche-
line Presle, who reappears as twin sister, Marie-Louise) and Armande (Dan-
iele Darrieux), who meet on Epiphany Sunday to go out to lunch, eat a
gaiette (a special Epiphany cake) and watch Marie-Louise perform at a
local concert. The action is framed by long-suffering Suzon's quarrelsome
relationship with her husband, Georges (Michel Galabru), who refuses to
accompany her. Treilhou's ability to extract both humor and pathos from
their situation is further developed in her dissection of the relationships
between the sisters, still informed by Germaine's bitterness at being rejected
by Armande's husband, Albert (Robert Lamoureux), and Armande's re-
pressed guilt. Armande's briskness and pretentiousness and Germaine's
grudging attitude towards her sisters generate tensions which are exacer-
bated by their need always to be in the right. (Germaine insists that she
knows where their mother's tomb is even though she and Suzon have gone
to the wrong cemetery.) An argument about the meaning of the Immaculate
Conception leads Germaine to walk out of Armande's suburban villa in
high dudgeon. Their limited horizons contrast with those of the exuberant,
exotic Marie-Louise, a seductive blonde with a man in tow, who is unafraid
of what people will think and intent on making the most of life. Despite
their jealousies and animosities, however, the sisters are still capable of
looking out for one another, and when Armande asks Marie-Louise to take
Germaine home after the show, she agrees. Elderly women are not normally
the subject of cinema except as figures of fun, but in Le Jour des rois,
Treilhou provides an affectionate study of the delicate links between women
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PERSONAL FILMS
An affectionate study of three elderly sisters in Le Jour des rois (1991).

Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Les Films du Losange.
who have not managed to let go of their past and whose age makes it
unlikely that they will ever be able to change their ways.
Le Fits préféré/The Favourite Son, actress Nicole Garcia's second feature
after Un weekend sur deux (discussed in chapter 8), was another box office
success, partly due to a star performance from Gerard Lanvin. The film is
a male melodrama centering on a forty-year-old man and his problematic
relationships with his father and his estranged brothers. The press was
delighted that a woman should choose to address such a topic, 'We've been
waiting for a woman's view on masculinity, one which does not judge,
criticize or condemn, nor denounce inequality and injustice in the name of
feminism' (Toscan du Plantier, 1994). But Garcia also had a personal inter-
est in the topic in that her own father had been estranged from his brothers
and she had never met her paternal uncles. In Le Fils préféré, Rafael
(Roberto Herlitzka), a first generation working-class Italian immigrant, is
being looked after in his old age by the favorite son of the title, Jean-Paul
(Lanvin), a hotel manager in Nice, and has not seen his other sons, snobbish
Milan-based banker Philippe (Jean-Marc Barr) and homosexual lecturer
Francois (Bernard Giraudeau) for ten years. Jean-Paul's dicey business ven-
tures and mounting debts lead him to contact his brothers for financial
help, the lack of which leads to a moment of madness when he nearly
allows his father to drown in order to claim on a forged life insurance.
Subsequently Rafael disappears, and in the search for him, the brothers'
jealousies and affections resurface, and the surprising truth of Jean-Paul's
identity is revealed.
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The film opens with panning shots over family snapshots which econom-
ically evoke the mother's absence and the fact that the father, a boxing
fanatic, has brought up his sons alone. An early sequence demonstrates the
unusual tenderness between father and son, as Jean-Paul visits Rafael in
hospital, bringing him his favorite olives and massaging his calf muscles.
(In a later scene of domestic intimacy, the father reciprocates by cutting his
son's hair.) Rafael's rift with his other sons is attributed to his humiliation
of Francois when he discovered he was a homosexual, and to his rejection
by Philippe when he was mistaken for a servant at his wedding. However,
Jean-Paul gradually discovers that Rafael is not his biological father at all,
but had brought him up after his real father, a young Italian boxer, died in
a fight he had organized. The film ends with Jean-Paul bringing about an
encounter between Rafael and his biological sons, while he himself winds
up on the beach alone with his hitherto neglected young daughter. It sug-
gests that the surfacing of family secrets may enable both Jean-Paul and his
brothers to move on.
Garcia's focus on French masculinity constructs solitary, vulnerable men
whose charm is starting to wane and whose activity in the world is a facade
for hidden suffering, brought about by obscure resentments and unspoken
or unconscious jealousies dating back to their childhood. The brothers'
interactions are shot with compassion, showing how they have displaced
their emotions into the quest for money and achievement but also allowing
them to get back in touch with their feelings and address the problems
caused by their inability to communicate. Like Le Jour des rois, Le Fils
préféré plays on the tensions between the continuing power and vitality of
family bonds and the desirability of escaping from their constraints.
Petits arrangements avec les morts/Coming To Terms was the first film
to be directed by Pascale Ferran (born 1960), who graduated from the
IDHEC in 1983, along with Eric Rochant and Arnaud Desplechin, with
whom she co-wrote the screenplay for La Sentinelle. (She first made two
shorts, Un diner avec Monsieur Boy et la femme qui aime Jesus and Le
Baiser.) Co-written with Pierre Trividic and produced by Aline Méhouel,
Petits arrangements took ten years to make and won the Camera d'or at
Cannes in 1994. Ferran wanted the film to evoke her own experience of
bereavement as a child, but without developing a plot or having a central
protagonist (Ferran, 1994). The result is a triptych, each part of which
centers on a different character, first a boy, Jumbo, then a young man,
Francois, then the latter's older sister, Zaza. In each case their often puzzling
behavior can be accounted for, in retrospect, by their reactions to the death
of someone they loved, Jumbo's friend Patrick, Francois's and Zaza's sister
Lili. The triptych is given a unity by its common setting, two days on the
beach at Audierne in Brittany, where Jumbo and the siblings briefly cross
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paths, and where the camera returns to repeated close-ups of the sea wash-
ing away sand and seaweed. As Ferran claims, the structure produces an
effect of stasis rather than of dynamism, and if there is progression it lies in
the increasing emotional intensity of the three stories.
The film's convoluted, playful handling of time is exemplified by the
recurring image at the end of each section of a clock running backwards,
superimposed over sea and sand. All three of the main protagonists are
preoccupied by the passage of time: Jumbo sporting a huge watch, Francois
reluctant to spend more time with his family; Zaza constantly asking for
the time. Each section is fragmented into a puzzle of brilliantly edited
flashbacks, which the spectator is required to piece together to make sense
of the film. Some flashbacks relate to the recent past, when the protagonists
are being interrogated about their actions: Jumbo by his parents and a
psychiatrist because he has terrified a friend with stories about death;
Francois by a young reporter questioning him about his work as an ento-
mologist in a museum where he classifies dead insects; Zaza questioning
herself about her work as a spiritual healer. Others relate to the more
distant past at the time of the deaths which were to have such an effect on
them: Jumbo was told that Patrick would not die, but he did; young
Francois was not told what was happening to Lili and still feels rejected by
his older brother, Vincent; Zaza, the older sister, decided to sacrifice her life
in order to be a mother to her younger siblings. Neither death is evoked
visually, instead the film cuts to insert close-ups of objects relating to the
way death informs the characters' lives: dead animals, collections of dead
insects, dead plants and overflowing litter-bins.
Petits arrangements is not interested in dramatic action, but focuses
instead on the minutiae of existence and human beings' lack of and need
for communication. It is constructed through cycles and repetitions rather
than through linear development, an example of which is the recurring
image of adult Vincent lovingly building and rebuilding a magnificent sand
castle, which is finally washed away by the sea just after Francois and Zaza
have helped him finish the last pointed turret. The film poignantly estab-
lishes an equivalence between lonely Jumbo and the adult siblings who are
all searching for ways of coming to terms with the shock of their childhood
bereavement.
Petits arrangements is obviously not just a film about adult siblings, but,
like Le Jour des rois and Le Fils préféré, it illustrates that the past is never
quite buried or forgotten, and that siblings continue to be bound by expe-
riences which they may share, but which they can rarely manage to com-
municate adequately to one another.
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Conclusion
The films discussed in this chapter are part of a much wider body of
women's films which address changing gender roles and relationships be-
tween the generations in the context of the contemporary fragmented fam-
ily. Apart from the sibling dramas and the dramas about fatherhood, w h a t
characterizes the films discussed here is the focus on the role and value of
motherhood, arguably a distinctively female experience which is rarely
represented on screen from a woman's perspective. Women's ambivalence
towards mothers and motherhood is clear from the ways women have
represented the lives of their o w n mothers as either independent and dis-
tanced or as intimate and potentially suffocating. It is even clearer in the
films which focus specifically on the mother-daughter relationship or on the
problematic lives of childless women. These films are sensitive to the way
women's identities are constructed through patriarchal discourses about
women's roles as wives and mothers, but they also demonstrate h o w em-
powering motherhood can be, even if it is an imagined condition and, just
as significantly, reinforce the value of the mother-daughter bond, even
though it produces heartache.
Apart from Coup de foudre and Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noel?, these
films have not been particularly successful at the box office. However, it is
notable that the interrogation of motherhood and mother-daughter rela-
tionships, a facet of films by directors influenced by the 1970s women's
movement, has also surfaced in films by younger women in the 1990s.
These films directly address w o m e n spectators in the way they place value
on women's experiences.
Notes
1. Within feminism itself there is a legacy of ambivalence towards the mother.

Many second wave feminists rebelled against their mothers, seeing them as
embodying and transmitting women's subjugation to patriarchal values (as in
Marie Cardinal's 1975 autobiographical novel, Les Mots pour le dire); others
focused rather on the distinctive pleasures of specifically female experiences
such as pregnancy and maternity (as in Annie Leclerc's 1974 essay, Parole de
femme).
2. See also Brigitte Roùan's Outremer (1990), discussed in chapter 9.
3. Anne-Marie Miéville's Mon cher sujet (1988) addresses the theme of mother-
daughter relationships across three generations of women. The mother-daughter
relationship is also a key theme of Marion Vernoux's road movie, Personne ne
m'aime (1994) (see chapter 8), while Nadine Trintigant's road movie, Les Fu-
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gueuses (1995), offers an example of a mother-daughter relationship between

women who are not biologically related.
4. Còte also plays a daughter in search of her mother in Jacques Rivette's Haut,
bas, fragile (1995).
5. The theme is also to be found in Charlotte Brandstrom's television comedy drama
Le Monde a Venvers (1999), in which a man abandons his executive job and
takes over parenting duties, while his wife starts on a career as an estate agent.
The change of roles leads to the breakdown of the marriage, and the film charts
the man's subsequent attempt to win back his wife. Having become better at
housework, cooking and putting the kids to bed than she is, he connives with
the children to do her housework and childcare in secret, in order to help her
out. He also manages to start a new career as a designer, as well as fathering
twins with another woman. Meanwhile, his wife has difficulty combining her
chosen career with being a mother, and her extra-marital affair ends unsuccess-
fully. The film ends 'happily' with the couple remarrying, but the film constantly
shows the father figure better able to juggle multiple roles than the mother.
6. Roùan's Outremer and Kurys's A la folie are also sibling dramas, structured
around the intimate but problematic relationship between adult sisters.
132
CHAPTER FIVE
Work, Art and Citizenship
The women's films discussed so far privilege the experiences of girls and
women (and occasionally boys and men) at key stages in their personal
lives, particularly in relation to the family, the couple or, in the case of
young people, the peer group. The films grouped in this chapter tend rather
to focus on individuals or groups and their place within a wider society, be
it through work and/or through art, or through their position as citizens.
Though women's feature films of the 1980s and 1990s generally take for
granted the need to locate their heroines in relation to their work (or lack
of it), work often simply provides a backdrop or starting point for a study
of interpersonal relationships. However, there are a few films which fore-
ground the relationship of women (and men) to the world of work, dis-
cussed below, a number of which are also concerned with the world of art,
and can thus be read as a reflection on the filmmaker's own sphere of work.
Other films more specifically position their characters in relation to the
question of what it means to be a citizen in contemporary France.
The notion of citizenship came to the fore in contemporary political
discourses following a period of increasing disillusionment with conven-
tional politics after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of commu-
nism. From the mid-1990s onwards, there has been a new awareness of
France's deep social divisions (ia fracture sociale'), manifested in debates
over the new nationality laws, the strikes of 1995, the protests at the state's
mishandling of the sans papiers affair and the struggles for parity and the
PACS. Debates about the meaning of citizenship ('la citoyenneté') for those
who are female, homosexual and/or of immigrant origin call into question
the traditions of French universalism, and open up a space for representa-
tions of the specificities of the experiences of women, gays and lesbians,
and ethnic minorities. Citizenship is thus used here as an umbrella term for
the discussion of films which foreground the place of marginal others
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within French society (though a concern for others underpins a number of

films discussed in other chapters).
This is the only chapter to consider documentary and essay films along-
side narrative films, not only because these different film forms have tradi-
tionally been used to challenge mainstream cinematic representations, but
also because they have re-emerged in the 1990s as a significant aspect of 'le
jeune cinema franâis'. Since the women's movement of the 1970s, women
have traditionally communicated their concern for others and their desire
to change the world through documentary. As Christine Gledhill notes in
relation to British and American feminism, 'The first independent women's
groups grabbed camera or video and went to talk to women about their
lives and experiences' (1977: 38). The result was 'the construction of a new
"we", the "we" or "us" of women, bound together through our realisation
that it is as women, as a gender group, that we are oppressed' (Brunsdon,
1986: 9). In France as elsewhere, feminists seized on documentary film and
video to express the realities of women's lives (in opposition to mainstream
cinema) and campaign for feminist demands. 1 Two films which epitomize
feminist documentaries of the 1970s are Marie Issartel and Charles Bel-
mont's Histoires d'A (1973), which promoted abortion and a woman's right
to choose at a time when abortion was illegal (and which was banned on
release and circulated clandestinely),2 and Coline Serreau's Mais quest-ce
quelles veulent?/But What Do They (Women) Want? (1978), made be-
tween 1975 and 1977, a compilation of testimonies from a variety of
women about their experiences and views on life, the frankness of which
shocked members of the general public (Colvile, 1993b: 85, Rollet, 1998:
50-62). At the same time, influenced by the critique of western imperialism
in the work of Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, a number of feminists used
film to denounce the double oppression of women in developing countries
around the world and give a voice to ethnic minorities in France. Examples
include Anne-Marie Autissier's Larmes de sang (1979), co-directed by Ali
Akika, which focuses on three generations of Algerian women, and Coline
Serreau's television film, Grand-mères de l'Islam (1978), devoted to North
African grandmothers. 3
The documentary, with its lower budget and more manageable technology,
not only provided a space for alternative subject matter, influenced by a left-
wing and/or feminist agenda, but also allowed for a questioning of tradi-
tional film form. On the one hand an exploitation of film's 'reality effect'
afforded a way of documenting women's lives and giving a voice to those
who had hitherto lacked representation or been represented in stereotypical
ways. On the other, the demand for a feminist film practice which would
'analyze and disengage the ideological codes embedded in representa-
tion' (Teresa de Lauretis, 1987: 128) invited a demystification of the
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W O R K , ART A N D CITIZENSHIP
'reality effect' through techniques which exposed the extent to which all
filmmaking, including documentary filmmaking, is constructed and ulti-
mately subjective. (The two approaches often seemed to be at odds with
each other, though debate on the issue raged more furiously in Britain and
America than in France.) Political (including feminist) documentary film-
making virtually ceased at the end of the entre-deux mai period.4 Neverthe-
less, in the 1990s there has been a significant renewal of interest in the
documentary, particularly in television.5 Spearheaded by La Sept/Arte, this
renewal has extended to cable and the other public television channels as
well as to film festivals and, occasionally, the cinema (Witt, 1999). Though
to date relatively few documentaries directly addressing 'women's issues'
have received a theatrical release, a number of documentary and essay films
by women have received a limited distribution. 6 Several of these demonstrate
a concern for marginal others within French society; several are also con-
cerned with foregrounding the place of the self/filmmaker within the film.
The chapter is organized, first through a consideration of the topic of
work, bringing together a mix of narrative and documentary films which
foreground unemployment or the precariousness of employment and its
effects on individuals; then through the topic of art, subdivided into narra-
tive films which focus on art as a form of work, and documentary films
about art and artists; and finally through the topic of citizenship, focusing
first on narrative and documentary films about France's ethnic others, then
on essay films which problematize the role of the self as both filmmaker
and citizen.
The world of work
One of the ironies of the 1980s and 1990s has been that, while feminist
demands for economic independence and the struggle for equal pay and
entry into the professions hitherto banned to women may have shown
dividends for middle-class women, working-class women in particular have
borne the brunt of the after-effects of the economic crisis of the late 1970s.
However, as Claire Simon (1996) remarks, French cinema is not really
interested in work as a topic, 'The only type of work which it finds fasci-
nating is that of crooks'. She might have added that as far as women's
work is concerned, this means prostitution. Yvonne Tasker (1998) has
demonstrated that the most successful women's roles in popular Hollywood
cinema are those of prostitutes, and that other forms of women's work are
also constructed primarily as sites of female sexual display. The prostitute
is also a key figure of male-authored French cinema, and most actresses
will have played a prostitute at one time or another in their career. How-
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ever, although prostitution has conventionally been regarded by many fem-

inists as symbolic of the way women generally are alienated from their
bodies in a patriarchal capitalist society, few women directors have chosen
to tackle such a theme. 7 Films which center on a prostitute, like Isabel
Sebastian's La Contre-allée (1991)8 and Sandrine Veysset's Victor. . . pen-
dant quii est trop tard (see chapter 1), represent the prostitute as an
attractive young woman who strikes up a close relationship with a child,
and minimize questions relating to class, identity, alienation and power.
Although most films by women now take women's need to work outside
the home for granted, work itself is rarely foregrounded as an issue, but
rather used as a background or counterpoint to women's personal, emo-
tional lives.9 Until the mid-1990s, it was mostly a question of middle-class
professional women. From the mid-1990s, however, directors associated
with 'le jeune cinema franâis' have documented the lives of working-class
women (most notably the farm laborer in Y aura-t-il de la neige a Noel?,
but also the factory worker in Rosine and the fish packers in En avoir (ou
pas) and young women (and men) suffering from unemployment or the
precariousness of employment. A number of women's genre films also
explore the dilemmas and prejudices facing working women/mothers, from
thrillers like Elisabeth Rappeneau's Frequence meurtre (1988) to comedies
like Guila Braoudé's Je veux tout (1999). There have to date been few
documentaries about women's work to receive a cinematic release. (There
is perhaps a symbolic significance in the fact that the topic of Hervé Le
Roux's acclaimed 1996 documentary, La Reprise, was his inability to locate
the woman who had protested at the return to work after the strikes of
1968.) The significance of work in the construction of subjectivities and
identities is most palpable in narrative films like Pomme Meffre's Le Grain
de sable (1982) and Marion Vernoux's Rien a faire (1999), which focus
respectively on a lower middle-class and a working-class woman facing
unemployment, and in Claire Simon's documentary, Coute que coute
(1995), which records the reactions of the boss and employees of a small
catering business on the verge of bankruptcy.10
Le Grain de sable/Grain of Sand was directed by Pomme Meffre (born
1933), a former factory worker, who followed her husband into the world
of art and theater, was made redundant, and then started working with
director René Allio at the Centre du Midi. The film is in part a reflection of
her own experiences, about a woman in her forties who loses her job as
bookkeeper and box office receptionist at the Atelier Theatre, the focus of
her life for over fourteen years. It stars Delphine Seyrig, the star of Chantal
Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975), and French critics were apprehensive
that Le Grain de sable would be a similarly 'difficult' hyper-realist film
about the everyday life of a woman of a certain age. In fact although
136
Meffre, like Akerman, uses fixed frames and long takes, she does so less
provocatively, making the film more accessible to the general public.
The film first focuses on how work gives a woman a sense of identity,
representing 'Madame Solange' through her everyday, somewhat mechani-
cal routine as an employee, from her confident walk and immaculate ap-
pearance to her ritual conversational exchanges with her concierge and
local barman. It then traces her disorientation once she loses her job.
Various scenes show her trying to cope by signing on at the employment
agency, shopping and reading, meeting up with her pregnant daughter,
Martine (Coralie Seyrig), her friend, Huguette, and her former colleague
(Brigitte Roùan), then suffering various indignities. She has to pretend to
go to work because she is too ashamed to tell the concierge, and she is
passed over for a job in favor of a pretty, younger woman with no knowl-
edge of bookkeeping. Solange gradually retreats from the harshness of the
present into memories of the past and her first love affair, with a blond
Corsican, the son of a baker, a relationship which was sabotaged by her
anti-Corsican parents. A montage sequence shows her in Corsica searching
for her lost love in all the baker's shops in Bonifacio, emerging from each
one with a little package of cakes. But after a scene in which she contem-
plates the rock called 'the grain of sand' where her lover had once sat
(while his letters, including his promise to wait for her, are read out in
voice-over), Solange returns home, dejected, worn and aged. In the last part
of the film, she stops taking care of herself and her appearance and starts
showing signs of a breakdown, by painting her future grandchild's bedroom
bright blue, and mistaking a youth in the street for her lost love. On New
Year's Eve, she abandons Huguette and a potential new partner Huguette
has found for her and goes instead to the dance hall in Paris where she met
her first love, now a modern skating rink where she has no place. When
her friends eventually break down her door, she is lying on her bed, already
dead. The film closes with a shot of the photographs of her past affair
decorating her wall, ending on a close-up of a black and white photo of the
young couple.
Seyrig's performance brilliantly conveys the gradual disintegration of a
lonely, middle aged widow who has been brought up to smile and not express
her feelings, but who is broken by loss and emptiness. The narrative is
punctuated with long takes, accompanied by poignant music, of Solange,
alone, sitting stoically on a park bench or sobbing on her bed. Elsewhere the
soundtrack expresses her alienation through loud, disruptive noises. Unusu-
ally, the film invites the audience to reflect on the importance of a woman's
age and economic situation to the way she is perceived by others and in the
construction of her own subjectivity and identity. At the same time it sug-
gests, more problematically, that her need for work is just a cover-up for a
137
PERSONAL FILMS
more fundamental lack, namely, the failure of the imagined ideal couple, an
issue which employment had previously enabled her to repress.
The loss of self-esteem through lack of work is also a key theme of
Marion Vernoux's Rieti à faire/Nothing Doing, which focuses on a
working-class woman, Marie-Do (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), and an older
middle-class executive, Pierre (Patrick dell'Isola), both of whom are married
with a family and unemployed. The unlikely couple meet by chance at the
local supermarket, start to exchange help and advice on purchases, and
slowly embark on an affair which comes to an end when Pierre finally gets
a new job. Vernoux's film contrasts the ugliness of the mise-en-scène (the
industrial zone of Boulogne-sur-mer, the banlieue housing estate, the enor-
mous Intermarché) with her protagonists' hesitant grasping for tenderness
and understanding, as they create something meaningful, albeit provisional,
out of this moment of limbo. Unfortunately, the film's schematic represen-
tation of class differences makes the couple's companionship sometimes less
than credible; and its representation of gender differences is equally trou-
bling in that ambitious Pierre finds a job and resumes his old life, whereas
self-deprecating Marie-Do is left hurt and unhappy. Nevertheless, where Le
Grain de sable turns unemployment into a private tragedy, Rien a faire
more optimistically emphasizes the possibility of shared, human resistance
to the alienation it provokes. Like Le Grain de sable, though, the film offers
no political agenda for social change.
Coute que coute/At All Costs, the winner of the 1995 George Sadoul
award, was the first full-length documentary to be directed by Claire Simon
(born 1955), who came to France as a child, having been born in Morocco.
Simon was involved in politics in the 1970s, and started her cinemato-
graphic career as a film editor, making short films in her spare time. She
initially trained as an ethnographer, and started making documentaries in
the 1980s. Recreations, shot on video in 1992, records the imaginative
games and violent power struggles of little children during their breaks in
the nursery school playground, and was shown at various film festivals
before being released in the cinema in 1998.
Coute que coute, is a feature-length black and white documentary, fi-
nanced by Arte, based on the life and death of a small company making
pre-cooked meals, Navigations Systèmes, in Saint-Laurent-du-Var on the
outskirts of Nice. The company is run by Simon's friend, Jihad, who used
to work for the Tunisian embassy, and Simon was allowed to film him and
his employees over a period of six months, shooting over four days at the
end of each month, specifically to include payday. The film is edited in such
a way that the ending is not known in advance (as it was not at the time of
making), setting up a suspense as to whether or not the company will
overcome its financial difficulties.11 Indeed, for Simon the film can be de-
138
The team of chefs cope with problems in the workplace in Coute que
coute (1996). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Films d'Ici.
scribed as 'a polar about money and a documentary about feelings' (Tré-
mois, 1997: 188). It is a study of how money determines people's lives (just
as problems of financing determine what films get made and by whom).
But it also records the impact of the company's lack of capital and eco-
nomic clout on the various human beings involved, filming Jihad trying to
sort out the bank, his creditors and his clients as well as finding money to
pay his employees, and the team of chefs, particularly Fathi, Toufik and
Madanni, trying to make do on an increasingly smaller budget without
always getting paid for their work. The film has its comic moments, as
when Gisèle, the secretary/labeller/administrative assistant, has to go to the
local bar to use the phone when the company's phone has been cut off. It
also sets up a contrast between the humor, enthusiasm and solidarity of
Jihad and his employees as well as their moments of despair as they defend
a product they believe in and try to convince the spectator that all will be
well, and the apparently inexorable demise of their small firm in a cutthroat
market dominated by the big companies.
For Simon, documentaries do not simply record reality, and this film
clearly constructs both a narrative (it is punctuated with inter-titles) and
'characters', using close-ups of faces and of hands at work rather than the
more 'sociological' long shot. Simon herself remains off screen, but the
participants do not try to ignore the presence of the handheld camera
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PERSONAL FILMS
(Simon's question are heard from time to time) and they play up to it.
Arguably, the fact of being filmed gives them a different perspective on their
struggle to keep their company going, enabling them to assume more heroic
roles which the team of chefs perform better than the more agitated and
progressively more elusive Jihad. As Simon points out, 'The film's heroes
naturally made the effort to act out their situation. They got over their
initial embarrassment. They realized they were evolving on a set. They
became actors in a drama with just the tone I was looking for. And they
spontaneously took responsibility for their own dialogue and mise-en-
scène.' (Roth, 1996a: 64). Unlike a Hollywood movie, however, the film's
working-class heroes are 'real' people, and their story a product of their
interaction with a filmmaker who shares their desires. Simon closes the film
with a scene in which two of the chefs, now unemployed, loiter on the
Promenade des Anglais in Nice in the sunshine, start to chat up some
American tourists, then face the camera together. The spectator cannot help
but sympathize with these victims of the liberal economy who are also (but
the film does not press the point) of North African immigrant origin, and
who are able, thanks to Simon's camera, momentarily to transcend their
situation
Simon has declared that, 'The workplace is to my mind the new and last
public space where one can exercise one's citizenship and have an effect'
(Royer, 1996). However, her film effectively demonstrates the difficulties
experienced by ethnic minority working-class men in fulfilling that role in
the contemporary economic climate. Like Meffre and Vernoux, Simon does
not set out to provide an agenda for change, her film merely draws atten-
tion to the predicaments of people whose identities are threatened by their
actual or incipient lack of work. The difficulties and paradoxes in the
position of working class women are explored more intensively in Domi-
nique Cabrera's Nadia et les hippopotames/Nadia and the Hippopotamuses
(2000), made for Arte in 1999 in the series entitled 'Gauche/Droite' ('Left/
Right'), initiated by Pierre Chevalier12, and shown at the 1999 Cannes film
festival in the section 'Un certain regard'. The film is set during the rail
strikes of December 1995, and made with a mix of real life railway workers
and actors (including Ariane Ascaride, who starred in Robert Guédiguian's
Marius et Jeanette in 1997, and Marilyne Canto). It explores the problem-
atic relationship between women, work and citizenship through its inter-
weaving of the workers' collective struggle, including Canto's sympathetic
woman trade unionist and the trajectory of a single unmarried, unemployed
mother who has nothing to gain from their struggle. Typically, Cabrera
uses the personal in order to explore the political, illustrating her dream of
'filmmaking as a research tool in politics' (Potelle, 1998: 44). The end of
the 1990s is thus marked, if momentarily, by a return to the political which
140
recognizes and centers on women's problematic place within the nation

state.
The world of art
Women filmmakers are themselves working within the French film industry
and it is not surprising if a number of narrative and documentary films
reflect upon their situation, either through representations of the world of
cinema, or through the related world of art. In French culture, the artist,
like the film auteur, is non-gendered in theory but conventionally male in
practice, while the artist's model and muse is conventionally female (a
relationship foregrounded in Jacques Rivette's La Belle noiseuse^ 1991).
Diane Kurys's A la folie/To The Point of Madness (1994) and Martine
Dugowson's Mina Tannenbaum (1994) confront this tradition in narrative
films which center on young women who are struggling professional artists.
In each case, however, the artist is unable to sustain both her artistic
creativity and her relationships with others, especially other women. Mina
dies in despair because of the breakdown of her female friendship, while in
A la folie Alice ends up gazing, paralyzed, out of the window because of
the impending reappearance of her mad, jealous sister (Tarr, 1999a: 125-
139). These films contrast with historical films about creative women like
Agnès Merlet's Artemisia (1997) and Diane Kurys's Les Enfants du siede
(1999), both of which foreground the creative partnership between the
successful artist and her (male) lover (see chapter 9). These later films show
how a woman's artistic or literary activity can be inspired by but is also
incompatible with a sustained relationship with another; but in both cases
the women are able to survive the loss or breakdown of the relationship in
question.13
Rather than addressing the representation of individual artists and their
Oedipal trajectory towards autonomy, however, this section focuses on
narrative films which address art as a collective process, and can thus be
read indirectly as reflections on women's place within the film industry. The
key films about filmmaking in France are Jean-Luc Godard's Le Méprisl
Contempt (1963) and Francois Truffaut's La Nuit américaine/Day for
Night (1973), both of which offer a patriarchal model of the industry,
albeit one which is also problematized in Le Mépris. The corpus of women's
films on the subject, all dating from the 1980s, include Coline Serreau's
Quest-ce quon attend pour ètre heureuxl/What Are We Waiting For To
Be Happy! (1982), a satirical comedy about the making of an advertising
film, in which the assorted workers (the actors) find themselves in conflict
with the grotesque and inept bosses (the owners and managers) in a won-
141
PERSONAL FILMS
derfully anarchic confrontation of class interests (Rollet, 1998: 63-5); and

Aline Issermann's La Vallèe des anges/The Valley of the Angels (1989), a
low-budget film, made in three weeks and set in a steelworks which was
about to be closed down. Issermann mixes the making of a documentary
drama about the history of the steelworks (foregrounding the film crew and
Issermann herself directing the actors) with a ghost story which enables
further tales of the workers' struggle to be told. The left-wing message of
these two films is clear, while Issermann's film also self-reflexively features
a woman filmmaker. However, the three films discussed here, Vertiges
(Christine Laurent, 1985), Un homme amoureux (Diane Kurys, 1987) and
Zanzibar (Christine Pascal, 1989), focus on women as performers rather
than challenging the accepted distribution of gender roles within the indus-
try by constructing women as directors or producers.
Vertiges/Vertigo was the second film to be directed by Christine Laurent
(born 1944), whose first, more obviously political film, Alice Constant
(1977), concerned an investigation by two sisters into the suicide of a young
maidservant. Laurent's background was as a set and costume designer for
the theater, but she became involved in cinema through her relationship
with René Allio. She chose as the topic of Vertiges a behind-the-scenes
study of a production of The Marriage of Figaro, an opera for which she
had previously designed the set and costumes, as she does for the film. The
title refers to the sense of vertigo which the artist experiences prior to
touring and performing, a vertigo induced in the spectator by the film's
opening shot which slowly pans over the theater from the depths behind
the stage to the decorated ceiling and back down over the auditorium, seen
from the performer's point of view. The film is then structured around a
series of rehearsals for the opera, intercut with the personal and profes-
sional dramas occasioned by the cast, which lead up to the finale of the
public performance when, in the convention of the genre, the show goes on
despite various tragedies, in particular the death of the conductor, and the
shooting on stage of the malicious Pierre/Figaro by Marius/the Count.
Laurent declared she wanted to make a film showing ordinary women
doing ordinary things (as in Cukor's Les Girls, 1957), but transformed on
stage by the power of their extraordinary voices (Lejeune, 1987: 164-5).
But, in fact, she weaves the themes of the opera—female solidarity in the
face of the weakness and inconstancy of men and their abuse of power—
into the offstage relationships between conductor, singers and musicians.
The film is dominated by the points of view of older but still attractive
Constance (Magali Noél), the Countess, whose affair with Eric, the conduc-
tor (Paolo Autran), is saddened by his obsession with the mysterious Gra-
diva he used to conduct, and fascinating, liberated Maria (Krystyna Janda),
Suzanne, who attracts all the men, but loses her voice (temporarily) after
142
spending a night with a stranger. The soundtrack similarly (and unusually)

foregrounds the strength and beauty of the women's voices, whereas the
men are only heard singing in the chorus and, elsewhere, giving orders or,
in the case of the conductor, breaking up the women's singing with an
irritated, 'No, that's not right!'. While the men are generally histrionic and/
or inadequate (even the new, young conductor is impotent in bed with
Maria), the women are down-to-earth and in control (as when Blanche
seduces the theater director, or Anne succeeds in her first major role as
Cherubin). But above all, the film, like the opera within the film, relies on
the professionalism of Constance and Maria, and the pleasures and
strengths of their friendship, symbolized by their beautiful, improvised duet
in the last hotel scene and the final curtain call which they take together, to
rapturous applause.
Not surprisingly, given Laurent's background in design, the film is con-
cerned not just with the deliberately elliptical narrative but with striking
visual effects, achieved on the one hand through a disconcerting use of
camera distance and framing, and on the other through the aesthetically
pleasing, almost abstract use of color and lighting, both of which create a
certain distancing effect. The places where the artists work and stay—the
theater and the hotel—are characterized by night time settings and cold,
geometric lines, emphasizing the alienation of their lifestyles. However, in a
color spectrum dominated by blues, grays and blacks in which the figure of
the sad, solitary conductor stands out only because of his white evening
scarf, the reds of the beautiful period costumes and glamorous modern
clothing worn by both Constance and Maria introduce a strong, woman-
centered sense of life, power and warmth.
In contrast with Vertiges, Un homme atnoureux/A Man in Love, Diane
Kurys's first film to feature a contemporary setting, is a glossy, star-studded
international co-production and by far the most commercially successful of
the films considered here. It draws in part on Kurys's own past experiences
as an actress in Cinecittà in the 1970s, and is set primarily in Rome, where
an Italian director is making a film about the Communist writer Cesare
Pavese with an American star, Steve (Peter Coyote) and brings in a young
Anglo-Italian actress, Jane (Greta Scacchi), to play Gabriella, a woman
Pavese met shortly before he committed suicide. The film interweaves the
passionate but doomed relationship which develops between Jane and Steve
(the 'man in love' of the title, who is also a married man devoted to his
wife and children) with scenes of the making of the film about Pavese at
Cinecittà and with Jane's progress towards becoming a writer. Thanks to
the support of her father (whose typewriter she takes over), her mother
(whose death in the course of the film provides her with courage and
inspiration) and Steve himself, who gives her a copy of Pavese's diary to
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PERSONAL FILMS
read, Jane is able to start transforming her experiences into words (just as
Kurys has transformed her experiences into screenplay and film). The film
ends with a shot of Jane, alone, sitting on the verandah of her parents'
house in Tuscany, starting work on a manuscript entitled cUn homme
amoureux' as the camera zooms out for the closing credits.
Despite the mise-en-abyme of the film's ending, however, the siting of the
film in the world of cinema serves primarily to provide a glamorous back-
drop to the development of the romance plot and the growing self-
confidence of the defiant central female protagonist. Little is made of the
contrast between the way Jane is filmed by Kurys and the way Gabriella is
filmed by the (male) director within the film, nor does the cutting between
the film within the film and the framing narrative expose the constructed-
ness of the film image. Although Kurys herself became a filmmaker as a
result of dissatisfaction with the roles she was given as an actress, her
ambitious, contradictory film does not provide an empowering critical pur-
chase on a male-dominated institution (Tarr, 1999a: 72-91).
Christine Pascal's Zanzibar, co-scripted with Catherine Breillat, also pro-
vides an insight into the world of cinema from an actress' point of view.
After the critical and commercial pasting she received for Veliate (1979),
Pascal felt unable to star in her own films. Instead, in Zanzibar (the title
picks up on Rimbaud's reference to Zanzibar as a place of escape), she
projects herself into the role of actress Camille Dor (Fabienne Babe), whose
name recalls Bardot's role in he Mépris. A stylish self-reflexive film about
French auteur cinema, Zanzibar took four years to make and invites a
reading as a film a clés. It focuses on three key roles: a passionate, ambi-
tious young Italian producer, Vito Cattene (André Marcon), an outsider
who is unfamiliar with the rules of French film funding (like Pascal's Swiss
producer-partner Boner)14; Maréchal (played by director Francis Girod), an
odious auteur-director with a reputation of being difficult (like Maurice
Pialat) whom no-one will back because, like Godard in the early 1980s, he
is considered finished, but who wants the chance to make a 'second first
film'15; and a beautiful young actress, Camille, a drug addict in need of
work who hopes that Maréchal will be able to make her cry. The film is
framed by Vito's self-imposed exile in 'Zanzibar' (shot in Djibouti). It opens
with video images of Camille radiantly accepting an award (presumably a
Cesar) in a sequence which is obsessively rewound and replayed, as she
tosses her blonde hair and expresses her regret at the absence of the man
whose love and obstinacy made her role possible (intercut with shots of
Vito's anguished face); it ends with the video playing to itself until an
African woman switches off the television. The film's curiously distancing
structure throws into question the value and significance of the image and
144
Camille (Fabienne Babe) suffers for her art in Zanzibar (1989). Source:
BIFI. (C) Gaumont 1988.
the work which went into constructing it, even though this is the substance
of the rest of the film.
Zanzibar constructs a more menacing world than either Vertiges or Un
bomme amoureux, in particular through its oppressive use of music, mise-
en-scène and lighting. It is mostly shot in shadow, illuminated by pools of
light, be it in Vito's company headquarters, in Camille's oriental-style apart-
ment, or in the scenes showing Maréchal at work. Its themes are dark, too,
from the sordid role of money (Camille agrees to undress for money, Ma-
réchal makes demands which drain Vito's production company dry) to the
unhealthy obsession with producing 'art' whatever the cost, an obsession
they all share but which is taken to an extreme by the monstrous Maréchal.
Maréchal works without a written screenplay, depending instead on the
effects of his brutal interactions with his actors and technicians, as when he
goads Camille into shooting up on camera for a screen test while the actor
sitting beside her reads out a poem by Rimbaud. It is on viewing the
recording of this scene that Vito, simultaneously horrified and fascinated,
realizes that the film will be brilliant, but that Camille, who has become his
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PERSONAL FILMS
lover, will not jeopardize her performance by giving up her drug habit, and
that he is partly responsible for encouraging her and Maréchal to take such
risks. Camille the actress, despite her apparent fragility and desperation, is
not represented as a victim. Although Maréchal subjects her to various
forms of humiliation, she is able to respond in kind, putting him down
verbally or playfully walking out on him. Despite their mutual antagonism,
she is prepared to plunge into the depths at his behest in order to re-emerge
into the light, aureoled in glory. At the end, however, despite Babe's subtle
performance, Camille Dor remains a mystery to the spectator, as she does
to Vito, the spectator within the film. Her video image may be available for
consumption, but it gives nothing away about what the actress has suffered
in the process. Nevertheless, Pascal's nihilistic portrayal of the cinema in-
dustry and the damaged personalities which inhabit it is far removed from
Truffaut's affectionate La Nuit americaine, and is no doubt attributable in
part to the anger and bitterness she experienced as a woman at the hands
of the French film industry.
These three films challenge the complacency and narcissism of male-
centered representations of the artist and offer a critique of patriarchal
director figures. Vertiges minimizes Eric, the opera conductor, and cele-
brates the women singers' points of view and the strength and beauty of
their artistic collaboration both offstage and on; Un homme amoureux
makes the film director an even more marginal, even caricaturai figure, and
instead centers on a woman who is empowered by her experiences to write
her own screenplay; Zanzibar, however, is less celebratory of female pleas-
ures and resistances and instead foregrounds the sadism of the director and
the price the woman pays to become a star, finally reduced to a flickering
video image in the eyes of her estranged male producer/lover/spectator.
Documentaries on art and artists
As well as being the subjects of feature films, art and artists are recurrent
subjects of documentaries directed by women in the 1970s and earlier.
Nelly Kaplan's first films were devoted to painters she liked, from Gustave
Moreau, Rodolphe Bredin: Dessins et merveilles (1961) to Le Regard Pi-
casso, which was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice film festival.
She also made a film celebrating the genius of filmmaker Abel Gance (Abel
Gance bier et demain, 1963), with whom she had worked as an assistant.
Other directors celebrated key figures in painting (Catherine Binet on Hans
Bellmer in 1973, Denise Tual on Olivier Messaien in 1973 and André
Masson in 1977), drama (Maria Koleva on Jean Vilar in 1977-1978),
music (the work of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub), literature and
146
ideas (Sarah Maldoror on Aimé Césaire in 1977 and Louis Aragon in 1978,
Josée Dayan on Simone de Beauvoir in 1979), and cinema (Nicole-Lise
Bernheim on Alice Guy in 1977, Denise Tual on Luis Bunuel, also in 1977).
One or two documentaries focus on gender issues in relation to cinema,
including Michka Gorki's short film on women directors and actresses, Les
Femmes et le cinema: Cannes 1977, and Delphine Seyrig's Sois belle et tais-
toi (1978), an ironic presentation of actresses talking about their relation-
ships with male directors.
In the 1980s and 1990s, women have tackled subjects drawn from pop-
ular art as well as high art. Agnès Varda's Mur murs/Walls and Murmurs
(1982) is a study of murals and mural artists in Los Angeles, while Marie-
Claude Treilhou's II était une fois la téle/Once There Was The Telly (1986)
explores the impact of television on a remote village community in the
Corbières. Varda's Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988), discussed below, provides
a portrait of popular actress-singer Jane Birkin, while Claire Denis's Man
No Run (1989) follows a group of Cameroon musicians, Les Teres brùlées,
during their first tour in France, including extracts from their concerts,
discussion with the musicians and footage of daily life during their journey.
Maria Koleva's work on filmed theater has continued with Fragments pour
un discours théatral/Fragments of a Theatrical Discourse (1983), while
others have paid homage to famous directors or screen personalities, like
Annie Tresgot and Michel Ciment's Elia Kazan, outsider (1982), Maud
Linder's tribute to her father Max Linder, UHomme au chapeau de soie/
The Man in a Silk Hat (1985), a forgotten star of the silent screen, Claire
Denis and Serge Daney's Jacques Rivette le veilleur (1993), and Varda's
tributes to her dying husband, Jacques Demy (1931-1990), in Jacquot de
Nantes (1990), and to the world he created in Les Demoiselles ont eu 25
ans (1993) and L'Univers de Jacques Demy (1995). Other documentaries
pay tribute to cinema more generally. Annie Tresgot's Un demi-siècle déjà
(1990) tells the story of the IDHEC, opening with an interview with My-
riam Aziza,- a young graduate, but then concentrating on male directors
such as Costa-Gavras and Alain Corneau. 16 Varda's film fantasy, Les 101
nuits (1994), commissioned for the celebration of the centenary of cinema,
centers on Monsieur Cinema (sic), embodied by Michel Piccoli, and his
encounters with various characters from the history of cinema. In Lumière
et Compagnie/Lumière and Co (1995), also made to celebrate the centenary
of cinema, photographer Sarah Moon invites 40 contemporary filmmakers
to make a 52 second single-sequence film actually using Lumière's original
cinematograph. The result is a series of often brilliant experiments with
film form, texture and lighting, intercut with somewhat fetishizing images
of the filmmakers themselves at work or in interview, including only three
women, Nadine Trintignant, Liv Ullman and Helma Sanders-Brahms.
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PERSONAL FILMS
There has been no film specifically commemorating women's contribution

to a century of filmmaking in France.17
From a woman's point of view, the most interesting work in documentary
on art and artists in the 1980s and 1990s has been produced by Agnès
Varda. Varda began making documentaries on commission in the 1950s
but regularly infused them with her own playful style. UOpéra-Mouffe
(1958) was her first more obviously personal, 'feminine' film, documenting
the rue Mouffetard from the disturbing point of view of a pregnant woman.
In the 1960s her work was informed by a political standpoint, as in Black
Panthers (1968) and, on her return from the United States after May 1968,
she made a television documentary, Réponses de femme (1975), inspired by
the feminist struggles of the time. However, her documentaries of the 1980s
are symptomatic of the growing depoliticisation of French cinema, even
though they demonstrate her continuing commitment to a self-reflexive
cinema and a female cinematic voice. (Her short film Ulysse won a Cesar
in 1984.)
Jane B. par Agnès V./Jane B. by Agnès V. is the result of Varda's collabo-
ration with actress/singer Jane Birkin, who approached her with the idea of
making a film together after the success of Sans toit ni hi (see chapter 8).
The film is a cinematic portrait of the actress which foregrounds questions
about spectatorship, subjectivity and desire. As the title indicates, Varda's
authorship of the film is displayed intermittently throughout the film, from
an early scene in which she discusses the project with Birkin, to the end
when the cast and film crew shower Birkin with presents on her fortieth
birthday. But the linking of the two women's names also hints at their
creative partnership, evident when Birkin in the course of the film suggests
the topic of Varda's narrative film Kung Fu Master, actually shot in tandem
with Jane B. (and discussed in chapter 3).
The film's complex kaleidoscopic structure consists of an uneven collage
of sequences, often accompanied by Varda's voice-over reflections and in-
tercut periodically with Varda's own presence in the shot and shots of the
camera itself, calling attention to the filmmaking process. An early conver-
sation with Birkin introduces the theme of looking and issues relating to
the way the actress is seen and sees herself. Varda has to persuade Birkin to
look directly to the camera (because she finds it too intimate), but compli-
cated mirror images draw attention to the fact that Varda is controlling
how the image is constructed for the viewer. Birkin agrees to submit herself
to Varda's project, talking to Varda about her past, her house, her career,
and above all her desire to please. Towards the end, however, she rebels
against the imposed role of flamenco dancer, saying she wants to be filmed
'like an ordinary person' and allowing Varda to point out the paradox of
the celebrity, who wants both to be a star and to remain anonymous. Varda
148
then films her in fictions or poses of her own choosing, 'gargons manqués'
like Calamity Jane and Joan of Arc. For the most part, however, Varda's
conversations with Birkin are intercut with Birkin in a variety of disguises
(as in the tableaux vivants, based on paintings by Titian and Goya) or
acting out a series of short fictions, from a noirish thriller-type drama, to a
parody of Laurel and Hardy, to the mythic Ariadne pulling a thread
through a maze. In so doing, Varda draws attention to the fact that the star
functions to embody both her own and the spectator's fantasies and desires,
and that whatever pleasure the spectator may experience in observing her
performance, Jane Birkin herself remains essentially unknowable.
Jacquot de Nantes/]acquot from Nantes, 'an evocation written and di-
rected by Agnès Varda based on the memories of Jacques Demy', is another
portrait film which results from a creative partnership. Based on Demy's
memories of growing up in Nantes, it traces Demy's life from happy child-
hood in the 1930s via the experiences of wartime to the frustrations of the
Collège Technique and finally his departure to Paris to study film, all the
while demonstrating Demy's love of spectacle and storytelling through the
puppet shows and, later, short homemade live action and animated films,
that he made to entertain himself and his friends and family. This reassur-
ing, linear coming-of-age narrative, set in a nostalgically reconstructed past,
no doubt accounts in part for its greater commercial success. Within this
familiar framework, however, Varda still introduces innovative techniques.
From the opening scene of the curtains closing on a puppet show shot in
color and a stubborn little boy refusing to accept that the show is over,
shot in black and white, Jacquot's realist black and white narrative is
intermittently disrupted by the playful use of color to mark out the events
and images which trigger his imagination, like the theater and puppet
shows, the town carnival, and the film posters at the local cinema.
The narrative is also regularly intercut with two other sets of images,
often with overlapping sounds weaving the three strands together (the
period songs and music, or the voice-overs of Varda or Demy). On the one
hand a cartoon-like finger introduces or closes brief extracts from Demy's
films, edited so that they blend into the preceding sequence to demonstrate
how they were inspired by his childhood experiences, as when Deneuve's
pregnancy in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg follows on from the revelation
of the pregnancy of the girl next door. On the other, brief extracts of
Varda's documentary footage of Demy, shot not long before his death, draw
attention to her role as filmmaker, sometimes just observing her subject,
sometimes documenting the relics of his past like the early movie camera
he used as a child, sometimes giving him a voice. This set of images begins
with Demy writing his memoirs, and includes extreme close-ups and pans
of fragments of his body, especially an open eye. It ends with a shot of the
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PERSONAL FILMS
sea which pans round to Demy sitting on the pebbles, smiling fleetingly at
the camera, then cuts back to the waves as Varda sings to him (and us) in
voice-over. As Emma Wilson notes, Varda 'celebrates the potential of cin-
ema to offer an illusion of life, a moving representation of the subject even
after his death' (Wilson, 1999: 43-4). But she also draws attention to the
construction of film and, by implication, of memory, making her film both
a moving tribute to Demy (though her interpretation of his films as primar-
ily autobiographical in origin may be rather reductive) and a testament to
her own work as a creative artist.
Varda's approach to documentary filmmaking not only continues to be
innovative and challenging, but also validates the work of the filmmaker
herself, without denying her specificity as a woman. 18 Apart from Varda's
work, however, women's documentaries about art and artists in the 1980s
and 1990s tend to avoid addressing either gender issues or issues relating
to the constructedness of film. On the contrary, they often reproduce the
unequal representation of gender roles in art and cinema, fetishizing the
male artist/director and minimizing women's creativity. Their reluctance to
explore a female genealogy or the specificity of female/feminine artistic
practices (in contrast to women's filmmaking in Quebec, for example) can
presumably be accounted for by their continuing need to proclaim their
identification with the supposedly ungendered (male) auteur.
Citizenship in postcolonial France
As previously noted, political documentary filmmaking in France virtually

ceased at the beginning of the 1980s and after Nicole Le Garrec's Plogoff,
des pierres contre des fusils (1980), a documentary about the anti-nuclear
protest in Brittany, the 1980s are marked by an absence of women's docu-
mentaries about women's lives or, indeed, about other social issues.19 The
return to a more civic, political agenda is signaled by the work of Yolande
Zauberman, whose first award-winning documentary, Classified people
(1988), was shot illegally in South Africa during the apartheid regime. The
film uses personal testimonies to demonstrate the iniquity of apartheid and
its consequences for individual lives. Her second film, Caste criminelle/
Criminal Caste (1989), shot in India, also uses personal testimonies, in this
case from descendants of criminals who are themselves treated as criminals,
to expose how the caste system forces people to live in misery and shame.
In a similar vein, Isabelle Quignaux, a graduate of the IDHEC, made her
first full-length documentary (after a number of shorts) in Cambodia, where
she spent a year on research. Les Joints de mines sont plus étanches que les
chambres à air de nos vélos/The Joints of Mines Are More Airtight Than
150
the Inner Tubes of Our Bicycles (1995) documents the after-effects of the
Khmer Rouge regime on the life of a small village and, like Zauberman,
Quignaux concentrates on a small group of individuals whose testimonies
express the strength of their ability to survive.20
Other filmmakers have turned to topics closer to home, like Patricia
Muxel and Bernard de Solliers' films about AIDS, Sida, une histoire qui ria
pas de fin (1993) and Sida, paroles de famille (1995).21 It is notable, how-
ever, that narrative films or feature-length documentaries on key issues of
the 1990s, like parity or the PACS, have still to be made, and that, despite
television documentaries like Valerie Stroh's Simone de Beauvoir (1998),
shown at the 1999 conference for the fiftieth anniversary of The Second
Sex, or Sólveig Anspach's Que personne ne bougel (1999), featuring a
group of women who carried out bank robberies, relatively few documen-
taries addressing women's issues have been exhibited on the big screen.22
The two films discussed here in more detail are Yamina Benguigui's Me-
moir-es d'immigrés (first shown on television in 1997) and Dominique Ca-
brera's first narrative film, UAutre coté de la mer (1997), both of which are
set and shot in France and share a concern with the continuing after-effects
of the Franco-Algerian War on post-industrial, post-colonial French society
at the end of the 1990s (films which actually reconstruct the Algerian War
are discussed as historical films in chapter 9).
Yamina Benguigui, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, is, along with
Zai'da Ghorab-Volta and Rachida Krim, one of the first women filmmakers
of North African origin to have made an impact on the French film indus-
try. Her first three-part television documentary, Femmes dTslam (1994),
received an award at the San Francisco film festival. Mémoires d'immigrés:
Vhéritage maghrébin/Memories of Imigrants: The Maghrebi Heritage, co-
produced by Canal Plus and released in the cinema in early 1998, was
described as 'the documentary about immigration everybody was waiting
for' (Ledere, 1997: 157). It fills a major gap in the French cinematographic
landscape by devoting space to first generation immigrants from the Ma-
ghreb, whose story has rarely been seen or heard before. Benguigui's aim
was to create 'a place of collective memory' (Durmelat, 2000), addressing
both the children of immigrants who are ignorant of their parents' history
and the indigenous French who prefer not to remember the historical back-
ground which accounts for the presence of the Maghrebi community in
France.
Mémoires d'immigrés is 160 minutes long and is sub-divided into three
sections, entitled 'the fathers', 'the mothers' and 'the children'. Individual
accounts of arrival or experiences in France are interwoven with black and
white archive material and interviews with officials, such as the person in
charge of recruiting workers for industrial companies, or the social worker
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PERSONAL FILMS
dealing with the education of women immigrants in France. The structure

reflects the chronology of immigration, where women normally joined their
husbands at a later date; it also allows men and women to speak separately
about their experiences, as well as creating what Durmelat has described as
a family epic which ends up by legitimating the place of the children within
the French Republic. Each part has its own tone. The fathers are mostly
filmed alone, at their former, now abandoned workplaces, their moving
testimonies, punctuated by songs of exile, unveiling the unwritten history
of poverty, humiliation and rootlessness endured by immigrants in France.
The mothers are more often filmed in pairs and in their domestic interiors,
and the extreme close-ups convey the empathy Benguigui created with her
interviewees. As in Serreau's Mais quest-ce quelles veulenti, women from
different regions, with different levels of education and different percep-
tions of their lives, recount their past, their despair and helplessness, their
regrets about their lack of education, and their feelings of imprisonment
when they arrived in France or when they were forced into an arranged
marriage. But their testimonies, punctuated with songs of nostalgia for the
homeland, are often accompanied by laughter, and Benguigui allows them
to emerge as individual 'characters'. Finally the children are filmed in ways
which emphasize their ability to overcome the past and become integrated,
their testimonies accompanied by music from Rachid Taha, formerly of the
group Carte de Sé jour.
In all three parts, the interviewees speak direct to camera, the presence
of the director being completely effaced. The result is an apparent objectiv-
ity, which means that the spectator is not encouraged to reflect on what has
been left out. Yet in her desire for reconciliation and acceptance, Benguigui
deliberately rejects or minimizes material that might be divisive (testimonies
about contemporary violence and disturbances in the banlieue, the heritage
of the Algerian war, the role of Islam, differences within the community).
Memories d'immigrés presents the acceptable face of immigration, lonely,
worn out old men, brave, warm-hearted old women, and valiant, successful
young 'Beurs'. Its evocation of the suffering of the past, though it cannot
be ignored, gives way to hope for the present, expressed in particular
through the reprise of slow motion archive images of immigrants arriving
for the first time against the background of graffiti reading 'France for the
French'. When seen again at the end of the film, these images demand to be
read in the light of the personal histories just recounted, which claim France
for its Maghrebi immigrants too. Benguigui's project for collective com-
memoration cannot be dissociated from her own investment in its subject
matter, for the film functions to reconcile herself with her father (whom she
has not seen since she ran away from home), and her community (for
whom she has become a spokesperson), as well as facilitating her own
152
Two mothers in Memoires d'immigrés: I'heritage maghrébin (1998). Sup-

plied by Bandits Longs and reproduced with permission from Yamina Ben-
guigui.
integration into French culture (she has since become a prominent television
presenter).
UAutre coté de la mer/The Other Shore, presented at Cannes in the
'Cinemas en France' section, was the first feature film by documentary
filmmaker Dominique Cabrera, who was born in Algeria in 1957 and came
to France as a child in the early 1960s. Cabrera was a Socialist Party activist
in the 1970s and a local councilor, and her political commitment is evident
in the topics of the nine shorts she made between 1981 and 1993, which
include Chronique d'une banlieue ordinaire (1992).
U Autre coté de la mer addresses the after-effects of the Algerian war
through a narrative structured by the chance encounter between Georges
Monterò (Claude Brasseur), a stubborn pied noir returning from Algeria
for the first time since the end of the Algerian War to have an eye operation
in Paris, and Tarek Timsert (Roschdy Zem), a successful young 'Beur'
surgeon who operates on him and whose family originally came from the
same village in Algeria. The rather schematic meeting between two men of
different generations and different cultures who would not normally meet
and are initially antagonistic (Tarek finds Georges patronizing, Georges
dislikes being at the mercy of an Arab) develops into a surrogate father-son
relationship, as a result of which the (white, pied noir) father helps the
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PERSONAL FILMS
('Beur') son recover something of the past which he has repressed, while
the son helps the father 'see' the present more clearly. Tarek, the apparently
well-integrated 'Beur', has to face up to his shame at the rejection of his
roots which underlies his excessive spending and the breakdown of his
bourgeois marriage to a white French woman (Marilyne Canto). Georges,
who denies that his decision to remain in Algeria was problematic, has to
confront his debt to Boualem, an Algerian tax officer, and his obligations
towards his estranged sisters, both of whom fled Algeria at the end of the
War. In one of the film's privileged moments, when Georges has taken Tarek
with him on a trip to an olive grove in the south of France, the two men sit
in the sun eating lunch together and recognize that they are both 'gaouis'
(outsiders) in their way. Their friendship enables Georges to effect a recon-
ciliation with his sisters (still haunted by their memories and fears of the
War) and agree to a partnership with Boualem so that he can return and be
buried 'back home'. Tarek in turn, after spending time with Georges's Arab
friends, is in a position to return to his wife feeling more secure in his
identity.
The film is held together by Brasseur's engaging performance as Georges,
particularly in the scene in which he briefly rekindles his love for former
girlfriend, Maria, played by Catherine Hiegel, now a lively grandmother,
but who is also haunted by memories of the dead bodies she saw as she left
Algeria. It is also punctuated by scenes of the Parisian corner cafe run by
Georges's friend Belka (Agoumi) where Georges meets up with old friends,
pieds noirs, Arabs and Jews. Cabrera uses amateur actors, improvisations
and a handheld camera to capture the life of the café with its ethnic mix,
its card games and conversations, and the despair of those who love Alge-
ria, whatever their racial background, at the horror of what is happening
there (monitored by the television in the café which announces the murder
of a Rai* singer). Although the film centers on men (and Tarek's marriage to
a white woman effectively evacuates 'Beurette' characters and means that
the question of his identity as a 'Beur' is represented only as a male prob-
lem), Cabrera carefully registers the presence of women behind the scenes,
including an otherwise gratuitous shot of Belka's daughter objecting to the
macho behavior of the 'barbu', the Islamic 'bearded man' who is sorting
out Georges's complicated business affairs. Both in its narrative structure
and in its 'documenting' of the interethnic relationships of the café, the film
acknowledges the weight of the past, but also the shifting nature of identi-
ties in the present and, refusing to be judgmental, expresses the desire for
and the possibility of the reconciliation of differences.
Both films discussed here are concerned with citizenship in a multicul-
tural France. Benguigui's film is more obviously designed to produce a
reaction in the spectator, namely empathy with and acceptance of the
154
immigrant Maghrebi community as an integral element of French society.

Indeed, Benguigui accompanied the film on a tour of France, encouraging
spectators to join in debates after each screening. But Cabrera's film, too,
demonstrates the mutual value of accepting the other. Neither film sets out
a program for political action, but each invites the spectator to sympathize
with the predicaments of others through the use of individualized, personal
stories, be they 'real' or fictional. In each case, though their concern with
gender is less important than their concern with class and ethnicity, they
make an important contribution to the representation of a multi-ethnic,
multicultural France.
The personal and the political
In the films just discussed, however personal the director's commitment to

the topic, the self is effaced in order to allow others to speak. However,
other films by women have used a more self-reflexive style, introducing the
self into the film as a way of interrogating the links between the personal
and the political, in a way reminiscent of feminist filmmaking of the 1970s
which was concerned to draw attention to the constructedness of film.23
Maria Koleva's four hour film, UEtat de bonheur permanent/The State of
Permanent Happiness (1982), which took three years to make, provides an
example of the genre from the early 1980s. Koleva, who emigrated from
Bulgaria in 1971, uses the quest for her own identity to trace the history
and subsequent disillusionment of the generation of May 1968. The film
consists of a montage of personal memories, family photos, interviews,
meetings with friends, and reflections on the death of Rudi Dutschke, one
of the best known student revolutionaries of the 1960s. Similarly, Cabrera's
film diary24 and Judith Cahen's cerebral fantasy films, discussed below, use
the camera to interrogate not just the self, but the place of the self in
society.
Cabrera's second feature-length film, Demain et encore demain/To-
morrow and Again To-morrow (1998), released a year after LAutre coté
de la mer, is a self-portrait artfully pieced together in retrospect from
fragments of a personal video diary, which she filmed daily over nine
months between January and September 1995. She explains gently in voice-
over that she had turned to video as a lifeline after a Christmas in which
she had accused her family of wanting her death, that she now wants to
'see clearly' what is happening to her, escape her fear and 'get back in
contact with the outside world'. The film charts her mood swings between
depression, insomnia and bulimia and the feeling that some sort of happi-
ness is possible. It does so through the development of her relationship with
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PERSONAL FILMS
her son, Victor; the progress of her affair with former soixante-huitard and
socialist politician Didier Motchane (who has a mistress in Rome); her
discussions with Jean-Pierre, her former partner, about which secondary
school Victor should go to; her interactions with friends and family (partic-
ularly her mother, who talks to her for the first time about what she had
been like as a baby); the views of the rooftops of the street where she lives
where a house gets demolished and rebuilt; and events in the outside world,
including various political meetings (1995 was the year of the presidential
election between Jospin and Chirac). However, it is also a film about
filmmaking, differentiating itself from her private, written diary (fragments
of which are glimpsed periodically) as Cabrera documents herself making
the film, shooting herself reflected in mirrors, or getting her son or lover to
hold the camera for her.
Much of the film's montage of images is concerned with daily life and
domestic space, one of the most expressive of which is an early close-up of
a plate of olive oil which Cabrera's hand mops up with bread for her to
eat. But the film is regularly punctuated by shots of nature, from the plants
in her apartment to those in her parents' garden, and from the snowstorms
of winter, and the sun shining on her carpet, to the mists which engulf her
and her son on a ski lift during their summer holiday, and which provoke
a discussion about what it means to be alive. As in this instance, Cabrera
uses her personal experiences as a starting point for capturing a more
complex texture of life, asking other people to define happiness, for exam-
ple, or sharing her problems about being a good mother with Victor and a
woman friend, or debating the problems of the Left and the disillusionment
of those who had been active in the 1970s with Didier and others. She also
invites speculation about what is going on in the world through the way
her camera documents others when she is out and about in Paris, filming a
sleeping black woman in the metro, the participants at a public meeting of
the Front National, Mitterrand presenting himself to the photographers,
two homeless men who do not intend to vote. Thus the film progressively
interweaves her obsession with her own fears and anxieties with an aware-
ness of others, and so ends up, not as an instance of narcissistic navel-
gazing, but rather as a poetic essay which speaks to spectators about issues
of more general concern and closes on an image of family and community,
as Victor blows out the candles on his birthday cake.
The other director to explore the possibilities of a more personal, politi-
cal cinema is Judith Cahen (born 1967), a co-founder of and contributor
to the intellectual journal, La Lettre du cinema. After making a number of
short films in the early 1990s, Cahen created and played a fictional alter
ego, the semi-burlesque Anne Buridan, as a way of 'projecting myself and
exploring the border between reality and fiction' (Cahen, 1999), following
156
A film about filmmaking: Dominique Cabrera in Demain et encore demain

(1998). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from Pierre Grise
Distribution.
in the tradition of otherwise male creations like Charlie Chaplin's Chariot,

Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot and Nanno Moretti's Michele. (Agnès Oba-
dia creates a similar character in Romaine, discussed in chapter 6.) In La
Croisade d'Anne Buridan/The Crusade of Anne Buridan (1996), Cahen,
posturing as the eponymous Anne, uses the device of the interview to
conduct an investigation of those around her, asking people questions about
politics such as, 'What is a political act for you?', and about their individual
desires such as, 'What do you do with your desires?', which give the film a
militant flavor. Like Chris Marker's Le ]oli mai (1963), where the question
'Are you happy?' threads through the film, bringing together individual and
collective experiences, Cahen's investigation exposes the dilemmas which
confront her generation (and others), hesitating between political/emotional
commitment and indifference. The film's punning title refers to the 'Ane' or
donkey, who cannot decide whether to opt for food or water and dies of
indecision. Like Cabrera, Cahen questions herself and others about the
meaning of politics after May 1968, and the necessity (or not) of involve-
ment with others to make things change.
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PERSONAL FILMS
The same quest is at the core of her second film, La Revolution sexuelle
n'a pas eu lieu/The Sexual Revolution Did Not Take Place (1999), where
Anne Buridan reappears with the same doubts and questions, repeatedly
announcing Til soon be thirty, I don't have a minute to lose'. This time,
however, Anne tries to sort out her life by means of a futuristic machine (to
some extent a metaphor for cinema itself) which is programmed to organize
her unconscious fantasies and fears in relation to the body, sexuality, the
couple and politics, and help her deal with them. Cutting herself off from
family, friends and colleagues (she works at Radio Ultime, a community
radio station), Anne plugs herself into her machine and acts out in her
imagination a series of convoluted scenarios in a variety of genres, particu-
larly comedy and burlesque, in which her friends and (former) lovers reap-
pear in various guises. Among them is the dancer Alberto Sorbelli as a
transvestite who teaches her to take pleasure in femininity as performance
and masquerade. The blurring of reality and fiction is further enhanced by
Cahen's casting of her own father as Anne's psychoanalyst father, and of
Dominique Cabrera as another psychoanalyst Anne visits, unsuccessfully,
and by Anne's attendance at a Gay Pride demonstration in Paris. However,
when Anne finally emerges from her narcissistic experiments and rejoins
her colleagues, she does so without having found any satisfactory answers
to her questions.
La Revolution sexuelle's concern with the lack of certainties and refer-
ence points in people's lives in the late 1990s is reminiscent of the concerns
of films directed by Cahen's contemporaries, such as Masson's En avoir
(ou pas) and Ferran's L'Age des possibles (discussed in chaper 2). How-
ever, the film's laborious structure and over-intellectualized discourse con-
stitute distancing devices which many spectators found alienating, and it
was not widely distributed. Nevertheless, Cahen's experimentation with
film form is still to be welcomed, and, like Cabrera's complex self-
representation of a forty-year-old woman, her curious, imaginative, quirky
Anne offers both a postmodern representation of fragmented subjectivity
and a challenge to dominant representations of femininity in mainstream
French cinema.
Conclusion
These groupings of films confirm the hypothesis that women's filmmaking

in the 1980s became increasingly depoliticized, particularly in relation to
the topic of art. Although some narrative films critique the patriarchal
structures which inform the production of opera or cinema, their solution
is to foreground women's success as performers or writers (including ele-
158
ments of female solidarity, particularly in Vertiges) without fundamentally

challenging the system. And, with the exception of Agnès Varda's work,
documentaries about art and artists reveal women's continuing inability to
identify with and celebrate successful w o m e n in positions of authority.
However, in the mid to late 1990s there has been a return to a social
agenda on the one hand through both narrative films and documentaries
about the place of individuals within the French economy and France as a
multicultural society, and to a concern with film form on the other, partic-
ularly through the w o r k of Dominique Cabrera and Judith Cahen. Clearly,
though, these are not films which anticipate commercial success, unlike the
w o r k of Yannick Bellon w h o addresses social problems through genre films
with star casts (as in La Triche, a film about homosexuality, discussed in
chapter 7). These films do not necessarily foreground w o m e n , but are
concerned with other marginalized groups, particularly working-class and
ethnic others. As Simon has argued, 'behind each camera there is a ques-
tion' (Trémois, 1997: 190). But the questions asked here, be they personal
(who am I?, w h a t am I doing with my life?) or collective (is there any
alternative to capitalism?, w h a t does it mean to be a citizen today?) rarely
address gender-related issues directly. Crucially, though, they confirm that
w o m e n filmmakers are once more aware that wielding the camera can itself
be an exercise in citizenship.
Notes
1. Cinémaction's 'Catalogue des films realises par des femmes depuis 1968' (Mar-
tineau, 1979: 175-201) classifies women's documentaries by genre, including
'feminist documentaries or documentaries about women' on themes such as the
body, abortion, contraception and sexual pleasure, children, motherhood and
education.
2. It is estimated that it was seen—illegally—by about 200,000 spectators (Chev-
allier, 1983).
3. These films were produced either by institutions like the Institut National de
l'Audiovisuel (INA) and the Ministère de la Cooperation or by women's groups
like Ciné-femmes internationales.
4. The term, coined by the historian Pascal Ory, refers to the 13-year-period
between May 1968 and May 1981 (when Socialist President Francois Mitter-
rand was elected).
5. From 1982-1998 the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir provided training,
funding and distribution facilities for women making videos.
6. It should be noted, too, that the Créteil Women's Film Festival always includes
a strong section on women's documentaries.
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PERSONAL FILMS
7. There is no French equivalent to Marleen Gorris's deconstruction of prostitution

in Broken Mirrors (1984) or Lizzie Borden's Working Girls (1986).
8. Critics described Caroline Cellier's role as a glamorous prostitute with a perfect
body who becomes the (temporary) surrogate mother of a lonely middle-class
child as France's answer to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall,
1990).
9. Michaela Watteaux's television film Féminin masculine (1997) explores preju-
dice against working women. Her heroine, a highly qualified chemical engineer,
is forced to cross-dress in order to obtain employment (none of which prevents
her from meeting the man of her dreams, too!).
10. Zai'da Ghorab-Volta's second feature film, Laisse un peu d'amour, shown on
Arte in 1999 but not released in the cinema, analyzes the effects of early
retirement/redundancy on a 57-year-old working class woman, together with
the relationships between the woman and her two daughters.
11. According to Simon, nine companies out of ten in France do not survive their
first year of business (Simon, 1997).
12. In order to avoid making overtly political films, directors must work within a
cinematographic genre, hence Tonie Marshall's choice of comedy in Tontaine et
Tonton (2000). However, Claire Devers' crime film, La Voleuse de St Lubin
(2000), clearly demonstrates a return of the political in contemporary filmmak-
ing in its reconstruction of a fait divers in which a young working-class widow
with children and a lowly paid part-time job (Dominique Blanc) pays the price
for shoplifting food.
13. A number of women's films position their women characters in professions
related to the arts without making their work the source of their marginality, a
novelist in Après l'amour, a scriptwriter in 5/ je t'aime . . . prends garde à toi, a
theater designer in Le Jupon rouge, an editor in Post co'itum animal triste,
picture restorers in Border Line and Love, etc., fashion designers in Portraits
chinois.
14. Pascal cites a new generation of producers who have an emotional relationship
with their films, e.g. Alain Sarde, Philippe Carcassonne, Emmanuel Schlumber-
ger, Ariel Zeitoun (Pascal, 1989).
15. Pascal acknowledged the multiple inspiration for the role of the director in
Pialat, Godard and also Cassavetes (Pascal, 1989).
16. Aziza has since co-directed a 57-minute documentary with Sophie Bredier, Nos
traces silencieuses (2000), in which Bredier, who was adopted as a little girl by
French parents, attempts to trace her Korean roots.
17. A short film about pioneer woman filmmaker Alice Guy, Le Jardin oublié: La
Vie et l'oeuvre d'Alice Guy-Blaché (1995) was made in Canada by Marquise
Lepage.
18. See also Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000).
160
19. The topic of Chantal Lasbats's Les Interdits du monde (1986), a rare 1980s
documentary, is unusual sexual practices around the world.
20. The denunciation of landmines throughout the world was also the aim of
Lumières sur un massacre (1998), a compilation film consisting of ten shorts
directed by ten filmmakers from France and other European countries, including
Coline Serreau, and produced by Little Bear, Bertrand Taverniere production
company.
21. In 1994, the Créteil Women's Film Festival paid homage to Mireille Dumas's
groundbreaking television documentary work, including Travestir (1992), a film
which allowed two transvestites to talk about their problematic identities.
22. Men's documentaries about women which have received a theatrical release
include Jean-Michel Carre's Galères de femmes (1992) about women prisoners
and Les Trottoirs de Paris (1994) about prostitutes.
23. The contemporary preoccupation with self-reflexive filmmaking was identified
at the tenth documentary film festival in Lussac (Piegne-Giuly, 1999).
24. Demain et encore demain can be compared with other intimate film diaries such
as Hervé Guibert's La Pudeur et Vimpudeur (1989), in which the photographer-
writer films himself dying of AIDS, or Sophie Calle's 'docu-fiction' film diary/
road movie, No Sex Last Night (1996), discussed in chapter 8.
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PART T W O
Genre Films
CHAPTER SIX
Comedy
Comedy has been the most popular French film genre since the early days
of cinema (Denat and Guingamp, 1993) but, despite Alice Guy's early silent
comedies, the canon has consisted primarily of male directors and perform-
ers, and male-oriented, often misogynist films. However, women directors'
most successful interventions in genre filmmaking in France in the 1980s
and 1990s have been in the field of comedy. Coline Serreau's Trois hommes
et un couffin (1985) is one of the most popular French films ever made,
with over ten million spectators, while Josiane Balasko's Gazon maudit
(1995) has attracted over four million spectators, making her France's best
known director after Claude Lelouch (Vincendeau, 1996b).1 The genre's
emphasis on entertainment rather than art means that it has been despised
and neglected by French critics who consider it, with the exception of a few
star-auteurs like Jacques Tati, to be 'socially irrelevant, undemanding and
lacking in subversiveness' (Vincendeau, 1996a: 88). Yet women directors
have clearly found it a productive area to work in, and if, as Vincendeau
suggests, it plays a key role in French cinema's construction of national
identity, then the significance of women's intervention in film comedies
should not be underestimated.
While comic narratives take a variety of forms and can inflect other
genres, their specificity lies in their treatment of everyday aspects of life in
ways which create amusement or laughter, leading to a 'happy ending'
which enables conflicts and contradictions to be (provisionally) resolved.
Comedy often works over the material of melodrama, providing an alter-
native in fantasy to melodrama's emotionality and despair. As Thomas
Schatz has argued (1981), it is a 'genre of integration', which works to-
wards the re-establishment and renewal of community, a key trope of which
is the heterosexual romance. However, critical debate about the ideological
implications of comedy has focused on its ambiguity. On the one hand, its
reliance on the 'transgression of decorum and verisimilitude: on deviations
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GENRE FILMS
from any social or aesthetic rule, norm, model, convention or law' (Neale
and Krutnik, 1990: 86) leads to disruptions and reversals of conventional,
common sense ways of behaving which open up a space for addressing
social and political concerns. On the other, its 'happy' endings convention-
ally mark a return to the norms of a eurocentric, bourgeois patriarchal
order, closing over disruptions and therefore functioning like a safety valve
for social tensions (like carnival) rather than having any more subversive
power.
The most sustained study to date of how comedy and the genres of
laughter are inflected by gender is to be found in Kathleen Rowe's study of
American popular culture in The Unruly Woman (1995). Drawing on the
work of Natalie Zemon Davis in an essay entitled 'Women on Top' (Davis,
1975), Rowe defines the unruly woman as a figure reverberating through-
out history 'whenever women disrupt the norms of femininity and the social
hierarchy of male over female through excess and outrageousness' (Rowe,
1995: 30). Though tropes of female unruliness are often coded in a misog-
ynist way, she argues that the unruly woman who, '[t]hrough her body, her
speech, and her laughter, especially in the public sphere, . . . creates a dis-
ruptive spectacle of herself (31), is also a potentially empowering figure,
questioning normative femininity and articulating subjective, transgressive
desires. For Rowe, the most productive examples of unruly women are to
be found in comedian comedy (as in the work of American actress Ro-
seanne Barr) and in certain types of romantic comedy (like the screwball
comedies of the 1930s) which foreground transgressive heroines (and stars).
Her analysis is particularly useful for highlighting how French actresses,
writers and directors have appropriated comedy to express female desires.
Although Freud's work on the joke demonstrated how it has convention-
ally been used to keep women (and others) in their place, French feminists
were quick to draw attention to the liberating function of laughter for
women. Hélène Cixous (1976) posited the laughter of the Medusa as an
instrument of female revenge, while Luce Irigaray asked whether laughter
was not 'the first form of liberation from a secular oppression' (quoted in
Rowe, 1995: 1). At the same time, comic performers like Les Trois Jeanne,
Anemone, Miou-Miou, Valerie Mairesse and Josiane Balasko started to
make their name as part of the flourishing Parisian café-théàtre scene
(where Coline Serreau also performed once with radical comedian, Colu-
che) and others created one-woman-shows, including Sylvie Joly, Zouc and
Marianne Sergent and, from the 1980s, Valerie Lemercier and Anne Rou-
manoff. The café-théàtre's new, anti-authoritarian approach to comedy
combined 'topical issues, derision and naturalistic performances' (Vincen-
deau, 1996b: 42) and though it was not without its own brand of misogyny,
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COMEDY
it enabled women to address hitherto taboo subjects, or at least, subjects

which were taboo when articulated by women. In particular, the café-
théàtre style privileged verbal and visual humor based on the grotesque
'lower' body associated with bodily functions, as opposed to the classical
'higher' body associated with the sphere of reason and intellect (Bakhtin,
1984). It thus opened up a space for unruly women to invert gender
hierarchies and unsettle sexual difference through their irreverent appropri-
ation of language and laughter, and the spectacle of women's 'fatness,
pregnancy, age, or loose behaviour' (Rowe, 1995: 33). This tradition is
evident subsequently in film performances by French comic actresses like
Anemone, Josiane Balasko and Valerie Lemercier (the latter two also writ-
ing and directing their own screen roles).
Unruly women are also to be found in films by French women directors
of the post May 1968 period.2 Nelly Kaplan's first feature, ha Fiancee du
pirate (1969), exposes and subverts the relationships between sex, class,
money and power through a carnivalesque fantasy centered on Marie (Ber-
nadette Lafont), a wild, unconventional young woman who lives in the
forest. Marie is at first exploited, sexually and economically, by the local
villagers. On the death of her mother and the killing of her billy goat,
however, she starts organizing her revenge. She begins charging men for
sex, making the more socially powerful pay more than the workers, then
humiliates them all by leaving a tape recording of their activities playing in
the church while she herself takes to the road, free and happy. Though
Marie's joyful use of prostitution as a means to emancipation was contro-
versial, the film's disturbing, Bufiuelesque flouting of social and sexual
norms does not lead to any easy restoration of order, and the hysterical
villagers are left in total chaos after Marie's departure. In contrast, Dolores
Grassian's Le Dernier baiser (1977) demonstrates how a feminist-influenced
theme can also be co-opted. It stars Annie Girardot (one of the most
popular French female stars of the 1970s)3 alongside stage actress Maria
Pacòme (who often played eccentric bourgeois women in French farces),
thus marking the first use in French cinema of a leading comic female duo.
(Male duos like Bourvil and Louis de Funès, Gerard Depardieu and Pierre
Richard and, more recently, Jean Reno and Christian Clavier are a recurrent
ingredient of French film comedy.) Girardot plays Annie, a wayward Pari-
sian taxi driver who has been abandoned by her boyfriend, while Pacòme
is a neurotic upper-class woman client chasing after her unfaithful husband.
Their shared adventures suggest the possibility of cross-class female solidar-
ity in the face of male inadequacies. However, the unruly loud-mouthed
Girardot eventually sympathizes with the unfaithful husband because he is
truly in love with the other younger, more feminine woman, and summarily
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dumps her disgruntled passenger. The theme of female friendship is thus

suppressed in favor of the discourse of romance, even if Girardot's excessive
comic performance continues to dominate the image.
Romance narratives have been problematic for feminists in that their
Oedipal trajectory leads to a form of closure which apparently reinforces
social norms, that is, the formation of the heterosexual couple and the
exclusion of the mother-daughter relationship. However, romantic comedy
also functions as a form of temporary liberation from authority, breaking
taboos, destroying hierarchies and expressing anti-social impulses. Even the
conventional 'happy ending' normally allows youth to triumph over the
rigidity and repression of the Law represented by the father. Comedy is
therefore a potential vehicle for young women to express their anger and
rage at patriarchal control. The screwball comedy in particular foregrounds
the ideological tensions generated by the unruly woman and the conflict of
the sexes, and allows for the inversion or destabilizing of gender differences
and the dismantling of male dominance. As Rowe points out, in line with
Neale and Krutnik, such comedies work over the same ideological terrain
as melodramas with their limited plots for female desire, dealing with the
private and domestic, the home and the heart. But whereas the life-
affirming screwball comedy is sympathetic to the unruly woman, in melo-
drama she is brought to heel, forced to suffer for her transgressive desires.
If comic narratives are marked by disruptions against authority, their
resolutions are conventionally linked not just with the restoration of order
but also with the desire for renewal and social transformation. Thus the
formation of the heterosexual couple (or other forms of collective celebra-
tion) produces the pleasures of connection and community, in contrast to
the separation and isolation which characterize more obviously male-
oriented genres. However, like all genres, comedy is sensitive to shifts in the
social domain, particularly the loss of confidence in modern romantic rela-
tionships as a result of second wave feminism (and, latterly, AIDS). Using
Woody Allen's byline in Annie Hall (1977), Neale and Krutnik identify a
cycle of 'nervous' American comedies of the late 1970s and 1980s which
register the difficulties and uncertainties of relationships between the sexes
and push towards 'a melodramatic conclusion, mixing nostalgia for a time
of "simpler" romance with a wariness about the possibilities of the hetero-
sexual couple' (Krutnik, 1990, quoted in Rowe, 1995: 195). Women's
challenge to conventional gender roles and wariness about relationships
between men and women is therefore likely to register, both in the oppor-
tunities they offer for female comic performances and in the degree of
nervousness of their resolutions.
In the 1980s and 1990s, many French women directors turned to com-
edy, no doubt inspired by the success of Trois bommes et un couffìn.4 Their
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COMEDY
films take up issues raised in the films discussed in Part One, illustrating the
proximity of comedy to the concerns of melodrama and the independent
woman's film, and often interweaving comedy with melodrama. For Vin-
cendeau they typically address female spectators as mothers and as part of
a (heterosexual) romantic couple, rather than offering more radical repre-
sentations of desiring femininity (Vindenceau, 1994a: 26). Nevertheless,
many of them open up spaces for unruly women to make fun of conven-
tional gender roles and identities, and some of their resolutions take the
form of alternative, Utopian visions of community and inclusiveness. The
first section of this chapter analyzes the inversion of gender roles and
identities in women's comedies of the 'post-feminist' mid-1980s; the second
focuses on films organized around single women and their search for 'Mr.
Right'; the third discusses comedies about relationships within the family;
the last two focus on Coline Serreau's Utopian social comedies and the
unruly women constructed by Josiane Balasko and Valerie Lemercier.
The inversion of gender roles
Two key films of 1985 highlight the destabilization of gender roles brought
about (in part) by the 1970s women's movement, Annick Lanoè's Les
Nanas and Coline Serreau's smash hit Trois hommes et un couffin, each of
which focuses on continuing differences between men and women. Les
Nanas is centered entirely on women, while Trois hommes focuses on a
community of men.
Director of the art cinema La Pagode in Paris, Annick Lanoè decided to
make a full-length feature after the success of UEphémère (1980), a short
film tribute to her dead grandmother. The script for Les Nanas/The Chicks
was inspired by her various girlfriends whom she felt were funnier and
more vivacious than the women customarily represented on screen (Le-
jeune, 163), and contains no men, on the model of George Cukor's The
Women (1939). It took Lanoè several years to find a producer, a task
eventually undertaken by Lise Fayolle, one of the few women producers of
the time. Marie-France Pisier, an actress who had supported the women's
movement from the beginning and was well known for her roles in films
by Truffaut and Rivette, was cast in the leading role. The rest of the film's
star cast mixes café-théàtre comedians like Dominique Lavanant, Anemone
and Clementine Célarié with actresses from a more classical background
like Macha Méril, Odette Laure and Catherine Sarnie,5 as well as featuring
an early performance by Juliette Binoche.
Lanoè situates her group of women, ranging in age from the twenty-
something generation to her own and her mother's generations, in what she
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G E N R E FILMS
calls 'a 1985 version' of the traditional French farce (Lanoè, 1985a). She
addresses the question of relationships between the sexes from various fe-
male points of view, and incorporates fast, witty, sexually explicit dialogues
drawn from the café-théàtre tradition (the film was co-written with Chantal
Pelletier, one of Les Trois Jeanne). The film produces energetic, sparky per-
formances from its female leads, particularly wisecracking Pisier and Ce-
lane. But its most obvious source of humor is the contradiction between the
absence of men (even in shots of the women's workplaces or the metro and
other public spaces) and the fact that the women's activities and conversa-
tions are more or less dominated by their obsession with men, whether it's
a case of keeping their body in shape (as in the opening scene of a women's
exercise class or the subsequent beauty parlor scenes), or of finding other
ways of being attractive to men (as in scenes set in the women's fashion de-
partment, or at a dating agency). This contradiction, which enables Les
Nanas to make fun of dissatisfied would-be liberated women, also makes
the film acceptable to a male audience, since finding, having or keeping a
man is in many ways the main goal of the women's existence.
Christine (Pisier) typifies the emancipated woman to be found on the
front covers of women's magazines of the 1980s. Her independent lifestyle
and open seven-year relationship with the unseen but apparently perfect
Robert is the envy of her friends, until they discover that Robert is having
an affair with Evelyne (Lavanant), a divorced mother who runs a book-
shop. Whereas jeans and leather-clad Christine refuses to do any house-
work or cooking, elegant Evelyne believes in keeping order in the home
(and Robert's sexual dalliance is betrayed by the sudden spotless appear-
ance of Christine's flat). Christine turns for support to her various friends,
including her neighbor Franchise (Méril), who is sharing her flat with her
absent husband's young pregnant girlfriend Antoinette (Binoche), Eliane
(Célarié), an actress who keeps having affairs, and the older Simone
(Samie), who runs a woman's radio show. Maintaining her bravura, Chris-
tine accepts Robert's departure (though she continues to see him offscreen)
and starts working for Simone as a radio presenter in a magazine-style
program for and about women where she undermines an advertisement for
bras by declaring that she doesn't wear one herself. Meanwhile, offscreen,
Robert, who has married Evelyne, starts an affair with Eliane, the discovery
of which throws all three women into disarray. The film's final shot shows
the three women leaving the radio station together to face the world,
consoling each other with the fact that their problematic relationship with
Robert is not really that important.
Les Nanas creates a potentially Utopian, feminist-inspired world in which
women have their own jobs and places to live, are supportive of each other
in times of need, and are free to live out their sexuality as they see fit
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COMEDY
(though there are no lesbian narrative threads). Christine's elderly mother

is having a passionate affair, while Franchise chooses to continue sleeping
with her husband, despite living with Antoinette. The women make fun of
the absent, abstract men, who are not obviously desirable, being either
philanderers (like Robert), distant (like Franchise's journalist husband) or
gay (like Simone's), though the younger women are less outspoken and
more conservative than the women of Christine's generation. Yet desire for
men permeates the film and dominates the women's lives, setting up a
tension between the film's narrative concerns and the visual imagery which
underlines their independence, their self-confident occupation of public
spaces (Binoche first appears on roller skates, Christine on a scooter), and
the value of their bonding with other women (their communal meals, their
outings to the gym or the theater, Evelyne's intimacy with her daughter).
As Pisier (1985) said, this film would have made her (and other feminists)
'grind her teeth' in the 1970s, when the women's movement's challenge to
patriarchal ideology was not a laughing matter. Its starting point is an
acceptance of the gains women have made since then. But it risks under-
mining those gains by suggesting that women's autonomy only leads to
difficulties in sustaining relationships with men, a theme reprised in the
comedies about romance discussed below (and endlessly reworked in
women's magazines). Its reluctance to portray a truly subversive community
of unruly women can be read as a response to the media panics of the mid-
1980s which repeatedly express the fear that 'women want it all'6, even if
it also foregrounds often hilarious cameo performances from the members
of its all-female cast. (Lanoè's less successful second film, Les Mamies/The
Grannies, made in 1992, features another star-studded female cast, includ-
ing Danielle Darrieux, Paulette Dubost, Sophie Desmarets and Odette
Laure.)
Trois homines et un couffin/Tbree Men and a Cradle, the most successful
of all women's films in France to date, was the third feature to be directed
by Coline Serreau (born 1947), who came from a theatrical background
(the daughter of Jean-Marie Serreau) and initially trained as an actress and
trapeze artist. Having lived through the evolution of French society follow-
ing the events of May 1968, she started her filmmaking career with the
feminist documentary Mais qu'est-ce quelles veulent? (see chapter 5), fol-
lowed by a low budget first feature, Pourquoi pas! (1978), which constructs
a Utopian ménage a trois (two men and a woman) who share beds and
domestic chores (the film won the Georges Sadoul Prize). Her next film was
a political comedy, Quest-ce quon attend pour ètre beureuxl, chosen to
represent France at the Berlin film festival in 1982. Strongly influenced by
the ideological struggles of the 1970s, it concerns the revolt of a group of
actors against those responsible for the terrible advertising film they are
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G E N R E FILMS
supposed to be making. Despite positive reviews, the film was a commercial

failure, perhaps because it was released a few months after the election of
the Socialist government, when for many the revolution advocated in the
film had already occurred.
Like Lanoè, Serreau had difficulty finding a producer for Trois hommes
et un couffin, despite its low budget (less than 10 million French francs)
and the fact that she had obtained the avance sur recettes. Eventually,
newcomer Jean-Francois Lepetit stepped into the breach, but the film had a
very low-key advertising campaign and opened only in a limited number of
cinemas. A dramatic rise in audience figures after the first week led to a
wider release, and it subsequently became the French film phenomenon of
the year, beating Rambo at the box office. It was awarded three Césars,
including best film and best script, and brought the director national and
international fame, together with the opportunity (which she declined after
a disagreement with the producer) of shooting the Hollywood remake,
Three Men and a Baby (Leonard Nimoy, 1987).
Trois hommes et un couffin centers on three men, confirmed bachelors,
who share a spacious flat in Paris where they lead a carefree, hedonistic life
punctuated by one-night stands with assorted women. During the opening
dinner party sequence, a man proposes to leave a package with Jacques
(André Dussolier) for a few days, and on the day in question, a package
arrives on the doorstep, consisting of baby Marie, whose mother Sylvia has
departed for the United States. Since Jacques, the alleged father, is in Bang-
kok (he works as an air steward), Pierre (Roland Giraud) and Michel
(Michel Boujenah) find themselves hilariously trying to deal with bottles
and nappies, and discovering a feminine, maternal world which they know
nothing about. Like women in similar situations, they are forced to recog-
nize the impossibility of reconciling professional life and baby care and
temporarily give up their jobs. When Jacques returns, he turns to his
mother for help, but discovers that she is about to go on a cruise with her
girlfriend. However, the men then realize that they want to look after the
baby, and establish a routine which enables them to combine childcare with
work (Jacques transfers to working on the ground). At a dinner party which
mirrors the opening sequence, the three men are so preoccupied with get-
ting Marie off to sleep that their bored guests leave before the dessert.
When Sylvia eventually returns for Marie, the threesome discover that their
former lifestyle has lost its appeal. Consequently, when she finds herself still
unable to work out how to combine her work (as a fashion model) and her
maternal responsibilities, the three men are only too happy to look after
Marie for her again, and the film ends on a freeze frame of little Marie
tottering towards them. The narrative's complicated subplot involving the
'real' package (a package of drugs which the men eventually dispose of in
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3 HOMMES
éomeomm ~
Jacques (André Dussolier), Pierre (Roland Giraud) and Michel (Michel
Boujenah) wonder how to cope with babycare in Trois hommes et un
couffin (1985). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the
Marie's dirty nappy) serves primarily to enable them to express their feel-
ings about the baby (the only thing they care about when their apartment
gets trashed), in contrast with the American remake which is obsessed with
the restoration of law and order.
Serreau has described Trois hommes et un couffin as her most feminist
film (Rollet, 1998: 136-40), but it has proved problematic for Anglo-
American feminist critics, particularly in the United States (Modleski, 1988,
Fischer, 1996). 7 Although the film explores shifting gender/parental roles
and shows men learning how to be fathers, arguably this is only possible in
a world from which women have been evacuated. Misogynistic attitudes
towards women are evident in the men's approach to sex, and their discov-
ery of the joys of parenting do not result in their each deciding to become
a father, but rather in the intensification of their regressive pre-oedipal male
bonding. Their love affair with Marie (who could not have been a baby
boy) actually takes the place of relationships with adult women (the rever-
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sal is made plain in the shot of Sylvia sound asleep in the baby's cot), and
their fascination and guilt is clear, first in the full frontal close-up shot of
the baby girl weeing on the sofa, then in the shot of Michel, rigid and
silent, when Pierre disturbs him kissing and cuddling Marie (also interpret-
able as guilt at being discovered behaving in an excessively 'feminine' way).
Nevertheless, as Vincendeau argues, the film manages to put on screen
'issues unimaginable before feminism' (1994a: 26), and its comic fantasy of
men taking over women's roles while women do their own thing draws
attention to the way women/mothers are normally expected to juggle their
lives. It criticizes the empty, selfish lives led by the three childless bachelors,
and puts the onus on men to change.
Both these films work over anxieties produced by women's changing
roles and expectations in the early 1980s, specifically the desire to combine
economic and sexual independence with relationships with men (in Les
Nanas) and with motherhood (in Trois hommes et un couffin). And both
implicitly identify men's failure to adapt to women's changing roles as a
key issue. But the effect of Les Nanas' otherwise imaginative evacuation of
men from the image track is to relegate them to a separate sphere which
leaves them impervious to change. In contrast, Trois hommes uses the
transforming power of comedy to represent new types of desirable mascu-
linity, though not, as yet, through men who are capable of relating to
mature, adult women.8
The single girl and romantic comedy
Changing gender roles and the conflict between the sexes are also ex-
plored in a range of comedies which focus on a woman's search for 'Mr.
Right'. These films foreground female characters and comic female per-
formances, address female desires and (often) make a mockery of men
who are variously married, gay, violent, inadequate, serial womanizers,
or simply unwilling to make a commitment. Furthermore, unlike the her-
oines of the films discussed in chapter 2, their comic heroines are not
isolated from work, home and family, but are mostly working women in
their late twenties/early thirties. They share their experiences with female
friends and colleagues and have often not managed to separate from their
overwhelming, sexually liberated and sexually predatory mothers. The
films' difficulties in establishing the happy heterosexual couple are typical
of the postclassical 'nervous romance', and, indeed, a number of them
end in the complete failure of the romance plot and the solitude of the
heroine. (These are the films which were least successful either at the box
office or with the critics, who in any case tend to dismiss such films as
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'films de femme', addressing issues worthy of the letter pages of women's

magazines.)
An early example of a comedy which ends with disillusionment and the
failure of romance is Un homme à ma taille/A Man of My Size (1982), a
film based on the autobiographical experiences of its director Annette Car-
ducci (born 1947), who thought that her story would be more marketable
as a comedy than as a realist drama (Lejeune, 1986: 100). The film follows
the tragicomic comic adventures of its tall, blonde German protagonist
(Liselotte Christian) who, despite a series of relationships with assorted
French men over the years, does not, as the title suggests, find one who
measures up. However, its attack on the sexist behavior of French men was
too hard-hitting to be funny. The pattern of a woman working her way
through various disappointing would-be romantic relationships is also the
theme of Caroline Chomienne's low budget Les Surprises de Vamour/The
Surprises of Love (1988), which ends with its naive, inexperienced young
heroine on her own again (and her mother going off with one of her
boyfriends). Philomène Esposito's more widely distributed Toxic Affair
(1993) both begins and ends with star Isabelle Adjani as a young woman
tearfully trying to get over the breakdown of a romance and survive her
ongoing relationship with her mother.
The theme of the young woman who is unsuccessful in love (and in most
other aspects of life) is treated in a more original manner in Le Journal du
séducteur/The Seducer's Diary (199(6) by Daniele Dubroux and Romaine
(1997) by Agnès Obadia (born 1963). Le journal du séducteur is a black
comedy starring Chiara Mastroianni as a young woman who is led into a
web of games, deception and (possibly) murder by a mysterious young man
(Melvin Poupaud), who eventually moves on to his next victim (whereas
her mother, played by Dubroux herself, happily lets herself be seduced by
another of her daugher's potential boyfriends). The more light-hearted Ro-
maine is a compilation of two earlier short films, Romaine et les garcons
(1994) and Romaine et les filles (1995), and a third episode entitled 'Ro-
maine et Romaine'. Obadia first invented and played the character of
Romaine in Romaine, un jour oil ca va pas, an award-winning short made
at the end of her film studies in 1989. Influenced by Jacques Tati's comic
creation, Monsieur Hulot, her thirty-year-old motherless heroine is another
slightly dysfunctional, accident-prone individual, whose naivete and bad
luck make her the victim of others. 9 In the first episode, she discovers that
her boyfriend has been seduced by her transvestite friend, Martine, whom
she left in charge of her flat while she went away on holiday.10 In the
second, she gets conned by a black woman, Louisa (Martine Delumeau),
who purports to be a surfing instructor, and loses all her belongings (though
Louisa later becomes a friend). And in the third, she gets knocked out by a
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beach attendant (Laurence Cote), loses her memory, gets knocked out again
to recover it, and ends up on the road alone, unable to decide whether to
go back to the beach (and new boyfriend) or home. Shrugging off each
incident with a resigned 'anyway . . . ' ('de toute fac,on . . . ' ) , the idiosyn-
cratic Romaine has elements of the unruly woman in the way she tells the
people she encounters exactly what she thinks of them, refusing the usual
forms of flattery or politeness, exposing hypocrisy, and making what passes
for normality unfamiliar (including romance).
Other women's comedies, like Tonie Marshall's Pentimento (1989), Eve-
lyne Dress's Pas d'amour sans amour (1993), Virginie Thevenet's Sam suffit
(1992) and Catherine Corsini's La Nouvelle Eve (1999), are structured in
more classic fashion by a romance narrative in which various obstacles
have to be overcome before the ideal couple can be united. They are
influenced to some extent by the unruly, energetic heroines of American
screwball comedy.11 Pentimento was the first film to be directed by actress
Tonie Marshall (born 1947), the daughter of French actress Micheline
Presle and American actor Bill Marshall. Starring Antoine de Caunes and
Patricia Dinev, it brings together the (male) lover and the ebullient, hyper-
active (female) troublemaker (Tamoureux et Pemmerdeuse') of screwball
comedy (Marshall, 1989) in a complicated plot which involves mistaken
identities (the protagonists meet at a funeral which the zany heroine thinks,
wrongly, is that of her unknown father) and a traffic in stolen paintings.
However, it ends happily with the formation of the couple, who turn out
not to be half-siblings as they had feared. The film introduces a significant
theme in Marshall's work, namely the after-effects of paternal neglect which
have to be overcome before the protagonists can find happiness, a theme
which is the main subject of Enfants de salaud (1996), discussed below.
Evelyne Dress's critically panned first film, Pas d'amour sans amour/No
Love Without Love, is a star vehicle for the actress/director herself, ena-
bling her to exhibit her perfect body as visual spectacle while at the same
time working her way through sexual relationships with a variety of unsat-
isfactory men, until she discovers in classic fashion that the ideal partner is
the formerly married colleague she has been working with all along (Patrick
Chesnais).
A more tongue-in-cheek approach to love and romance is to be found in
Virginie Thevenet's third film, Sam suffit, whose title (based on 'c,a m'suffit'
meaning 'it's good enough for me') refers to the name homeowners often
give their first home. Thévenet wanted to assess what might have happened
to the protagonist she created in La Nuit porte jarretelles, referring to Eva
(Aure Atika), the heroine of Sam suffit, as 'the Jézabel of 1992' (Thévenet,
1992). The title is an ironic comment on Eva's decision to relinquish her
unconventional lifestyle and settle down to a more 'normal' way of life.
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Sexy Eva abandons her job as a striptease artist in Spain, spends time
meditating in Brittany (in a decor which recalls Beineix's 36° le matin and
then sets out to integrate herself into society, in contrast to her eccentric,
liberated mother (Bernadette Laffont) and her HIV-positive friend (played
by Rosy de Palma, one of Pedro Almodovar's iconic actresses). The film
subsequently charts her pleasure in learning to be, or rather, perform being
'normal', assisted by her lovelorn artist friend, Peter (Philip Bartlett). She
starts dressing more conventionally, finds a part-time job as a cleaner (for a
middle-aged gay couple, one of whom is played by Claude Chabrol), ac-
cepts their offer of a room of her own, and also works as a clerk for the
local council. Her first pay slip fills her with such pride that she starts
collecting and framing the symbols of her integration (like her social secu-
rity card) with fluorescent fun fur. She also starts learning to cook and
looking for a man to father a child, motherhood (but not marriage) being
the next step on her road to 'normality'. However, while Eva sleeps with
Peter in order to get pregnant, a gallery owner spots her zany collection
and decides to promote her as an artist. The film ends with an exhibition
of her 'work', which clearly demonstrates that for Eva normal femininity is
just a collection of signs, a form of exhibition or performance. Though
pregnant Eva agrees to form a couple with Peter amid the festivities cele-
brating her success as an artist, this conventional happy ending cannot
efface its heroine's otherwise transgressive behavior in the pursuit of her
desires.
Catherine Corsini's first comedy, La Nouvelle Eve/The New Eve is the
most commercially successful woman's film to address the question of ro-
mance through a modern screwball comedy. Autobiographical in inspira-
tion (Guichard, 1999), it has also been described as 'a girls' film' (Lefort,
1999), given that Corsini worked closely with cinematographer Agnès Go-
dard and also credits Laurence Ferreira Barbosa. It stars Karin Viard12 as
Camille, an outrageous single thirty-something swimming instructor, who
values her independence and is outspoken in her criticism of those like her
brother who opt for marriage and the conventional family. Her hectic,
promiscuous sex life involves meeting men via the Minitel and experiment-
ing with group sex, and it is implied that in the past she also slept with her
best friend, who is a lesbian. Despite her uninhibited sexuality and appetite
for life, however, Camille is also subject to bouts of depression. When she
spills a huge bag of tranquillizers in the street, she is touched by the help
she is given by Alexis (Pierre-Loup Rajot), a married man and father of
two, who is a senior executive in the Socialist Party. She becomes obsessed
with him, disrupts his orderly life at home and at work, and eventually
pressures him into starting an affair, even though he does not want to leave
his family. On the rebound, she marries a lorry driver (Sergi Lopez) with
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Camille (Karin Viard), the screwball heroine of La Nouvelle Eve (1999).

(C) LOTHER/MPA.
whom she has also started an affair, but leaves him on their wedding night
in the hope of being rescued by Alexis, a project which is foiled when her
husband knocks her unconscious. The last scene, set some months later,
shows her meeting Alexis again by accident in a supermarket. Both are now
separated and free, though Camille is pregnant without being sure who the
father is. Their tender embrace suggests that Alexis has learnt to love her
as she needs to be loved, and that they may now be able to make a
commitment to their relationship, though the happy ending is appropriately
tentative.
La Nouvelle Eve's debt to American screwball comedy is evident in its
strong, transgressive heroine and its combination of burlesque (including
custard-pie throwing) and situation comedy (as in the scene where, com-
pletely drunk, Camille goes to the wrong party and finds herself sitting
between two middle-class psychiatrists talking about their clients). Cam-
ille's unexpected, unruly behavior in public and in private creates much of
the film's humor. She drinks too much, takes drugs, sleeps with complete
strangers, and is confrontational and loud-mouthed. The spectator is in-
vited both to revel in her disruption of conventions and sympathize with
her attempt to live out something different from her contemporaries (like
her married brother and her settled lesbian girlfriend). Although the final
image of Camille is one of a woman reaching the full promise of her
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femininity through the prospect of maternity and the heterosexual couple,

arguably Corsini's 'new Eve' still remains relatively untamed (she deliber-
ately chooses blue clothes for her baby even though she is expecting a girl)
and only accepts the formation of the couple on her own terms.
French women's comedies about single women are structured by female
desire and foreground strong, if at times quirky women, and their search
for happiness, in particular through the possibility of a romantic relation-
ship with a man. They create humor through the spectacle of women's
behavioral excesses and by making fun of men's inadequacies. But they also
draw attention to women's frustrated desires and anxieties about the het-
erosexual couple. Only some end with the heroine finding a man who
responds to her desires, and even in these cases, there is often an element
of hesitation about the couple's viability.13 However, the quest for romance
is at times accompanied by narcissistic self-display and attention-seeking
self-deprecation, which takes the edge off the heroines' potential for unru-
liness and is particularly unfunny in the case of Pas d'amour sans amour
and Toxic Affair. Romaine's isolated comic heroine is more unusual and
inventive, but the most energetic, transgressive comic heroines here are Eva
and Camille who look set to accept maternity and the couple (in that
order), whilst refusing to conform to normative expectations of feminin-
ity.14
Family comedies
In view of comedy's impulse towards renewal and social transformation, it

is interesting that a number of women's comedies of the 1990s explore the
fragmented family, and in particular the impact on family relationships
of the failure of the father to fulfil his traditional role. Aline Issermann's
only comedy so far, Dieu, Vamant de ma mère et le fils du char cutterI God,
My Mother's Lover and the Butcher's Son (1995), takes a serious
(autobiographically-inspired) topic, the near breakup of a family caused by
the father's inability to satisfy his wife and the wife's adultery with the local
hairdresser. Although it is treated from a comic perspective which empha-
sizes the children's point of view, its ending veers towards melodrama (and
the film was not a commercial success). Tonie Marshall offers an even more
critical representation of fatherhood in Enfants de salaud/B astard Brood
(1996), in which four very diverse adults (three women and a man, played
by Anemone, Nathalie Baye, Molly Ringwald and Francois Cluzet) find out
that they are half-siblings when they attend the murder trial of their biolog-
ical father, the 'bastard' of the title whom they have never met before.
Thanks to Anemone's unruliness and joie de vivre, the other three start to
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lose their inhibitions and enjoy life. The puritanical American feminist ends
up performing a striptease and having sex with her half-brother, while the
repressed bourgeois wife leaves her joyless marriage and starts an affair
with her brother's friend. As for their monstrous father, who intends to
leave all his ill-gotten gains to an adopted Argentinian son, the 'bastard
brood' take their revenge by giving him a heart attack (they pretend they
have killed the adopted son). The last scene shows them literally dancing
on their father's coffin, trying jubilantly to get it to fit into the grave.
Typically, Marshall addresses a serious, autobiographically inspired topic
(her mother Micheline Presle even has a cameo role as one of the father's
ex-wives) through an anarchic, libertarian comedy.
Two more mainstream, commercially successful women's comedies from
the end of the decade also represent a critique of the father, but without the
same sense of anger. Charlotte de Turkheim's first film, Mon pére, ma mere,
mes frères et mes soeurs/My Father, My Mother, My Brothers and My
Sisters (1999), is a light-hearted farce starring Victoria Abril (the star of
Gazon maudit) as a sexy but impecunious single mother living in Paris with
her three children. In the course of a surprise summer holiday in the Carib-
bean engineered by the children's grandmother, she finds herself staying in
the same resort as her former lovers, the happy ending being the (tempo-
rary) reunion of her children with their different fathers. Screenwriter Dan-
ielle Thompson's first film as director, ha Buch elChristmas Beatings
(1999),15 also focuses on a fragmented family, this time blending comedy
with melodrama. Set in Paris, it concerns a family of Russian immigrant
origin, three adult daughters, their unknown half-brother and their es-
tranged parents, who meet up after the funeral of the mother's second
husband during the period leading up to Christmas. Its all-star cast includes
Franchise Fabian, Claude Rich, Sabine Azéma, Emmanuelle Béart and
Charlotte Gainsbourg (winner of the 2000 Cesar for Best Supporting Ac-
tress), and its pleasure lies in its various romance plots, which include the
(temporary) reunion of the children's parents.
Another theme of women's comedy in relation to the family (and society)
is the very real problem of reconciling motherhood and work. Camille de
Casabianca's Le Fabuleux destin de Madame Petlet/The Fabulous Destiny
of Madame Petlet (1995), starring Casabianca herself and French television
personality, Mai'té, centers on a harassed Parisian television scriptwriter
who secretly creates a new drama series based on the traumatic life history
of her provincial working class cleaner and baby-minder. The film compares
the experiences of women from different classes, and criticizes the way the
working class woman is exploited both by the media and by her middle
class employer. Guila Braoudé's first film, Je veux tout/1 Want It All (1999),
starring Elsa Zylberstein and Frederic Diefenthal, dramatizes the threat to
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the couple when the heroine decides to resume her career as an architect
and includes very funny scenes when she tries taking her baby with her to
interviews). Je veux tout reaches a farcical climax when, having convinced
her husband that he has to do his share of the domestic and childcare
chores, she is able to construct, on the spot, a winning model of the
architectural plans for a new hospital, thus sanctifying her status as super-
woman. 16
These films show women (particularly middle-class women) working out
the consequences of the breakup of the nuclear family, criticizing their
errant fathers (or the fathers of their children) and demonstrating women's
need to combine family life and work. They offer different Utopian fanta-
sies, the pleasures of sibling intimacy in Enfants de salaud and La Buche
(where the relationships between sisters are particularly important), the
vision of more caring partners/fathers in Moti pere, ma mère . . . and
Je veux tout. And perhaps most importantly, they confirm that women's
roles in comedy can be expanded beyond those of brides-to-be (or phallic
mothers-in-law).
Utopian social comedies
The impulse towards Utopian fantasy is most strongly pronounced in the

work of Coline Serreau. Her films after Trois hommes et un couffin move
beyond the domestic world of the family, using the breakdown of the white
middle-class heterosexual couple as a starting point for a more general
investigation of the state of society. This is most obvious in Romuald et
Juliette (1989) and La Crise (1992), which provide a transforming vision
of French society through their construction of others (in terms of race and
class), and thus most clearly contribute to the reworking of French national
identity in comedy.
Romuald et Juliette reworks Shakespeare's tragic love story as contem-
porary fairy tale, bringing together two people from different and poten-
tially antagonistic class and ethnic backgrounds, and producing social
awareness, humor and romance from their unlikely encounter. Juliette Bon-
aventure (Firmine Richard) is an improbable modern Cinderella, a large,
black, middle-aged cleaning-woman with five children all by different mar-
riages, whose story conventionally belongs to the world of social realism or
melodrama. Romuald Blindet (Daniel Auteuil), who turns out to be her
Prince Charming, is the affluent, white managing director of the yogurt
manufacturing company Blanlait where she works, whose story is the stuff
of conventional farce (his wife is having an affair with his most trusted
colleague). The film's opening sequences cut between the two characters in
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order to emphasize their differences: Juliette leaves work at night and goes
home to Saint-Denis by metro and bus to face a crowded flat, fractious
children and domestic chores, while Romuald sets off for work in the
morning in a chauffeur-driven car, taking his two children to school and
leaving behind a wife, a cleaning-woman, and a huge, luxurious sixteenth-
arrondissement Parisian apartment. The improbable couple meet in the
liminal spaces of the office at night when Juliette discovers clues relating to
internal machinations to overthrow Romuald (one rival colleague is engi-
neering an outbreak of food poisoning in a factory Romuald is responsible
for, another is engaging in insider share-dealing in Romuald's name). Ju-
liette takes pity on Romuald, allows him to take refuge in her flat when he
is divested of his functions, and helps him sort himself out and eventually
regain his position. In contrast, when she needs Romuald's help in getting
her oldest son, Aimé, released from prison on a drugs charge, Romuald is
away on business. Not surprisingly, when Romuald realizes that he is really
in love with her (after finding out about his wife's affair), Juliette angrily
rejects him, listing all the reasons why she is not interested in his offer of
marriage, including the fact that he is white and selfish. However, after his
concerted attempts to seduce her and her children, the film ends in classic
style with a celebration of their wedding and a Utopian vision of the mixed-
race couple (the pregnant Juliette intends to call her new baby Caramel)
and their various ex-spouses and children having fun together without
distinction of class, race or age.
As Dina Sherzer argues (1999), Romuald et Juliette shows a keen aware-
ness of issues around race and nationality being debated within French
society at the time of its making. The film makes the white spectator
uncomfortably aware of racial difference from the black characters' points
of view, for example, through the children's awareness of Romuald as an
insensitive white man in their midst, or Juliette's experience of not really
existing when she confronts the white tennis club secretary. It also demys-
tifies racist stereotypes about black women, creating an unusual black
heroine who is intelligent, hard-working, proud and independent as well as
challenging normative modes of feminine glamor. And, even more than in
Serreau's other films, it renders visible the difference between women's work
(particularly working-class women) and men's work, showing the burden
of Juliette's double workload. Furthermore, Juliette has an active narrative
role, using her female skills to sort out Romuald's problems but, more
importantly, teaching him that feminine qualities of care and solidarity are
more important than profit and status (the film's subplot satirizes the mar-
ket economy). However, the happy ending is entirely dependent on the
agency of the white middle-class French male and his ability, first to change
his (and others') way of seeing the world and reject the rules and hierarchies
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Romuald (Danniel Auteuil) takes refuge with Juliette's family in Romuald

et Juliette (1989). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the
of white bourgeois society, and second, paradoxically, to pay for what he

wants. The film does not entirely dislodge entrenched power structures,
even if Juliette insists on carrying on working, and thereby draws attention
to the fantasy nature of its vision of a world in which distinctions of race,
class and gender are erased (Rollet, 1998: 80-86).
The optimistic belief in the capacity for change is also a key structuring
device of La Crise/The Crisis, which is focalized through another white
middle-class male. The crisis in question is initially that of Victor (Vincent
Lindon), a company lawyer, who wakes up one morning to find that his
wife, Marie, has left him and that he has been made redundant. Alienated
from his friends, who are all obsessed with their own (relatively trivial)
crises, lonely Victor finds himself drinking with homeless, unemployed
Michou (Patrick Timsit), who attaches himself to Victor on his otherwise
painful journey of self-discovery. Their awkward relationship is a source of
humour, though the film's invitation to laugh at Michou's apparent naivete,
clumsiness and vulgarity is rather problematic. Victor discovers crises in
other aspects of his life (his indifferent parents are about to separate, a
neighboring champagne Socialist politician has lost control over his family)
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but fails to listen to Michou's problems, treating him in a hypocritical and

insensitive way. After Michou abandons him, however, he eventually makes
the effort to find him again. As a result of his encounter with Djamila, the
Arab woman who brought Michou up, he gives Michou a job, realizes
what an unreliable, uncaring father he has been, and tries to restore his
relationship with Marie. (Marie had taken refuge in her mother's apartment
because she felt so exhausted, like baby Marie's mother in Trois hommes et
un couffìn.)
La Crise is less concerned with homelessness and social exclusion as a
political issue (despite a brief montage of shots of homeless people) than
with Victor's slow realization of his selfishness, narrow-mindness and ig-
norance about other people's lives, his own family as well as those from a
different social background. The film is shot through with images of bro-
ken, though not necessarily unhappy, families, as in the hilarious scene
where he is introduced to the various permutations of parents of the chil-
dren that a friend's wife's sister is taking on holiday, or when he discovers
that his aging mother (Maria Pacòme) is about to go off with her lover.
However, his most important discovery concerns his misperceptions with
regard to class and ethnic difference, first through his encounter with
Michou, then with the multi-ethnic community of Michou's brother's
household. When he first meets Michou he refuses to listen to what the
man has to say, except when, in answer to the politician's question, Michou
affirms that he is a racist. The spectator is aware of the contrast between
the politician's anti-racist rhetoric and his wife's blatantly racist attitude
towards the women she employs. But the significance of Michou's position
is only revealed towards the end when Victor discovers that, despite his so-
called racism, he has sacrificed his room in his brother's flat for the dying
Djamila, has Arab friends, and thinks other Arabs are racist for not agree-
ing to Djamila's marriage with his brother. Arguably, the film's risky but
sophisticated play with stereotypes (Rosello, 1997) undermines Michou's
stereotypical assertions both through the automaticity and excess of Tim-
sit's comic delivery and, more importantly, through the contradictions be-
tween Michou's discourse and practice. La Crise suggests that people
should be judged by what they do rather than by what they say, leaving it
up to Victor at the end to demonstrate in practice that he is a changed man.
Serreau's comedies offer Utopian fantasies about the reconciliation of
differences in French society, between whites and blacks or whites and
Arabs, between the middle classes and the lower classes, and between men
and women. However, though they invite all spectators to confront and
reflect upon prejudices and stereotypes, they are primarily addressed to a
white middle-class male-oriented audience. Both these films center on pro-
fessional men with beautiful wives and apartments, played by attractive,
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well-known stars, whose lives are challenged by their chance encounters

with people of lower social status and less attractive physical appearance
(played by in the first instance an unknown actress, in the second a comic
actor). As a result, they undergo a process of humiliation and loss, then
come to understand how blind they have been to others and discover more
'feminine' values in themselves. However, though Romuald et Juliette and
La Crise both construct an ethnic minority woman as the embodiment of
feminine wisdom and include other older women characters who refuse to
be stereotyped, they also feature cameos of pinched, repressed white
women, and minimize the white bourgeois wives whose absence triggers
the male protagonists' trajectory. Nonetheless, as Vincendeau argues, Ser-
reau's films need to be read against the specificity of the French cultural
background, and their significance in offering 'a female-centered, comic
corrective on the crumbling edifice of masculinity' should not be under-
estimated (Vincendeau, 1994a: 28). 17
Unruly women
If women are secondary characters in Serreau's comedies, they take center

stage in the films written and directed by Josiane Balasko, whose comic
creations, performed by Balasko herself, generally conform to Rowe's defi-
nition of the unruly woman as 'rule-breaker, joke-maker, and public, bodily
spectacle' (Rowe, 1995: 12). For Rowe, the carnivalesque bodily excesses
of unruly women like American comic actress Roseanne (or British stand
up comedian Jo Brand) are capable of unsettling ideologies about gender
and momentarily inverting the social hierarchy (see Rollet, 1999). The
presence of unruly women in French cinema is examined here in particular
in relation to Gazon maudit (1995), where Balasko uses her star persona
to impersonate a sympathetic butch lesbian, and Le Derrière (1999), writ-
ten and directed by Valerie Lemercier, which challenges normative represen-
tations of femininity through Lemercier's cross-dressing performance as a
camp, gay youth. In both instances, the directors/performers play with the
transformative possibilities of comedy to foreground alternative expressions
of gender and sexuality.
Josiane Balasko (born 1950)18 had a classical stage training but then
joined the Theatre du Splendid café-theàtre and has worked as a comic
actress, writer and director ever since. Most of the Splendid's shows were
adapted to the big screen, including the cult film, Le Pére Noel est une
ordure (Jean-Marie Poire, 1982), and two of Balasko's fellow actors,
Michel Blanc and Gerard Jugnot, directed their first films in the early
1980s. Balasko herself was driven to write her first screenplays because of
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the scarcity of roles for women who did not conform to accepted norms of
femininity. Her first script, Les Hommes préfèrent les grosses/Men Prefer
Fat Girls (Jean-Marie Poire, 1981), starred Balasko herself and 'was the
first time a not-so-beautiful woman had the leading role' (Lejeune, 1987:
78). In her first film as writer-director, Sac de noeuds (1985), a road movie
comedy (see chapter 8), she also makes herself deliberately unattractive and
is constantly self-mocking, like her role model Mae West. Balasko's taste
for masquerade and excess of body, speech and laughter creates a disruptive
spectacle which she uses to unsettle conventional ideologies about gender.
Her films also push at the limits of caricature to deconstruct racial and
other stereotypes, tackling racism in her second film, Les Keufs (1987), a
police comedy (see chapter 7), and homophobia in Gazon maudit.
All Balasko's films center on an unruly heroine whose parodie disguises
deconstruct the mechanisms, mise-en-scène and artifices of femininity. In
her third comedy, Ma vie est un enfer/My Life is Hell (1991), a spectacular
reworking of the Faust myth packed with special effects, she plays Leah
Lemonier, an unhappy, unattractive dental assistant in her mid-thirties, who
accidentally invokes an agent of the devil, Abar (Daniel Auteuil). Abar
offers to obey her desires in exchange for her soul, and when Leah com-
plains that people do not look at her because she is not 'a stupid blonde
bimbo with big tits and a cute arse', he transforms her into Scarlet, a sexy
blonde with a strong resemblance to the early Bardot (played by Jessica
Forde).19 As Scarlet, Leah at last enjoys the attention of her psychoanalyst,
Xavier (Richard Berry), but then discovers that he is only interested in her
as a sex object. Empowered by Abar, a shadow of Leah/Scarlet's body on
the bedroom wall displays an erect penis, and just as Xavier tells her that
she is 'feminine in a deeply moving way', the angry Leah sodomises him,
despite his protests and cries of pain. This scene completely disempowers
the male gaze and radically disturbs conventional gender roles, though it is
hastily smoothed over as Leah returns to her former body and creeps away.
However, the film ends with a further reversal of roles as Leah, who has
become the managing director of a vast corporation, embarks on a sexual
relationship with the now human, devoted Abar. As in Les Hommes préfèr-
ent les grosses, Balasko deliberately constructs a scenario which indulges
the fantasies and desires of ordinary women spectators for a 'not-so-
beautifuP heroine to end up with a handsome man.
In Gazon Maudit/French Twist, Balasko set out to fill a void in popular
French cinema by making a film about lesbianism, though it should be
noted that she herself is well known as a heterosexual woman and mother.
She does so by appropriating the stock situation of nineteenth century
French bedroom farce, the adulterous triangle, radically rewriting the genre
by making the cuckold's rival a lesbian and encouraging the spectator to
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take her side. The film begins where Sac de noeuds ends, on the road, with
the central character, Marijo (Balasko), heading south in her van covered
with voluptuous, oriental designs. It then engineers a meeting between
Marijo and Loli (Victoria Abril), the lovely, very 'feminine' Spanish wife of
estate agent Laurent (Alain Chabat), who happens to be a serial womanizer.
When Marijo appears on Loli's doorstep, her van having broken down, her
ambiguous sexuality is quickly signaled by her uncompromisingly 'butch'
appearance in cap, rugby shirt and shades, cigarillos to the ready (one of
Loli's children even calls her 'Monsieur'). But point of view shots quickly
establish a current of desire between the two women, which the spectator
is invited to share and which provides the basis for a hilarious critique of
Laurent and his friend's (Ticky Holgado) attitude towards women and
lesbianism. Laurent's violent reaction to Marijo's presence, followed by
Loli's discovery that Laurent has regularly been unfaithful to her, lead
hitherto heterosexual Loli not only to consummate her desire for Marijo
(represented by scenes of the two women spending the night on the beach
together and, later, sharing a bath) but also to install Marijo in the house.
When Marijo then takes pity on the desolate Laurent, however, she agrees,
with delight, to spend equal time with each lover, keeping Sundays to
herself. This Utopian solution to Loli's predicament is foiled when she
becomes jealous of one of Marijo's former lovers, Dany (Catherine Hiegel),
a situation which enables Laurent to persuade Marijo to leave, which she
does on the condition that he (reluctantly) help her get pregnant. But her
departure does not signal a return to order. Rather, months later when she
discovers what has happened, Loli confronts Marijo in the lesbian night-
club in Paris where she works, prompting her to give birth and insisting
that she come back south. The film ends with shots of the incongruous
threesome's latest domestic arrangements, concluding with an image of the
two women in bed together with Marijo's baby, and, unexpectedly, of
Laurent exchanging looks of desire with a handsome Spaniard whose house
he is planning to buy for his expanding family.
Gazon Maudit raises a number of issues for feminist and lesbian scholars,
the most important being the extent to which it confirms butch/femme
stereotypes of lesbian behavior and uses the figure of the lesbian merely to
bring the straying male back into line and rejuvenate the heterosexual
couple. Lucille Cairns (1998) notes how Balasko opts out of visual depic-
tions of lesbian sex even though she shows heterosexual pleasure (including
Marijo's funny attempt at sexual intercourse with Laurent), and argues that
the figure of the butch lesbian is further desexualized and feminized by
Marijo's choice of motherhood (as in the last bedroom scene). For Susan
Hayward, however, Marijo's lesbian appropriation of the maternal, repro-
ductive female body is potentially subversive in itself and undermines 'the
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G E N R E FILMS
Marijo (Josiane Balasko) seduces Loli (Victoria Abril) in Gazon maudit

(1995). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the Ronald
Grant Archive.
heterosexual matrix of power' (Hayward, 1998: 143). Hayward's reserva-

tions about the film relate more to the fact that Marijo is played by a
heterosexual woman masquerading as a lesbian, so denying the film an
authentic 'gay signature'.
Certainly, Balasko's scenario does not foreground lesbian love at the
expense of heterosexual relationships, even if the former is initially repre-
sented as more caring and life-enhancing. Rather, as in Serreau's films,
Balasko's strategy is to humiliate the inadequate middle-class male in order
to allow him to see the folly of his ways and make amends by becoming a
more attentive, loving partner. However, there is no simple return to a
reinvigorated nuclear family, since Balasko's ongoing plot twists keep desta-
bilizing sexual identities, with the more androgynous Loli continuing to
find pleasure in her newfound bisexuality and Laurent himself experiencing
the awakening of homosexual desire. Furthermore, even if Balasko's perfor-
mance as Marijo becomes more feminized by the end of the film, this does
not entirely efface her earlier disruptive behavior as she outsmarts Laurent
and seduces his (willing) wife.
For her next film, Balasko played safe with Un grand cri d'amour/A
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COMEDY
Great Cry of Love (1998), an adaptation of her successful stage play, which
ran in Paris in 1996-1997 with Balasko herself and Richard Berry (her real
life brother-in-law) in the starring roles. Un grand cri d'amour foregrounds
the bitter, confrontational relationship between two aging stars, flamboyant
has-been and former alcoholic Gigi Ortega (Balasko) and her former lover
and stage partner Hugo Martial (Berry). It provides Balasko with another
opportunity to flaunt her outrageous linguistic and physical unruliness, as
she insults Hugo, wearing heavy make-up, a leopard-skin top, a red leather
mini-skirt and flashy jewelry.
Le Derrière/From Behind (1999) was the second film to be directed by
comic actress Valerie Lemercier (born 1964), who was catapulted to star-
dom after her role as Beatrice de Montmirail in Les Visiteurs (Jean-Marie
Poire, 1993). Her first film as director was Quadrille (1997), an adaptation
of a boulevard comedy by Sacha Guitry.20 The more innovative Le Derrière
is a rare example of a French cross-dressing film, set, unusually, in a gay
male household. French culture lacks the British tradition of camp humor,
and the sympathetic portrayal of a household of drag queens in the highly
successful La Cage aux folles (Edouard Molinaro, 1978)21 was unique in
French cinema, though it did little to raise the audience's awareness of gay
issues. The theme of homosexuality became more prevalent in films of the
1980s and 1990s, including Joy Fleury's La Lète des pères/Father's Day
(1989) which depicts a couple of gay men (Thierry Lhermitte and Alain
Souchon) who are determined to be fathers and prepared to sleep with a
woman to achieve their goal. More typical, however, is Gabriel Aghion's
Pedale douce (1996), publicized (misleadingly) as the 'Cage aux folles of
the 1990s', in which the outrageous drag queens function primarily as an
exotic backdrop to the development of a conventional, heterosexual ro-
mance (Roller, 2000).
In Le Derrière, Lemercier plays Frédérique, a young middle-class woman
living in the country whose mother has died without telling her who her
father was. Frédérique's search for her father takes her to Paris and, while
staying with gay friend Jean-Francois (Patrick Catalifo), she is persuaded
to dress up as a gay man in order to accompany him and his friends to a
nightclub (the spectacle of her transformation being completed by the sock
stuffed into her jeans). Her metamorphosis is so convincing that, not only
does she pass for gay at the entrance, she has to be rescued from a leather-
clad man who tries to chat her up. When she discovers that her father,
Pierre (Claude Rich), is also gay and indifferent to women, she decides to
insinuate herself into his life as his gay son, Frederic. Switching gender and
sexual identities liberates her from the constraints of feminine respectability
and enables her to express the resentment (and desire) she feels towards
him (though, paradoxically, the only time Pierre expresses concern for her
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Valerie Lemercier camps it up as Frédéric/que in Le Derrière (1999). Sup-

plied by and reproduced with permission from the Ronald Grant Archive.
as a father is when he catches her dressed as a woman and thinks she is in

drag and in need of counseling). However, her presence arouses the animos-
ity of Pierre's long-term black partner, Francois (Dieudonné), who only
accepts her when he discovers that she is 'really' a woman (and therefore
completely unthreatening). After a variety of comic incidents, Frédérique
decides to drop the mask and returns to the meal table completely naked
(shot discreetly from behind), seating herself next to her father who is
thereby forced finally to accept her as she is.
Most of the film's humor is generated by Lemercier's performance as
Frederic, since she not only acts male, she also acts gay, and chooses a style
of gayness which clashes profoundly with her father's exquisitely cultivated
bourgeois manners. She behaves in the way a middle-class thirty-something
woman from the country might think gay men behave, pretending to be a
ballet dancer and accentuating the campiness of her Marseillais speech and
behavior in a way which her father finds supremely irritating. She also
provokes laughter through her difficulties as a woman performing certain
male tasks (like peeing against a tree, the image reproduced on the film's
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poster). Her successful masquerade enables her to overcome her 'feminine'

inhibitions, demonstrating that a white middle class woman can move
between different roles and appearances (genders and sexualities), and need
not be constricted by inhibiting social conventions. As a gay youth she
drinks heavily, lets herself be chatted up, makes inappropriate comments to
her newfound family, and generally behaves excessively badly, both in
public and in private. However, as a woman, Frédérique is neither interest-
ing nor funny. Shy and awkward when confronted with other people, she
knows her place in society and remains discreet and respectful, only seem-
ing at ease in the company of her horses. At the end, Frédérique's decision
to put an end to her double life by baring all in front of her father and his
guests suggests that she may have been transformed and liberated by her
rebellious cross-gender experiences. Arguably, though, her nakedness re-
turns her to an essentialist construction of femininity based on the 'truth'
of the body's sexual difference. Furthermore, the film's disappointing final
sequence restores her to an even more conventional feminine role through
the conclusion of the ongoing but unconvincing heterosexual romance plot.
Le Derrière maps its critique of the absent, inadequate and uncaring
father on to a humorous parody of Mitterrand and the Mitterrand era. The
name of Pierre's gallery, TGG ('Très Grande Galerie' or 'Very Big Gallery')
is an ironic reference to the various TG projects started during the Mitter-
rand era,22 while Rich's performance accentuates his slight physical resem-
blance to Mitterrand, particularly in his inaugural speech at the TGG. The
allusion is even more pronounced when, during their first argument, Fréd-
éric/que directly accuses her father of parodying Mitterrand yet failing to
recognize his own child, unlike Mitterrand who had legally recognized his
illegitimate daughter, Mazarine.
Gazon Maudit and Le Derrière both foreground carnivalesque per-
formances (the butch lesbian, the camp, gay youth) which demonstrate
the performance of gender and the female body. In each case, however,
the woman's transgressive behavior appears eventually to be contained:
motherhood makes Marijo less threatening (and implicitly more femi-
nine), while romance tames Frédérique, who loses the spark and vitality
of her gay male persona. However, whereas the Utopian ending of Gazon
maudit is still open to new permutations of gender and sexual identities,
Le Derrière retreats to a more reassuring position in which the woman's
unstable identity is finally fixed and resolved through the display of her
naked female body. Whatever their narrative resolutions, however, these
films still provide the pleasures of star performances of and by disruptive,
unruly women.
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Conclusion
The commercial successes of Coline Serreau and Josiane Balasko, and to a

lesser extent Valerie Lemercier and, most recently, Daniele Thompson, offer
valuable models of how to succeed as a woman writer and director in
mainstream comedy. Each of these directors has a background in the indus-
try, the first three as performers, and Thompson as a screenwriter. And,
apart from Serreau's Trois hommes et un couffin, each has been able to
mobilize a star cast. Serreau, Balasko and Lemercier have inflected a popu-
lar genre with concerns related to social and/or gender issues, whereas
Thompson has written a bittersweet tragicomedy which dwells on the dif-
ficulties of personal relationships but injects them with humor. In each case,
though they may construct masculinity as problematic, they do so without
alienating a male audience. However, their success should not obscure the
fact that many women's comedies are actually rather low budget personal
films which receive only a limited release.
There appear to be two main themes dominating women's comedy, an
interrogation of the couple and an anxiety in relation to the contemporary
fragmented family, though both Serreau and Balasko, in their different
ways, also use comedy to draw attention to other social issues.23 Most
women's comedies, whether they center on female characters or not, are
gently critical of men, demonstrating how men need to learn more 'femi-
nine' skills and values in order to please women, including undertaking
their share of domestic and childcare duties. Indeed, a recurring theme of
the 1990s in particular has been the absence or inadequacy of men as
fathers, be it in films where women have to juggle their lives to include
motherhood and a career, or in films which simply try (temporarily) to
piece the fragmented family back together again.
Women's comedies also foreground the performances of unruly women,
who express their desires without paying heed to conventional notions
of femininity. Comic heroines (except in Serreau's films) often seem able
to enjoy friendships with other women, even if they are mostly expressed
through the sharing of grievances about men. However, the most signif-
icant comedies are those which offer a more transgressive vision of so-
ciety, be it through the Utopian social fantasies of Coline Serreau and
Josiane Balasko, or the carnivalesque challenging of gender and sexual
identities to be found in Gazon maudit and Le Derrière and, to some
extent, La Nouvelle Eve.
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COMEDY
Notes
1. Two of Serreau's films, Trois hommes et un couffin and La Crise, and three of
Balasko's films, Gazon maudit, Ma vie est un enfer and Les Keufs, are among
the ten women's films of the 1980s and 1990s which have sold more than a
million tickets. The other five are Daniele Thompson's comedy La Buche, but
also Kurys's Coup de foudre, Palcy's Rue Cases-Nègres, Varda's Sans toit ni hi
and Marshall's Vénus Beauté (Institut) (see Filmography).
2. Unruly women feature in a number of internationally celebrated feminist film
classics of the 1970s. For example, Take It Like a Man, Ma'am (Danish Red
Collective, 1975) denaturalizes the construction of gender through a hilarious
dream sequence in which a middle-aged housewife and her friends take over
men's roles and the men take over women's roles. Similarly, Jan Oxenberg's A
Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts (1975) interrogates dominant stereotypes about
lesbianism through the performances of various unruly women. Marleen Gor-
ris's A Question of Silence (1982) is notable for its disturbing use of shared
laughter between women in its final courtroom scene as a way of demonstrating
women's power to disrupt social norms.
3. Girardot also starred in Cours après moi que je fattrape (Robert Pouret, 1976),
a comedy co-written with Nicole de Buron, who also directed her in Vas-y
maman (1978), a comedy about a woman's struggle to combine work and
motherhood.
4. Vincendeau (1994a: 26) also notes the greater prominence of female comics on
radio and television, including the cult all-women humorous chat show Frou-
frou/Frills (1994), hosted by Christine Bravo.
5. Catherine Sarnie is a member of the Comédie Franchise who, like Catherine
Hiegel, another Comédie Franchise actress, also stars in films by Josiane Bal-
asko.
6. From alarming headlines like 'they [women] want everything' to the newly
created word célibattantes (made up from célibataire/single and battanteslie-
male fighters).
7. Modleski's assertion that the film (but more specifically the American remake)
reveals 'men's desire to usurp women's procreative function' (Modleski, 1988:
70) needs to be read in the light of 1980s debates about women's rights as
surrogate mothers in the United States.
8. Nelly Kaplan's comic fantasy, Plaisir d'amour/Pleasure of Love (1991), is also
based on gender inversion and role reversal in the context of a community of
women. Daughter (Cécile Sanz de Alba), mother (Dominique Blanc) and grand-
mother (Franchise Fabian) are each in turn seduced by a good looking visitor,
Guillaume de Burlador (Pierre Arditi), a descendant of Don Juan, who then
discovers, to his humiliation, that he has been a 'sex toy' for the three women
concerned.
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9. Obadia did a final year dissertation on Tati and also worked as the assistant of
his daughter, Sophie Tatischeff.
10. There are interesting similarities between scenes in this film and Judith Cahen's
La Revolution sexuelle n'a pas eu lieu (1999), discussed in chapter 5.
11. Intertextual references to American romantic and screwball comedies are evi-
dent in films like UHonorable Catherine (Marcel L'Herbier, 1942), made in
France during World War Two, at a time when American films were banned.
An early example of a woman director's interest in screwball comedy is 17 suffit
d'une fois/Once Is Enough (1946), a postwar star vehicle for Edwige Feuillère
directed by Andrée Feix (1912-1987), which typifies the ideological ambiguity
of the genre. It focuses initially on an outrageous, witty, free-spirited woman
sculptor, but ends with her sacrificing her career and her independence to live
in the wilds of Patagonia with an irascible male explorer (Fernand Gravey).
12. Viard's comic persona was revealed in Tatie Danielle (Etienne Chatiliez, 1990).
13. Anne Fontaine's comedies Augustin (1995) and Augustin roi du Kung Fu
(1999), co-written with Jacques Fieschi, foreground a comic hero (played by
Fontaine's brother, Jean-Chrétien Sibertin-Blanc). The latter film follows the
clownish adventures of the naive, physically awkward and socially inept Augus-
tin, who moves to Chinatown in Paris (the 13e arrondissement) to immerse
himself in Chinese culture. However, a Eurocentric gaze dominates the narra-
tive, while Maggie Cheung, who plays Ling, Augustin's acupuncturist, functions
primarily as an exotic object of desire. The film's Utopian ending shows Augus-
tin living in Beijing, married to a Chinese woman and the father of a little boy,
having at last overcome his diffidence, and speaking fluent Chinese.
14. Chantal Akerman's Un divan à New York (1996), an international co-
production starring Juliette Binoche and William Hurt, is also a romantic com-
edy, featuring gender inversion as the two characters first occupy each other's
places, in Paris and New York respectively. However, the film was not particu-
larly successful.
15. Thompson is the daughter of director Gerard Oury, whose innumerable French
comedies include the most popular French film of all time, La Grande vadrouille
(1966), co-written with Thompson.
16. The film casts Braoudé's husband, Patrick, director of Neuf mois/Nine months
(1994), as the ridiculous accident-prone neighbor.
17. In her next comedy, La Belle verte/Green Beauty (1996), Serreau more directly
inscribes a female point of view on the world by foregrounding a female protag-
onist (played rather self-indulgently by Serreau herself). However, its science-
fiction fantasy of aliens landing on earth to save the planet from destruction is
disappointingly simplistic. Mila (Serreau) volunteers to leave her green, Utopian
planet on a mission to earth (because she is a half-earthling) where she behaves
as an unruly Candide/Romaine character whose naivete and candidness expose
the prejudices and contradictions of those she meets, as in her first encounter
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COMEDY
with top surgeon, Max (Vincent Lindon). Her attempts to transform the way
earthlings behave meet with only limited success, even if, as in La Crise, she
gets Max to think differently about his wife and his job. She provisionally
transforms Max's luxurious, bourgeois flat into a Utopian community inhabited
by Max's children, her own sons, their girlfriends, and a baby they have saved
from the social services; but in the end she returns to her planet, leaving behind
just a revitalized nuclear family.
18. There is an uncertainty about Balasko's date of birth, either 1950 (IFI) or 1952
(IMD).
19. The resemblance to Bardot is reinforced, not only by a black hair band, but
also by her pseudo-Brazilian dance reminiscent of Bardot's performance in Et
Dieu créa la femmei'And God created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956).
20. Lemercier's adaptation of Guitry's complicated play about a quartet of two men
and two women in and out of love subverts the playwright's well known
misogyny, expressed through the character of Philippe (André Dussolier). By
removing Philippe's old-fashioned tirades about marriage, creating complicity
between the two women (played by herself and Sandrine Kiberlain), and mock-
ing Philippe's pomposity by making faces or looking at the ceiling while he
talks, Lemercier transforms the play, focusing on the desires and pleasures of
the two women.
21. La Cage aux folles came out in the same year as Serreau's Pourquoi past, a
sympathetic exploration of homosexual/bisexual relationships.
22. For example, the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse/Very Fast Train) and the TGB
(Très Grande Bibliothèque/Very Big Library).
23. For a comparative discussion of the work of Serreau and Balasko, see Rollet
(1997).
195
CHAPTER SEVEN
Crime Dramas
The French crime film or policier {polar in slang) has been one of French
cinema's most popular genres since the 1950s (Austin, 1996: 99-118,
Forbes, 1992: 47-75, Vincendeau, 1992a: 50-80). However, it enjoys
higher status than comedy, thanks in part to its indigenous nineteenth-
century literary origins (Vincendeau, 1992a: 70), and has been an inspira-
tion for auteur filmmakers from the New Wave onwards. Its earliest
manifestations can be traced back to the crime series of the silent era,
including Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires (1915-1916), which starred Mu-
sidora as villainess Irma Vep. However, it has conventionally been a male-
oriented genre. Thrillers of the 1950s and 1960s, heavily influenced by
American film noir and by sèrie noire crime literature, featured male stars
like Jean Gabin and, later, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. By the
end of the 1970s, the genre had diversified to include action-packed
comedy-thrillers, stylized gangster films and political thrillers, epitomized
by Costa-Gavras's films starring Yves Montand, and in the 1980s it was
further inflected by the postmodern thrillers of the cinema du look. Though
crime dramas vary widely, Vincendeau argues that the specificity of the
French policier can be detected in recurrent motifs, including 'the centrality
of Paris . . . , the consistent weight placed on social observation, and the
blurring of law and lawlessness within more ambiguous moral codes (the
French policier never showed much interest in the social origin of crime)'
(Vincendeau, 1996a: 339).
The core experience addressed in crime dramas is violence (Cook, 1985:
87), but their investigation of violence, and of the boundary between law
and lawlessness, has conventionally taken place within a male-oriented
fictional world with its own codes, of which women are more often than
not the victims. Indeed, the continuing popularity of the policier in France
in the 1970s has been seen (like the proliferation of pornographic films) as
a response to the 'crisis of masculinity' supposedly triggered by feminism
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CRIME DRAMAS
(O'Shaughnessy, 1999). As Olivier Mongin argues, the absence or margin-

alization of women in so many mainstream policiers (1996: 88), may be
symptomatic of a crisis in relationships between the sexes. However, the
crime genre's 'overt interest in offences against the person and property,
and in the legal regulation of morality' (Chibnall, 1999: 96) makes it fertile
terrain for women's interventions, whether in deconstructing gender roles
within conventional policiers, revisioning the crime drama as a vehicle for
illicit female desires and female violence, or using film to explore crimes
against women. 1
French women began making crime films which addressed a popular
audience as early as the 1970s, including Nadine Trintignant's Defense
de savoir (1973), a political thriller which denounces the collusion be-
tween the police and the extreme right, and Yannick Bellon's controver-
sial L'Amour violé/Tbe Rape of Love (1978), a woman-centered film
which foregrounds the devastating impact on a young professional
woman of her rape by a group of 'ordinary' men. In the 1980s, women's
crime narratives proliferated, but not necessarily in ways influenced by
feminism. Neige (1981), the first film co-directed by actress Juliet Berto
and Jean-Henri Roger, constitutes a poetic realist depiction of the Pari-
sian underworld (set in Pigalle and Barbès), which is focalized through
the eyes of a woman, Anna (Berto), a sympathetic waitress. However
their follow-up film, Cap Canaille (1983), a star-studded thriller set in
Marseilles, is shot in a style influenced by the cinema du look (like their
later, even more enigmatic Havre), and constructs its heroine, Paula
(Berto), as the stylish, laconic victim of a corrupt world involving both
lawyers and gangsters. The construction of gender is even more problem-
atic in three 1984 films directed by women, Christine Pascal's La Gar ce,
Irene Jouannet's LTntrus and Yannick Bellon's La Triche, discussed be-
low. And in the 1990s, women's appropriation of conventional male-
oriented crime narratives has led at times to their relegation of women
to the margins, as in Max et Jérémie (Claire Devers, 1992)2 and Toni
(Philomène Esposito, 1999).3 Toni, an atmospheric gangster film set in
Paris, starring Alessandro Gassman as a lugubrious young Calabrian ma-
fioso hoping to escape vengeance for a contract murder (with Beatrice
Dalle as 'the love interest'), was not a commercial success.4 In contrast,
Max et Jérémie, a big budget, action-packed adaptation of Teri White's
1987 sèrie noire novel, proved that women can direct major stars in a
successful French buddy movie/comedy-thriller; but it failed to provide a
critical purchase on the regressive, childlike behavior of its central sur-
rogate father-son duo, a couple of contract killers played by Philippe
Noiret and Christophe Lambert. However, other women have reworked
crime narratives in more personal auteur films which blur the boundaries
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of the genre and provide new perspectives on the policiefs conventional

deployment of gender roles.
Yvonne Tasker has argued in relation to popular Hollywood cinema that,
'female protagonists and characters can be understood as located across
three sites or realms within crime genres: the active, knowledgeable (or at
least enquiring) space of the investigator, that of the criminal/object of
investigation, and that of the victim of crime' (Tasker, 1998: 92). French
women's films of the 1980s and 1990s locate their female protagonists in
similar ways, and this chapter brings together (according to the chronology
of their appearance within French film culture) films which foreground
women as the potential or actual victims of crime, as criminals, and as
investigators, though these categories prove to be fluid and permeable. It
also highlights women's use of crime narratives to explore the links between
criminality and 'the transgression of social norms' (Philippe, 1996: 3) in
films which do not necessarily foreground women, but raise questions of
sexual and ethnic otherness.
Independent women in danger
Yannick Bellon's denunciation of rape in UAmour viole, together with

Aline Issermann's denunciation of incest in L'Ombre du doute (1993),
discussed in chapter 1, are rare examples of social problem films which
openly explore the effects of patriarchal violence against women. Other
directors have turned to the thriller as a way of exploring more general
anxieties about the role of sexually independent working women. As Eliz-
abeth Cowie (1979) points out in her discussion of Coma (Michael Crich-
ton, 1978), the combination of 'women's film' and suspense narrative tends
to turn the strong, independent heroine into the victim of the events she is
investigating, her vulnerability enabling a potentially progressive text to be
recuperated. Interesting variations on this theme are to be found in Elisa-
beth Rappeneau's Frequence meurtre (1988), a whodunit/horror film in
which the heroine is plunged into nightmare by a mystery murderer, and
Catherine Corsini's Poker (1988) and Nicole Garcia's Place Venderne
(1998), whose more flawed protagonists risk reprisals for their incursions
into the masculine worlds of gambling and jewel theft, respectively.5
The star-studded Frequence meurtre/Listening in the Dark (a pun on
FM) was the first, and to date only feature film to be directed by Elisabeth
Rappeneau (sister of director Jean-Paul Rappeneau), 6 who had previously
worked as a continuity girl and screenwriter, and subsequently went into
making films for television. An adaptation of Stuart Kaminski's novel When
The Dark Man Calls, co-written with Jacques Audiard, the film was chosen
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CRIME DRAMAS
by Pierre Tchernia (1989) as the best policier of 1988 and did reasonably
well at the box office.
Frequence meurtre centers on the significantly named Jeanne Quester
(Catherine Deneuve), an attractive, professional, divorced woman with a
young daughter, whose life is threatened by a mystery caller. A successful
psychiatrist, Jeanne works for an emergency psychiatric service in Paris and
runs a radio phone-in program where she starts receiving calls from 'Mon-
sieur Paul' who talks of 'unfinished business'. Suspense is created by the
way the film cuts from Jeanne's final session with her psychiatrist to a
spooky, handheld camera shot of footsteps going up stairs in the dark and
a gloved hand opening a locked door. Jeanne's discovery of bloodstains on
the wall and her daughter's parrot dead on her bed conjures up a series of
fragmented flashbacks of her horrific discovery as a child of her parents'
murdered bodies, covered in blood. The mystery to be unraveled, then,
links the threat to Jeanne with the earlier destruction of the nuclear family.
The enquiry into the affair is led by Jeanne's solicitous older brother,
Frank (André Dussolier), a police commissioner, but as various suspects fall
by the wayside (including Faber, the man found guilty of their parents'
murder who has recently been released from a psychiatric hospital), it
becomes clear that the murderer can only be Frank himself. The film ends
with a set-piece showdown in Jeanne's menacing art deco apartment with
its curious, almost Gothic atrium and shadowy staircases, as Frank con-
fesses to his distraught but still unsuspecting sister that he murdered his
parents when he discovered that his father was having an affair with Hé-
lène, his (Frank's) mistress, and was about to go and live with her. Taking
on the high-pitched, feminized nasal voice of Monsieur Paul, the monstrous
Frank accuses Jeanne of abandoning him too, tries to kill her and pursues
her out onto the roof, where he is shot in the back by his junior officer who
arrives in the nick of time. The film ends with a disturbing, elliptical trick
shot as the terrified Jeanne turns round, looking glamorous again, about to
front a new television program.
The film's thriller elements, the suspenseful narrative, the disturbing
soundtrack, the noirish lighting and mise-en-scène as Jeanne seeks out the
source of the threat, are well handled, though Frank's split personality is
not necessarily convincing. It is less easy to know how to interpret it.
Frequence meurtre constructs a society haunted by mental disturbance,
ranging from Jeanne's patients, the wrongly accused man and Frank himself
to Jeanne and her psychiatrist, whose surprise phone call at the end nearly
plunges her back into terror. Jeanne, incarnated by Deneuve in flat-heeled
shoes and a business-like brown jacket, appears to be a well-adjusted,
successful professional woman and single parent, with an attentive suitor
and a friendly relationship with her ex-husband. Despite her professional
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GENRE FILMS
Jeanne (Catherine Deneuve) in her menacing art deco apartment in Fre-

quence meurtre (1988). Supplied by and reproduced with permission
expertise, however, she is insensitive to her brother's dual personality,

though she finds clues about her past which help the police officer work
out who he is. Her strength and self-confidence are progressively under-
mined, she becomes increasingly unable to function in the outside world,
and ultimately she depends on men both to save her life and promote her
career. The film can thus be read as an illustration of Cowie's argument
about the way in which representations of independent women can be
recuperated by a classic suspense narrative, underlined by the fact that
Frank's madness is triggered by his jealousy of women acting outside his
control. Although Jeanne is allowed to survive her ordeal, the film high-
lights her vulnerability as a woman and a mother and calls into question
her independence and raison d'etre as a psychiatrist.7
Poker was the first feature film to be directed by Catherine Corsini (born
1956), who had studied cinema at Paris III University and worked as an
actress before making three shorts. Her screenplay of Poker, about a
woman gambler (also the topic of Rachel Weinberg's 1981 film, La Flam-
beuse), was initially refused the avance sur recettes, and the film itself later
suffered from poor advertising and poor distribution.
Poker concerns a woman, Hélène (played by Caroline Cellier, later the
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CRIME DRAMAS
star of Isabel Sebastian's La Contre-allée), who describes herself as 'single,

no kids, no dogs', but whose passion, gambling (a passion shared by Cor-
sini herself), regularly brings her into contact with the criminal underworld.
A tourist guide in Paris during the day and evening, at night Hélène seeks
out the thrill of the cards, the camera pursuing her to illicit gambling dens
through dark streets and labyrinthine, subterranean corridors. The specta-
tor is at first invited to share her excitement, signaled by a close up of her
slipping off her stilettos, and her pleasure in winning. But when she loses
to a sadistic, threatening gangster, a potentially more violent, suspenseful
narrative is introduced. Hélène's cool but desperate search for ways of pay-
ing off her debt leads to the murder of her feckless brother, Stéphane (Jean-
Philippe Ecoffey), (the bag of smuggled money she stole from him turns out
to be counterfeit), and her discovery that responsibility for the crime lies
with a lawyer (Francois Berléand), who wants to make her introduce rich
tourists to the gambling table. Hélène forces him to clear her debt and
dismiss the assassin, Tonio (Jacques Mathou). But when Tonio holds a knife
to her throat, she is only rescued by the arrival of Paul Due (Pierre Arditi),
a mysterious but sympathetic fellow gambler whose path has crossed hers
throughout the film. The film ends ironically with Paul tossing a coin to see
whether they should bother to pursue their relationship.
Hélène is a far more transgressive character than Jeanne in Frequence
meurtre, though, like her, she is both strong and vulnerable. A fascinating,
solitary woman, she is shot either on the move in the city, taking on men
at their own game (and showing solidarity with Tonio's much abused moll,
Jo), or sitting alone in her empty flat in an old leather armchair waiting for
the next game, impersonal and impenetrable. The film's stylized visual
texture combines a noirish use of browns, reds and dark blues with a
documentary style which captures the tension of the card games and the
atmosphere of Paris by night, particularly in the rain, with its dropouts,
prostitutes and drag queens, in a style recalling the films of John Cassavetes.
Poker is thus a hybrid film, combining a taut, restrained study of an
unconventional woman and the world she frequents with a thriller in which
the independent woman is at risk of death for her stubborn refusal to do
what she is told or behave as she is expected to behave.
Nicole Garcia's third film, Place Vendóme, co-written with Jacques Fies-
chi, is a highly successful big-budget thriller centering on the world of
diamond merchants. Its star-studded cast includes Catherine Deneuve in a
performance which won her the Best Actress award at the 1998 Locarno
film festival. The film combines an investigation of the dubious business
affairs of jeweler Vincent Malivert, whose suicide, disguised as a car acci-
dent, initiates the narrative, and the return to life of his alcoholic widow,
Marianne (Deneuve), whose attempts to dispose of the set of stolen dia-
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monds he has left her finally enable her to confront and, perhaps, exorcise
her painful past.
The complicated plot is underpinned by a concern with mise-en-scène,
which fixes the settings in credible, recognizable locations. It starts with a
slow pan round the sculptures of the Column in the Place Vendòme in Paris
before revealing the facade of Maison Malivert and documenting the jew-
eler's internal procedures at the end of a busy day. It subsequently takes the
spectator on journeys to London (De Beers) and Antwerp (the precious
stones market), and culminates with an attempt to capture the main culprit,
Serge Battistelli (Jacques Dutronc), Marianne's former lover, in the Gare de
Lyon, complete with shots of and from the famous Train Bleu restaurant.
Yet the opulent settings are constantly undermined by an encircling camera
which calls into question the stability of the image, and by the repeated
rain-soaked night time settings, shadowy lighting and autumnal colors.
Similarly, the heavy, dark, apparently solid space of Marianne's vast apart-
ment turns out to be a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms and secret
cabinets.
Despite the unease produced by the mise-en-scène, Marianne's trajectory
from fragility to strength, superbly incarnated by Deneuve, is not in itself
particularly suspenseful. The plot follows her, first as the disgraceful, infan-
tilized middle-aged alcoholic who spends most of her life in a detoxification
center, then as the newly independent widow whose handling of the dia-
monds encourages her to attempt to recover her former skills as a diamond
broker, then, when she discovers who lies behind the theft, as the all too-
human woman who has to face again the man who years before had
betrayed her while trafficking in stolen jewelery, leading to her exclusion
from the diamonds business. Marianne decides not to exact revenge from
Battistelli (though it is in her power to betray him to the men who are
seeking him), but instead hands the diamonds to him voluntarily, leading
to a moment of truth and intimacy between them and, ultimately, to his
decision to give himself up. Marianne is then free to put the past behind
her and the last scene (which includes one of the film's rare long shots)
shows her walking freely on a beach near Ostend. Despite the presence of
Jean-Pierre (Jean-Pierre Bacri), the man sent to spy on her who has become
her lover, and the unnecessarily romantic final shot in which the camera
circles around the two protagonists, the open ending offers no certainty
about Marianne's future.
The plot is complicated by the role of Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner),
Vincent's employee and (possibly) mistress, Jean-Pierre's erstwhile girlfriend
and Battistelli's current lover (the men are all rather sad and middle-aged).
Nathalie is Marianne's younger double, and closely resembles her in her
beauty, her ambition and, particularly, her hair style, the coil of which
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CRIME DRAMAS
Marianne (Catherine Deneuve) rediscovers her independence in Place Wen-

dòme (1998). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the Ron-
ald Grant Archive.
recalls that of Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo. In this instance, however,

Marianne's recognition of herself in Nathalie leads her to try to prevent a
repetition of the past. She warns Nathalie about the way she is being used
by telling her about her own past, reconstructed in a flashback sequence in
which the young Marianne, betrayed by BattistelH and caught by (and later
married to) Malivert, is actually played by Seigner. Although the film por-
trays both women as (still) capable of being destroyed by love (BattistelH
could be seen as an homme fatal), it goes on to demonstrate that survival
is possible, as is some sort of solidarity between women.
These three films are each set in Paris in a way which blends social
observation of particular Parisian milieux from a woman's point of view
with a more expressionistic mise-en-scène linked with the danger which the
crime narrative imposes on the vulnerable female protagonist. Each elicits
an impressive performance from its female star in its portrait of an uncon-
ventional, professional woman (Deneuve in the two most successful films)
whose success in entering a man's world, be it as a psychiatrist, a gambler
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or a dealer in diamonds, provokes anxieties which nearly result in her

destruction. However, if the heroines of Frequence meurtre and Poker have
to be rescued at the last minute in conventional fashion, this is not the case
in Place Vendome, where the protagonist is responsible for dispatching the
villain in her own way (and even in Poker, the heroine remains cool and
collected, unlike the terrified Jeanne of Frequence meurtre). In each case,
their ability to survive threats, crime and betrayal, assess their situation and
reassert their independence offsets their potential recuperation at the end of
each film into what are in any case rather 'nervous', tentative romance
plots.
Dangerous women
Although the heroines of Poker and Place Vendòme get a thrill out of
contact with the underworld, they are constructed as the potential victims
of crime rather than its perpetrators. They are certainly not femmes fatales
who actively use their sexuality to manipulate men and bring about their
(and their own) downfall. The desirable but dangerous femmes fatales
which haunt 1940s American film noir have provided a certain fascination
for feminist film theorists (Kaplan, 1978) and, as Yvonne Tasker argues
(1998: 117), work, 'as both an archetype which suggests an equation be-
tween female sexuality, death and danger and simultaneously as a textual
space within which women function as the vibrant centre of the narrative'.
However, their impact on French crime narratives is less obvious and, as
Nathalie Debroise argues, the fallen women who inhabit classic French
cinema are better described as 'garces fatales' (bitches), lacking the hieratic
qualities of the Hollywood model (Debroise, 2000). Nevertheless, manipu-
lative femmes fatales are to be found in poetic realist films of the 1930s
and late 1940s, and in New Wave films based on the policier (like Truffaut's
La Sirène du Mississippi and Godard's Pierrot le fou). The link between
female sexuality, death and danger is also to be found in films of the cinema
du look which openly deploy sexy, young female killers, like Luc Besson's
Nikita (1990), in which Anne Parillaud becomes a trained assassin, and in
Claude Miller's road-movie Mortelle randonnée (1983), in which Isabelle
Adjani murders her (male and female) victims after having sex with them.8
However, Ross's study of criminal women in French cinema (Ross, 1991)
overlooks the role of the femme (or gar ce) fatale and refers only to the
paucity of representations of women killers, most of which are based on
historical characters like Lucrèce Borgia and the seventeenth-century poi-
soner La Voisin, or more contemporary criminals such as the Papin sisters
or Violette Nozières.
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CRIME DRAMAS
The link between female sexuality and death is explored in a number of

1980s and 1990s films by women which feature women capable of killing,
or provoking others to kill, and in the process draw attention both to
women's repressed anger and to anxieties about women who do not con-
form to conventional feminine roles. Christine Pascal's La Garce (1984)
stars Isabelle Huppert 9 as a garce fatale who murders her adoptive mother.
(In Charlotte Huppert's road movie, Signé Charlotte (1986), discussed in
chapter 8, Huppert's garce fatale murders her lover).10 Irene Jouannet's
Ulntrus (1985) centers on a woman whose repressed sexuality leads to the
murder of her would-be lover. Daniele Dubroux's Border Line (1991), dis-
cussed in chapter 4, features a disturbed woman murdering a rival mother
figure, while Catherine Breillat's Sale comme un ange (1991) and Farfait
amour! (1996) investigate the extent to which women are responsible for
murders committed by men.11 In each case, the heroine's often mystifying
behavior is viewed through the eyes of a fascinated but bewildered man.
La Garce/The Bitch was the second film to be directed by Christine
Pascal (born 1953), who had been discovered as an actress by Bertrand
Tavernier in the early 1970s, but whose first film as a director, the semi-
autobiographical, sexually explicit Felicità (1979), was a commercial fail-
ure. She hoped (unsuccessfully) to reach a more popular audience with a
star-studded genre film. Co-written with three male scriptwriters, La Garce
is set in Paris in the late 1970s/early 1980s, like Bob Swain's La Balance
(1981), with which it was compared. However, its focus on a detective
whose investigation turns into an obsessive quest for a woman is reminis-
cent of American film noir, as is its mise-en-scène of dark rain-soaked
streets shot with low-key lighting.
The choice of La Garce as a title (Pascal initially wanted to call it Cache-
each e/Hide-and-seek) highlights the film's central problematic of female
duplicity. Its heroine, seventeen-year-old Aline Kaminker (a dark-haired
Isabelle Huppert), is not allowed her own subjectivity but is constructed
from the point of view of Lucien Sabatier (Richard Berry), a police officer
whose life is thrown into chaos when they meet. The film opens with
Lucien's vision of Aline through the rain-soaked windscreen of his car at
night, when she gets thrown out of the Jag he is following. Their mutual
state of attraction/confusion, conveyed by repeated alternating close-ups of
their faces and soulful, accompanying jazz music, leads him to throw her
onto the bonnet of his car and rape her, an act which (problematically)
turns into a scene of mutual desire and pleasure. However, orphan Aline, a
minor, reveals her duplicity by accusing him of rape, as a result of which
Lucien is jailed for six years and finds on his release that he has lost his
wife and children. The spectator is positioned to sympathize with his plight,
a position which many spectators may well find difficult to occupy, despite
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G E N R E FILMS
Berry's haunted performance. The film then traces his obsession with find-
ing Aline again.
The complicated plot depends on an investigation Lucien is carrying out
as a private detective into thefts from a fashion house in the Sender, the
Jewish district of Paris centered on the rag trade. Lucien discovers that the
fashion house is run by the mysterious Aline under the name of Edith
Weber, and, eventually, that she changed her identity after killing her adop-
tive mother. (A flashback shows her shooting her mother when she calls her
a 'whore' and a 'dirty Jew', after discovering her making love with her
gangster lover, Max.) However, the investigation has been engineered by
Max (Vittorio Mezziogiorno), a hardened criminal who exploits illegal
immigrant workers in the rag trade, as a way of keeping Aline in his power.
While Aline is set up as a garce fatale, a woman of multiple identities who
uses her sexuality to manipulate men and is capable of murder, there is also
a sense (which the film does not develop) that she is the victim of circum-
stances (a Jewish orphan with unloving adoptive parents) and trapped in
her relationships with men who want to possess and control her. After
various plot reversals, Aline takes refuge with Lucien, but then betrays him
again and walks out on both men, removing her latest wig/disguise. The
film ends on a freeze frame of her enigmatic face as Lucien's voice-over
declares that he will wait for her to return. But Huppert's opaque perfor-
mance and the film's open ending does not enable the spectator to under-
stand the 'real' Aline.
Ulntrus/The Intruder was the first film to be directed by Irene Jouannet
(born 1945), who had been active in the women's movement and contrib-
uted to the pro-abortion documentary, Histories d'A. A low budget psycho-
logical drama set in Chinatown (the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris),
Ulntrus centers on Anne (Marie Dubois), a recluse, whose life is disturbed
the day a murder is committed in the neighborhood. The opening shots of
her walking past the crowd surrounding the dead body make clear her
indifference to others. However, she is forced to confront the presumed
(though actually innocent) killer, Gilles (Richard Anconina), who flees into
the tower block where she lives and asks her to hide him. The film then
traces the strange relationship which develops between them. Anne tries to
get rid of Gilles by telling him that she has daughters who visit her but
Gilles, who returns uninvited, witnesses her conducting a strange, violent
ritual with imaginary children and realizes that they exist only in her
memory or imagination. Unaware of the extent of her neurosis and thinking
that his love will save her, he confronts her with his discovery; but, just
when she appears to be responding to his desire for her, she kills him.
The mise-en-scène of Anne's flat creates a claustrophobic atmosphere
reinforced by the gloomy view of the tower blocks from the window.
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CRIME DRAMAS
Jouannet uses long takes to show Anne's obsession with routine domestic
and professional tasks (she works as a translator), constructing her as a
repressed woman whose alienation is attributable to her frustrated maternal
desires and disturbed sexuality. In the final sequence, she appears wearing
a revealing bathrobe instead of her usual turtleneck jumper and brushing
her long, blonde hair which is usually tied back in a sensible ponytail. She
then kills Gilles without a word by plunging her hairdryer into his bath, in
the tradition of crimes committed by women within the domestic space
using 'feminine weapons' (Chadder, 1999: 71). Anne's alienation and the
film's spare style and narrative closure recall Chantal Akerman's Jeanne
Dielman (1975) in which the housewife-prostitute ends up killing a client.
But rather than foregrounding Anne's motivation for murder, Ulntrus
chooses to endorse Gilles' male gaze which constructs her as the enigmatic,
deathly other.
Catherine Breillat originally researched the world of crime and the police
for the script of Maurice Pialat's Police (1986), and her first crime film,
Sale comme un ange/Dirty Like An Angel (1991), recalls the atmosphere
of Pialat's film, with its brutal characters and crude depiction of feelings.
Like Police, Sale comme un ange centers on the fascination experienced by
a police officer for a young woman, this time the misogynist Deblache
(Claude Brasseur) who falls for Barbara (Lio), the wife of his recently
married young partner and friend, Theron (Nils Tavernier). Deblache, a
man in his fifties, drinks too much, has just suffered a heart attack and lives
alone in an apartment decorated with weaponry, signs of his virility. After
meeting Barbara, he arranges to visit when Theron is absent, keeping
Theron at a distance by employing him to protect an old drug dealer friend
(Claude-Jean Philippe).12 Barbara first resists then gives way to his sexual
advances because she experiences pleasure as well as disgust and remorse
(a Breillat trademark). Her combination of petulance and sensuality proves
fatal to Deblache, who becomes more and more obsessed and disorientated,
to the extent that, when Barbara tells him that she cannot carry on being
unfaithful to her husband, he arranges for Theron to get killed in a botched
police raid. Instead of coming back to him, however, at Theron's funeral
Barbara walks away, turning back only to flash him a shocking smile
which, like Lili's smile at the end of 36 Villette, suggests that she has got
what she wanted.
Breillat's debt to the crime film shows in her representation of the violent,
macho, racist police officers and the Arab bars and brothels they frequent.
But this aspect of the film is marginalized in relation to her dissection of
the intense, violent passion which develops between Deblache and Barbara,
whose isolated, domestic space, soft toys and fluffy dressing gown provide
a disturbing representation of child-like femininity. Breillat's camera con-
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centrates on the physicality of the lovers' intimacy, with tight framing and
long, lingering close-ups of their faces during their quarrels and embraces,
designed to provoke discomfort in the spectator. As usual in a Breillat film,
however, male and female sexuality is represented as incompatible, and
sexual pleasure as inseparable from self-disgust. Furthermore, as in La
Garce and Ulntrus, the film positions the spectator to sympathize with the
man's point of view, constructing the woman as the duplicitous, enigmatic
other, the dirty angel (and garce fatale) who in this case is capable of driving
her lover to kill her husband.
Breillat's starting point for her next film, ironically entitled Parfait
amourl/Perfect Love! (1996), was a program in the Antenne 2 TV series
L'Amour en France (Daniel Karlin and Tony Lainé, 1989) which featured a
young man who had killed his mistress by stabbing her forty times with a
kitchen knife. Breillat's controversial exploitation of the topic was booed
when first shown in the 'Cinemas en France' section at Cannes, but subse-
quently well received by the critics. The film opens with the police recon-
struction of the crime at the murder scene, shot on video in a low-key,
documentary-like style. After the culprit is seen listlessly reproducing his
actions, as instructed, the murdered woman's eighteen-year-old daughter
says in an interview, directly to the camera, that she bears the young man
no grudge since he was her mother's victim. The rest of the film is a long
flashback detailing the development of the ten month affair between the
murderer and his older erstwhile mistress, which ends with him wordlessly
stabbing at her (offscreen) body. Breillat's project, then, is not to create
suspense but rather to reconstruct the emotional tensions that led to murder
and open up the question of who is the victim.
Set in Dunkerque, the flashback begins with the flirtation at a wedding
reception between Frédérique (Isabelle Renauld), a beautiful, sensuous 36-
year-old ophthalmologist and (twice) divorced mother of two, and Chris-
tophe (Francois Renaud), a rather immature, 28-year-old youth with money
to spare and time on his hands. Their relationship is at first represented as
romantic and passionate. They make a date, have dinner, walk on the beach
and make love in Christophe's room (earlier the site of Christophe's quarrel
with his mother which informs the spectator that he has had an affair with
an older woman before and has spent time in a psychiatric hospital); and
they spend a weekend in the country, among clichéd scenes of romantic
mountain settings, accompanied by Beethoven on the soundtrack. Back in
Dunkerque, however, they are forced to confront each other's social reality,
Frédérique's relationship with her ex-husband and two children and Chris-
tophe's dissolute friendship with Philippe (Alain Soral). When Frédérique
discovers that Christophe gets fucked by Philippe and calls him a 'pédé'
('poof'), taunting him with his inability to satisfy her sexual desires (her
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CRIME DRAMAS
frustration prefiguring the theme of Romance), Christophe confesses that

he hates sex and experiences women's bodies as 'stinking flesh'. In their
final encounter, his attempt to prove himself a 'real' man by trying to
sodomise her with a broom handle provokes her to uncontrollable laughter.
Frederique's merciless assault on his masculinity is what drives him to kill
her, so demonstrating Breillat's provocative thesis, that the desire to kill is
a component of love and that the woman is guilty of her own murder
(Breillat, 1996: 25).
Once again, Breillat uses a crime narrative to rework the themes of the
irreducible difference between the sexes and the destructiveness of passion.
The disintegration of romantic love into a deathly sado-masochistic rela-
tionship is underlined by the spareness of the cold, wintry settings, intercut
with fade-outs to black. Long takes of the couple making love and talking
together are replaced by more brutal sex scenes. Frederique's initial roman-
ticism of Christophe gives way to the realization that her relationship with
him is no different from her previous unsatisfactory relationships with men,
and she accuses all men of being either gay or impotent. As in her other
films, Breillat constructs men as weak, inadequate and vulnerable, whether
immature youths or spineless ex-husbands, whereas her heroine is a vora-
cious, sexually desiring woman and mentally the stronger of the two spar-
ring partners. Yet her dissection of the female psyche again runs the risk of
alienating a female audience by suggesting not only that women are de-
pendent on men but that women trigger the violence they receive at men's
hands.
The films discussed here do not probe the social or economic situations
which might drive women to crime, despite hints that their heroines suffer
from oppressive family backgrounds. Nor are they concerned with the
detection or punishment of crime. Rather, they use crime dramas to explore
women's capacity for violence and anger. La Garce and Sale comme un
ange draw most closely on the policier, since their narratives, set in Paris,
are structured by an investigation into crime, and their female figures cor-
respond to an archetypal garce fatale, whose unstable, treacherous behav-
ior, represented through the eyes of the weak, fascinated men who are its
victims, exceeds normative representations of femininity. In contrast, the
murder investigations in L'Intrus and Parfait amour! give way to more
intense psychodramas between the two main protagonists, be it within the
huts clos of Anne's flat or in small town Dunkerque. In these films, the
woman's suppressed anger gradually leads to a monstrous, self-destructive
act associated with her perverse sexuality and, in the case of Anne, mental
instability. In each case, however, the woman is viewed from the perspective
of an inadequate, damaged male with whom the spectator is invited to
sympathize. Except to some extent in the case of Frédérique, the heroines
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of these films are not allowed their own subjectivity, nor do they function
as 'the vibrant centre of the narrative'. Rather they confirm mythic repre-
sentations of femininity as the duplicitous, diabolical, uncontrollable other
without providing female spectators with alternative pleasures.
The prison drama
Prisonnières/Women Prisoners (1988), Charlotte Silvera's second film after

Louise Vinsoumise, approaches the topic of women and crime through the
use of a related genre, the women's prison drama, which brings together
women who have been involved in prostitution, drugs, theft and murder.
Like other women directors, however, Silvera is not interested in exploring
the socio-economic circumstances which lead women to commit crime.
Prisonnières's community of women (a rare phenomenon in French cinema)
depends on star performances, visual atmosphere and episodic mini-
narratives rather than a single, linear plot.13
Apart from the opening scene in which manacled women are transported
to the gaol and a brief epilogue set three years after the events of the film,
where a shot from the top of the prison wall follows a woman now on the
outside, the action is set within the gloomy, tomblike prison. The mise-en-
scène of its dark, damp underground passages expresses the harshness and
corruption of the prison system. The resulting degradation and dehumani-
zation of the prisoners is further underlined by their treatment at the hand
of the grim women gaolers ('les matonnes'), led by Marie-Christine Barrault
as the dour-faced, unsympathetic governor. Anonymous groups of women
are shot in the workshops, the refectory and the recreation ground, or on
the stairs and in the corridors, their behavior feeding into cliches about
their toughness and violence, especially in their merciless attitude towards
child-killer Nicole (Agnès Sorai). There are frequent outbursts of fighting
and at least one woman, who keeps showing photographs of her children
to others, is mentally ill. Individuals are shot in their cells, but there is little
attempt to develop an understanding of their social or mental condition.
The main narrative strand concerns the jealousy between unscrupulous
Marthe (Annie Girardot), the governor's favorite and an informant, and
the difficult but better-educated, principled Nelly (Bernadette Lafont), who
gets sent to solitary confinement after Marthe and her henchwomen set her
up for drugs possession. Other narrative strands nevertheless hint at the
possibility of women rising above their circumstances to create some sort
of community, through scenes of women working together in the prison
kitchens, the developing love affair between Sabine (Milva) and glamorous,
slightly older Lucie (Corinne Touzet), and the women's refusal to work
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after Lucie's suicide attempt. It also allows justice to be done inasmuch as

Marthe's role is finally discovered and denounced, and she in turn is dis-
patched to solitary confinement (though the background to her murder of
her husband is never fully explored).
Despite its star cast, the film was not a commercial success. Its screenplay
and dialogue lack conviction, the women's motivation is insufficiently de-
veloped (including that of the governor and the gaolers) and the conven-
tional, rather static cinematography refuses the energy and realism that
might have been achieved from a more documentary-like 'cinema vérité'
style. Consequently, the spectator is not encouraged to identify or sympa-
thize with the prisoners' plight (the women are presumed to be responsible
for their crimes), but simply to observe how well they cope with it. Al-
though it creates a community of women (and includes a lesbian romance
theme), Prisonnières does not capitalize on its subject to produce either
viewing pleasures for female spectators or a more feminist-influenced un-
derstanding of women and criminality.
Female investigators
Women's presence as investigators within crime narratives only became felt

in the late 1970s when Annie Girardot, the top female star of the period
(often cast in traditionally 'male' roles like surgeons or lawyers), played a
chief inspector in Philippe de Broca's comedy Tendre Poulet (1977) and its
follow-up, On a perdu la cuisse de Jupiter (1979).14 According to Olivier
Philippe (1996: 48), women now account for 10% of the overall number
of detectives in French crime dramas, 15 a shift which marks a belated
recognition of women's changing social roles and installs the woman as the
subject rather than the object of investigation. However, as Tasker (1998)
notes in relation to Hollywood cinema, that shift is not without its prob-
lems. Women's investigative work is often linked with the exploration and
display of the female investigator's sexuality, as in José Giovanni's Dernier
domicile connu (1969) where novice police officer Marlene Jobert is used
as bait to catch 'perverts' in a local cinema, or linked with 'female' issues,
as in Yves Boisset's La Pemme flic (1979) where Miou-Miou is delegated to
deal with a case of incest (and forced to leave the force because of the
political scandal she uncovers).
Among the films featuring women police officers or private investigators
are two women's films set in Paris, Josiane Balasko's police farce, Les Keufs
(1987), and Tonie Marshall's detective comedy drama, Pas très catholique
(1994), both of which have been box-office successes. In each case, the
female stars, Balasko and Anemone, come from the café-tbéàtre tradition
21 I
GENRE FILMS
and, like Girardot, construct unconventional figures of femininity through

their performances as strong, sexually independent, working women.
Les Keufs/The Fuzz was made in the mid-1980s at a time when many on
the Left were concerned by the rise of Le Pen and the Front National.
Balasko deliberately set out to make 'a real police thriller with a backdrop
of social satire' (Veran, 1988). Adapted from a script by Christian Biegalski
and shot in cinemascope in Ménilmontant, the film stars Balasko herself
(under the name of Sylvie Balaskovic) as inspector Mireille Molyneux, and
black actor Isaach de Bankolé as Blaise, an inspector in the internal police
investigative body, nicknamed the boeuf-carottes. The film uses the comic
antics of the mixed race duo to draw attention to social issues like prosti-
tution, drugs and, especially, racism, denouncing the prejudices of those
who might object to 'niggers and tarts' (as Blaise puts it) in the police force.
At the same time, Balasko creates a powerful comic action heroine in her
first self-directed role as a woman in a position of authority.
The film's playful opening sequence juxtaposes Mireille's feminine and
masculine accoutrements, as she puts on her lipstick, takes up her gun,
strokes her cat and sets off on her scooter on an undercover mission as a
prostitute (in flamboyant red-haired wig and very tight clothes) to disman-
tle a prostitution ring run by Charlie.16 (She wants to help Yasmina, a
young Maghrebi prostitute, escape from Charlie's clutches with her young
son.) Two hilarious action sequences construct her as a feminized Rambo,
first overpowering and arresting Charlie single-handed, then doing the same
to Blaise and his accident-prone partner (Ticky Holgado). Blaise suspects
Mireille of being a prostitute, Mireille mistakes Blaise for a pimp, and the
film sets out to deconstruct the stereotypical views they have of each other
by mapping a romance plot on to the crime drama. Once Blaise has recog-
nized Mireille's superior skills, knowledge and determination (she steals his
gun by pretending to seduce him after she has been suspended), they are
able to start an affair (with a prolonged onscreen kiss) and work together
to find the vicious Charlie again (the villains are all white). The final
prolonged shoot-out is followed by a scene in which the couple, in plain
clothes, are asked yet again for their identity papers and burst out laughing
as they disappear into the park in Belleville to the sound of Charles Trenet's
'Ménilmontant', now sung by Francis Agbo.
Despite the trope of the undercover female police officer disguised as a
prostitute, Balasko's performance sends up the conventions of the crime
genre and at the same time disturbs conventional notions about femininity.
An energetic, fearless police officer, Mireille dominates the action and is
ready to bend the law to assist those who are exploited. In contrast, her
fellow officers spend their time eating junk food, her boss (Jean-Pierre
Léaud) keeps having hysterics (and mistakes her for a 'real' prostitute), and
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CRIME DRAMAS
Blaise's partner is subjected to humiliating pratfalls. While Charlie might

sneer that 'she thinks she's a man and she's not even a woman', Mireille's
behavior and appearance shows that being a good cop is not incompatible
with being a woman, but also that gender roles are fluid and unstable. Her
excessive wigs and make-up in her disguise as a prostitute contrast with the
jeans and denim jacket she sports when she is being 'herself, and the little
black dress she wears on her first date with Blaise, when she tells him, 'I
sometimes dress as a woman when I'm not working'. The phrase calls
attention both to femininity as performance and to women's problematic
status within the police force (Bankolé as Blaise similarly performs a variety
of ways of being 'black'). However, the film's desire to promote an alliance
of marginalized others as the (black and female) active criminal investiga-
tors and at the same time demonstrate how both women and blacks get
trapped in the views of others is perhaps overly schematic. There is a danger
of Mireille's role being undermined by the interethnic romance plot (Blaise
typically has to rescue her from Charlie) and it is hard to believe that
Mireille ever held stereotypical views about black men, given how at ease
she is among Belleville's multi-ethnic population. Nevertheless, Les Keufs is
extremely important in showing how women's genre filmmaking (in this
case a hybrid of farce and policier) can be used to subvert dominant
discourses on gender and ethnicity.
Tonie Marshall's second film, Pas très catboliquelSomething Fishy, is
dedicated 'to Jacques and Gerard' (the late Jacques Davila and Gerard Frot-
Coutaz) and stars Marshall's friend Anemone, who was in part an inspira-
tion for the central role of Mademoiselle Maxime Charentier (Max), a
forty-year-old woman private detective. The film opens by parodying the
Bogart-like detective of American film noir, setting the mood by placing
Max in a traditionally male space, sitting in her car at night, chain-smoking
and keeping watch, then defusing the situation with humor. When an angry
armed man comes out in his pajamas to investigate why his car alarm has
gone off, Max sorts out the situation by telling the dog responsible that the
man is a cretin and no doubt a former collaborator and a racist, and forcing
the man to apologize. The following scene, which shows Max frantically
typing her report while a male cleaner comes into her office with a vacuum
cleaner and complains about her untidiness, confirms that the film aims to
subvert conventional expectations about what it means to be a woman.
The plot itself turns out not to be the film's main focus (there is no
suspense with regard to the crimes investigated), but rather an excuse on
which to hang the portrait of Max, at a time when her past resurfaces and
interferes with the present. In the course of an investigation into drug
dealing among schoolboys, Max comes across her son Baptiste (Grégoire
Colin), whom she has not seen since she left him and her husband seventeen
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years earlier. At the same time, when she is working on the suspicious death
of a colleague, Loussine, she uncovers a series of financial malpractices
involving her ex-husband, who is behind a dummy property company
involved in the arson of a hostel for immigrant workers in which people
died. Despite her need to assert her independence, Max gradually starts to
enjoy her newfound relationship with Baptiste (who shares her principles
and mannerisms) and to express her feelings again. (In an earlier scene she
is unable to show compassion towards Loussine's widow, played by Mar-
shall's mother Micheline Presle, who is devastated at the prospect of aging
alone.) At the end, although she has the evidence to incriminate her ex-
husband, she drops the investigation and departs for the airport to join her
lover on a trip to Moscow. But the last scene shows Baptiste recovering the
envelope she has left behind, a compromise solution which allows the son
to know the truth about the father.
It is made clear early on that Max (an ambiguous name) lives by her own
rules and prides herself on being a woman doing a man's job in contrast to
her pathetic young male trainee, the protege of her gay married boss. She
rejects the traditional attributes of femininity, be it in her physical appear-
ance (her disheveled hair, shapeless long shirts, boots and stained raincoat),
her lifestyle (she lives alone in a small untidy flat with bright blue walls,
sleeps with her clothes on and eats in her local cafe), her language (she
refuses the common platitudes of polite conversation), her energy (she races
with a group of adolescents and dances wildly to the jukebox) or her sexu-
ality (she spends a night with her lesbian friend, Florence (Christine Bois-
son), and starts a relationship with a stranger, Jacques (Michel Didym),
after her scooter collides with his motorbike in the course of her investiga-
tion). She cannot conform to the role of mother with Baptiste, nor can she
play the repentant wife when meeting her ex-husband (she even twists her
ankle wearing the stockings and stilettos Florence lends her for the occa-
sion). Yet she is still a desirable and desiring woman. Marshall's empathy
with her original, outspoken heroine is obvious in the endless close-ups of
Anémone/Max's aging, unconventionally attractive face and body, and the
way she is constantly in shot, by day and by night, in the streets of Paris and
in her bedsit or office, on the move and at rest, insolent and melancholy.
Les Keufs and Pas très catholique are recognizable comic policiers which
challenge the genre by placing memorable, independent women in the 'ac-
tive, knowledgeable (or at least enquiring) space of the investigator'. Each
female investigator combines an unquestionable ability to solve crimes (un-
like their male peers) with a flexible woman-centered approach to the law
(Mireille sympathizes with the prostitute and an older woman shoplifter,
Max is concerned not to compromise her son's future). Each finds ways of
dealing with expectations of sexual display in public, Mireille by parody
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CRIME DRAMAS
Max (Anemone), the unconventional woman detective of Pas très catbo-

lique (1994). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from the Ron-
ald Grant Archive.
and excess (backed up by physical violence when necessary), Max by re-

fusal and indifference. And each finds romance without compromising their
status or being subjected to a voyeuristic gaze. Furthermore, the films'
unconventional, empowering representations of women are combined with
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G E N R E FILMS
crime narratives set in Paris which challenge the cliches of mainstream

crime cinema with regard to class and ethnicity, and stress the need for
sexual and racial tolerance.
Crime and sexuality in the provinces
The films discussed to date have foregrounded women's roles within crime
dramas. However, as previously noted, a number of women's crime films
focus exclusively or predominantly on men and crime. A key location for
male violence in women's films is the family, as in Jeanne Labrune's Sans
un cri (1992) (see chapter 4). Two critically-acclaimed family crime dramas,
both set in rural France, specifically foreground violence between broth-
ers.17 Patricia Mazuy's beautifully shot Peaux de vaches/Thick Skinned
(1989) appropriates the music and iconography of the American western in
its study of the love-hate relationship between two farming brothers when
one of them (Jean-Francois Stévenin) returns from prison, having been
gaoled for a crime instigated by the other (Jacques Speisser). In this film,
the woman's role (the brother's wife, Annie, sensitively played by Sandrine
Bonnaire) is little more than a stand-in for the spectator, a reluctant witness
who gradually comes to feel sympathy for the wronged man. Hélène An-
gel's award-winning Peau d'homme, coeur de bète/Skin of Man, Heart of
Beast (1999), set in the Hautes-Alpes, centers on the obsessive and doomed
relationships between a widowed mother and her three anti-social, misog-
ynist sons (one a sex murderer just out of gaol, one a violent, suspended
cop, the other linked to the local Mafia). Here, a critical perspective on
events is provided by point-of-view shots and an intermittent voice-over
narration from the cop's two traumatized young daughters, whose cathartic
screams on the mountainside bring the film to a close. In these two films,
the family self-destructs because of individual greed, or the persistence of
uncontrollable patriarchal, colonialist codes of violence. Elsewhere, how-
ever, the threat to the family springs from its repressed sexuality, external-
ized in the figure of a fascinating gay or bisexual youth whose summoning
up of socially unacceptable desires leads to violence and crime, the subject
of La Triche by Yannick Bellon (1984) and Nettoyage a sec by Anne
Fontaine (1997).
The exposure of bourgeois hypocrisy has been a recurrent theme of the
policier, particularly in the work of Claude Chabrol (and including Frequ-
ence meurtre and Pas très catbolique, discussed above). However, Yannick
Bellon's decision to explore the topic of male homosexuality in a policier in
which the central protagonist was a respectable, sympathetic gay/bisexual
police officer was 'an exception among French policiers' (Philippe, 1996:
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CRIME DRAMAS
58) and she had difficulty finding a producer. La Triche/The Cheat quickly
establishes the guilt-free double life led by its macho-looking hero, Chief
Inspector Michel Verta (Victor Lanoux), by cutting from a scene in Paris in
which he tells his naked male lover, 'I like meeting the wrong people', to a
scene in Bordeaux where he is tenderly kissed by his wife (Annie Duperey).
The film then interweaves an investigation into the murder of Morane
(Michel Galabru), an effeminate, gay ventriloquist from the Le Paradis
nightclub, with a suspenseful narrative based on Michel's desire for and
unexpectedly passionate affair with Bernard (Xavier Deluc), a young musi-
cian (and rugby-player) who works in the same club. Michel's happiness is
threatened, first by his wealthy bourgeois wife, who forgives him his (pre-
sumed heterosexual) infidelities but will not tolerate his homosexuality and
threatens to leave him; and, second, by the police investigation which
threatens to 'out' him when Bernard's cigarette lighter, a gift from Michel,
is found on Garcia, the killer (a police informant and blackmailer), who
has been accidentally killed by Bernard. Unable to handle the crisis, Michel
advises Bernard to disappear; but the following day, as Bernard trustingly
runs out to greet Michel, he is shot in the back by Michel's police col-
leagues. In the last resort, Michel cynically betrays his lover and endorses a
murder to protect his position as citizen, husband and father.
La Triche's nightclub settings and its construction of a fascinating,
young, footloose musician as the object of desire of an older, serious,
socially acceptable man do not challenge conventional representations of
homosexuality. Yet by making both Bernard and Michel sympathetic char-
acters (at first), the film makes a strong plea for the recognition both of
love between men and of bisexuality. Michel needs and loves both Bernard
and his wife, and wants to protect them both. His inability to do so is
attributed not just to his own cowardice but to the hypocrisy of a bourgeois
society which tolerates homosexuality within the confines of the under-
world but not out in the open (and certainly not within the police force).
The impossibility of a happy ending capable of embracing alternative sex-
ualities is reinforced by the policier's need for closure and the restoration
of order, which in this instance requires the gay youth to be eliminated,
turning him into a tragic victim typical of early gay films (Dyer, 1979).
Anne Fontaine's Nettoyage à sec/Dry Cleaning is not a conventional
policier, but it also uses the fascination exercised by an androgynous youth
as the basis for a crime drama, set this time firmly within the nuclear family.
Set in Belfort (and shot by Caroline Champetier), the film focuses on Nicole
(Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie Kunstler (Charles Berling), an ordinary,
work-oriented couple who run the Pressing des Vosges, a dry-cleaning
business. It traces the way in which their mundane lives are transformed by
their chance encounter with a couple of promiscuous, cross-dressing night-
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GENRE FILMS
The passionate affair between Michel (Victor Lanoux) and Bernard (Xa-
vier Deluc) in La Triche (1984). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission
from Productions du Daunou.
club artistes, Loie (Stanislas Merhar) and his sister Marylin (Mathilde Seig-
ner) where Loie performs Sylvie Vartan and Marylin Johnny Halliday.
When Marylin leaves Loie, the couple offer the fascinating stranger a home,
and within the ominously claustrophobic spaces of the dry-cleaning shop
(the flat above and the cellar below), the threesome work through various
permutations in their relationships. Whereas Nicole is easily seduced by
Loie and wishes Jean-Marie would be too, Jean-Marie teaches Loie the
business but rejects his advances. Just when Nicole is about to walk out,
however, Loie starts to seduce Jean-Marie while he is doing the ironing
and, after apparently experiencing pleasure, Jean-Marie swings out at Loie
with the industrial iron and kills him. Nicole disposes of the body in the
well in the cellar and the last scene shows the couple walking silently down
the road together, their bodies slowly drawing closer as Nicole dutifully
accepts her burden of guilt at her husband's side.
The film uses the theme and mise-en-scène of dry-cleaning to demonstrate
how the guilty, middle-class couple 'clean up' the evidence of their t r a s -
gressive, sexual desires, embodied in Loie. Loie, whose eroticized body is
repeatedly framed as the object of desire, beckons to them with the promise
of heightened sensations (foregrounded in the vividly-shot nightclub scenes)
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CRIME DRAMAS
which contrast with the aridity of their own oppressive, anonymous lives.
But Jean-Marie, the repressed, feminized male, is unable to acknowledge or
control his desires. He suppresses Loie not because he needs to hide his
desire from others (though this may be a factor), but because he needs to
disguise it from himself. At the same time, childlike, orphaned Loie remains
a fantasmatic character who is denied subjectivity and whose motivation
remains opaque and problematic. His sensuous yet aggressive, polymor-
phous sexuality, which can be read as his embodiment of people's fantasies
of sexual liberation or, more mundanely, as his strategy for insinuating
himself into people's lives, also potentially plays into homophobic fears of
gays as potential rapists.
In each of these crime dramas, an apparently conventional, provincial
bourgeois family is troubled by the thrills offered by a more hedonistic,
polymorphous form of sexuality. The choice of provincial settings indicates
the limited horizons of their inhabitants, but there is a marked shift in the
representation of the female characters, from the intolerant wife of La
Triche to the open-minded, sexually curious wife of Nettoyage a sec. In
each case the transgressive youth who embodies their desires and threatens
the stability of their lives (particularly that of the husband) pays the price
for his sexuality with death, a prerequisite for the restoration of order.
However, whereas La Triche invites the spectator to see in Bernard a loving
youth who is the victim of social prejudice (and thus constitutes a plea for
tolerance and understanding), the representation of Loie in Nettoyage a sec
is rather more ambiguous and unsettling. Nevertheless, the association in
both crime narratives between homosexuality and death indicates how
potent the threat/fascination of male homosexuality is in women's cinema
in France.
Crime, sexuality and ethnicity
Women's fascination with men's homosexual desires is also pursued in

crime dramas which address the question of ethnic difference. French crime
films have conventionally constructed stereotypical representations of eth-
nic minorities linked to the criminal underworld, as in Maurice Pialat's
Police (1985) and Bertrand Taverniere 'docu-polar3 L. 627 (1992).
Women's crime narratives also associate ethnic minorities with crime, but
do so in less stereotypical ways, as in Neige (1981), which contrasts police
brutality with the interethnic solidarity between the transvestites, drug deal-
ers and delinquents of Pigalle. In the three auteur films discussed here,
Claire Devers's Noir et blanc (1986) and Claire Denis' S'en fout la mort
(1990) and J'ai pas sommeil (1994), the ethnic other, notably the African-
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G E N R E FILMS
Caribbean male, is represented as an object of desire, whose sexuality is

nevertheless inextricably linked with crime and death.
Claire Devers (born 1955) had a background in journalism and studied
at the IDHEC, making three shorts before her first low budget feature, Noir
et blanc/Black and White, based on a Tennessee Williams short story. A
striking, black-and-white film about sexual fantasy, Noir et blanc won the
Camera d'or at Cannes in 1986, and has been compared in style to David
Lynch's Eraserhead (Austin, 1996: 92). It focuses on the sado-masochistic
relationship between Antoine (Francois Frappat), a timid white accountant
employed to do the books in a private gym, and Dominique (Jacques
Martial), a physically imposing black masseur who, after treating Antoine
to a series of increasingly painful (and pleasurable) massages, eventually, at
Antoine's request, organizes Antoine's excruciating, ritual death. Tension is
built up by the way the film cuts away from explicit visual images of the
escalating violence, often showing just empty walls, corridors and stair-
wells, relying instead on the screams on the soundtrack or the reactions of
the disgusted cleaning women to the messes on the floor. The long, final
sequence takes place in a dark, deserted factory where Dominique impas-
sively assembles the machinery, lights the furnace, chains Antoine to the
press, and switches on the power, leaving the spectator to imagine the
consequences.
Dominique is first constructed as object of desire through Antoine's
point-of-view shots of his fetishized, fragmented body, his rippling black
skin and muscle emerging from the glinting water of the hydrotherapy pool.
During the first massage, filmed very physically with an expressive sound-
track, the power and strength of his black arms contrast with Antoine's
puny limbs and flaccid flesh. Antoine's excitement in his submission to
Dominique (he admits that he had never before been aware of his desires)
contrasts with the dullness of his choir-singing and his marriage to compe-
tent Edith, a woman he perceives as cold and parasitical. Although the
elliptical cutting and lack of dialogue mean that no character is given
psychological depth, it is Antoine who drives the relationship along, and
Dominique who at one point tries to resist. For the enigmatic Dominique is
not just a sadist, he treats Antoine tenderly, takes him to hospital for
treatment, and installs him in a hotel room away from his wife (the only
point, apart from the ending, which foregrounds Dominique's point of
view). Indeed, in the scene of Dominique escaping from the hospital carry-
ing the increasingly frail and damaged Antoine, Dominique wearing a white
coat and Antoine a black jacket, the intermingling of black and white seems
to signal their mutual interdependency.
Noir et blanc has been read by Hayward (1993: 259) and others as an
exercise in voyeurism, which makes the spectator uncomfortably aware of
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CRIME DRAMAS
his/her spectatorial position, but also films the male from a distinctly female
point of view. However, given the mythic quality of Dominique's presence
(he does not express his own desires), one might expect its play with
interethnic, homo-erotic, sado-masochistic fantasies to make available a
postcolonial reading, whether it be the black man's revenge on the white
master for past colonial enslavement, or the white man's guilt at past
exploitation and racism. Such a reading seems to be denied by the way the
two men take refuge in a fused, if sado-masochistic, relationship with each
other, where they are united by their shared inability to live out their
masculinity. Antoine is clearly insecure and inadequate in every aspect of
his life, while Dominique cannot easily reproduce his masterful appearance
and behavior outside the gym. The fact that Antoine's ghastly death is
engineered in a spirit of tenderness and understanding suggests that the film
is less about race and criminality than the expression of a powerful (white)
sexual fantasy of self-destructive submission, which can appeal to female
as well as male spectators.
S'en fout la mort/No Fear No Die was Claire Denis's second feature after
Chocolate a semi-autobiographical film about childhood set in Cameroon
(see chapter 9). S'en fout la mort also engages with issues of race and
identity, but does so through a crime narrative which, like Noir et blanc,
ends with a death, though this time the death of a black man at the hands
of a fearful, jealous white man. The film is prefaced by a quotation from
Chester Himes, 'Every human being, whatever his race, nationality, religion
or politics, is capable of anything and everything'. Unusually, the narrative
is mainly focalized from the point of view of Dah, an African from Benin
(played by Isaac de Bankolé, the black houseboy in Chocolat), whose early
voice-over assertion, 'I am black', signals the importance of the theme of
racial difference. S'en fout la mort is primarily concerned with the slow
disintegration of Dah's mysterious Caribbean friend, Jocelyn (Alex Descas),
who, with Dah, the business manager of the team, has been employed by
Pierre Ardennes (Jean-Claude Brialy), a restaurant and nightclub owner, to
help run illegal cockfights in Rungis on the outskirts of Paris. Jocelyn's
mystical relationship with his fighting cocks is progressively troubled by his
problematic relationship with Ardennes, who knew his mother in the Ca-
ribbean and may be his father, and his fascination with Ardennes' beautiful
wife, Toni (Solveig Dommartin). By the end, when Jocelyn has lost his prize
cock, S'en fout la mort, and, drunk, abusive and screaming in creole, is
unable to protect his newest cock, Toni, against his gypsy rival, he gets
knifed to death by Ardennes' legitimate son, Michel (Christopher Buch-
holz), who is also Toni's lover. In a last ritual, Dah, the survivor, washes
Jocelyn's dead body, speaking of the Caribbean he will never now see before
leaving with one of the remaining cocks, his voice-over silent.
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The film's banlieue setting, strikingly photographed, consists of a dismal,

rain-soaked, concrete wasteland of car and lorry parks, within which Ar-
dennes has created a dark, clandestine 'pit' where the fights take place. Dah
and Jocelyn are relegated to dingy, claustrophobic, subterranean spaces, far
from the Caribbean (an image of which hangs over the bar). But Denis uses
the scenes of Jocelyn's training of the cocks, which requires a quasi-religious
attention to rules, diet and medicaments, to elicit beautiful, very physical
images of man and bird, documented in detail by Agnès Godard's handheld
camera. Jocelyn is shot here as the object of Dah's brotherly concern (which
legitimates the camera's pleasure in filming the beautiful, black male body).
But, mediated through Dah's distanced, critical point of view, Jocelyn is
also shown to be an object of desire for both Ardennes and Toni (preparing
the way for Michel's murderous jealousy). Ambitious, arrogant Ardennes
oscillates ambivalently between fatherly concern (treating Jocelyn like a son
but without openly acknowledging him) and neocolonial contempt (when
Jocelyn resists him, he resorts to racial abuse); thoughtless, capricious Toni
comes to see Jocelyn as a way of escape from her confined existence. The
tragedy, however, stems from the way Jocelyn's ability to assert his subjec-
tivity in relation to either Ardennes or Toni is gradually broken down,
leaving him to succumb to alienation and despair.
S'en fout la mort is a beautifully shot but pessimistic film which was not
a commercial success. It offers an unusual perspective on race relations in
France, using the theme of paternity as well as the interethnic romance to
probe relations of desire between whites and blacks, (former) colonizers
and (former) colonized. In contrast with conventional crime dramas, it
emphasizes how the Caribbean male other is the victim of a violent, white
racist society, and its tragic ending brings about neither a restoration of
order nor a form of reconciliation and understanding, but only a sense of
separation and loss.
Denis's follow-up film, fai pas sommeil/1 Can't Sleep, another collabo-
ration with cinematographer Agnès Godard, was loosely based on the
Paulin affair of 1987-1988 and was selected for the 'Quinzaine des réalis-
ateurs' at Cannes in 1994. Thierry Paulin, a gay HIV-positive man of
Caribbean origin, was responsible (with his gay lover) for murdering a
number of old women in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, where he lived.
He was only caught thanks to a random identity check, and died later of
AIDS in gaol. J'ai pas sommeil resituates the affair in the early 1990s, but
does not focus on the police investigation or the reconstruction of Paulin's
crimes. Instead it weaves together a multiplicity of overlapping, fictional
narratives within the increasingly labyrinthine mise-en-scène of the 18th
arrondissement, until the Paulin figure, the androgynously named Camille
(Richard Courcet), is finally (and accidentally) apprehended. In particular,
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Camille (Richard Courcet) performs in a gay nightclub setting in J'ai pas

sommeil (1994). Source: BIFI. (C) I.Weingarten/Arena Films.
it focuses on Dai'ga, a young Lithuanian immigrant and would-be actress

(Katherine Golubeva), whose arrival in and departure from Paris more or
less coincide with the opening and closing of the film (she disappears in the
middle of the night, taking Camille's stash of money with her, having
discovered that he and his boyfriend live in the hotel where she works). It
also highlights the role of Camille's brother, Theo (Alex Descas), a pensive,
disillusioned musician who plans to abandon the noise, violence and racism
of Paris and go back to Martinique with his little son, against the wishes of
his partner Mona (Beatrice Dalle).
Denis was aware that a black, gay, HIV-positive serial killer was not
going to be seen as 'politically correct' subject matter (Denis, 1994), and
there is certainly a danger that the film's fascination with Camille sets him
up as the perverse, exotic other. He is first presented to the spectator as a
passive object of desire, the camera panning over his recumbent body and
highlighting his painted fingernails. Later in a gay nightclub setting, he
performs languorously for groups of silent men, wearing a low-cut black
dress, aware of his powers of attraction, yet head downcast (and accompa-
nied, as elsewhere in the film, by extremely sensuous music). Yet Camille's
feminized body is not just the object of a (white?) homo-erotic voyeuristic
gaze, it is also the object of his own gaze, his narcissism evident in his care
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over his appearance, the alluring studio photographs which litter his room,
and his need for mirrors and to be looked at by others. At the same time,
disconcertingly, Camille is also shown participating in acts of extreme vio-
lence, as when he attacks his (white) boyfriend, Raphael, or in the scenes
which occur halfway through the film, without any preparation, when the
two men kill two old women in cold blood, each ritualistic murder shot in
a single silent take. Rather than stereotyping Camille as a monstrous serial
killer, then, the impossible contradictions in his behavior can be read as
signs of an inner emptiness and alienation which, as Martine Beugnet
argues, are symptomatic of the society of which he is a part (Beugnet, 2000:
236-78).
For Thierry Jousse (1994: 22), the film is a modern film noir, which
'seeks to penetrate society's dark shadows, that cursed section inhabited
by outcasts who haunt the city's corners and deepest recesses'. For Cynthia
Marker (1999: 147), the film also subverts the codes of noir through its
'disorienting images and complex characters [which] do not allow viewers
to trust what they see or to fall back on an easy stereotyping (i.e. good
vs. evil, masculine vs. feminine, same vs. other)'. Certainly, J'ai pas som-
meil regularly confounds stereotypical expectations. Old women are
shown refusing the fear instilled by the 'granny-killings' and taking karate
classes with Madame Ninon (Line Renaud), the manager of the hotel
where Camille and Raphael live (and who describes them as 'such nice
boys'). Fragile, 'foreign' Daiga refuses to be harassed by the unpleasant
men she encounters (including the police), and gets revenge on the man
who promised her a job. Theo exposes the violence and racism of his
white neighbors. But the film is punctuated with reminders of the murders
which are troubling the community, as in the opening sequence of Daiga
arriving in her Trabant, which is intercut with short scenes showing the
discovery of a woman's dead body, covered in flies. As Beugnet points
out, these combine with the labyrinthine mise-en-scène, the expressive
lighting, the multiplication of points of view and the fragmentation of the
narrative to create a feeling of collective malaise. The film constructs a
claustrophobic world of solitary individuals and random violence, where
people do not understand each other (Daiga cannot even speak French),
immigrants are subjected to sexual and racial harassment, and the police
are cynical and ineffective. Within this fluid, shifting, multicultural Paris,
where everyone is informed by fear and mistrust of others, Camille's acts
are as banal as they are inexplicable.
Unlike mainstream crime dramas, Devers and Denis address the relation-
ship between crime and ethnicity by constructing black male protagonists
(there is a noticeable absence of Arab males) who are the objects of a
desiring (white, usually male) gaze. (Balasko avoids this strategy in Les
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Keufs, choosing instead to confound expectations by representing a black

man as the active investigator.) Despite being responsible for murder in two
cases, the men are not demonized and vilified but represented as alienated
from the world and curiously passive, operating almost as if within a
dream.18 Nevertheless, whereas in Noir et blanc the action takes place
within enclosed, claustrophobic spaces, in Denis's films the action is located
more specifically within a problematic, postcolonial social context. How-
ever, the fascination with oppressed ethnic minority men can lead to the
marginalization or stereotyping of women (and the evacuation of ethnic
minority women), a danger which Denis manages to avoid in J'ai pas
sommeil through the film's complex, multiple narrative structure.
Conclusion
Many of the best known films in this corpus, be they commercially success-
ful genre films like La Tricbe and Max et Jérémie or critically acclaimed
auteur films like Noir et blanc and S'en fout la mort, construct a world of
crime which is primarily male-oriented, showing how difficult it is to appro-
priate the policier for woman-centered narratives and 'women's issues'.
However, a number of women's films use the tropes of the policier (in terms
of character types, atmospheric urban settings and expressive lighting) to
work over anxieties and tensions related to women's independence and
female (or male) sexuality. Films which associate women with violent crime
tend to confirm stereotypical representations of women by attributing their
violence to their repressed or perverse sexuality, perceived from a male
point of view. However, the theme of women in danger allows for some
complex, challenging portraits of independent women survivors and the
social world they inhabit, while the comedies centering on women investi-
gators not only construct women as active agents of knowledge and desire
but also explore social issues relating to women, violence and criminality
from a woman's point of view. In addition, a significant number of women's
crime films explore (male) violence within the family, or provide original,
innovative investigations of alternative sexualities and ethnic differences,
though the troubling sexual or ethnic others they construct are not inte-
grated back into the community. Curiously, these films rarely feature lesbian
or ethnic minority women (the exceptions in the latter case being Les Keufs
and J'ai pas sommeil). Rather than providing classic narratives involving
the pleasures of suspense, crime solving and punishment, they nearly all
marginalize or disempower the (male) forces of law and order and use
crime primarily as a way of gaining an insight into individual psychology,
personal relationships and/or family secrets.
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Notes
1. A key feminist film from the end of the decade is Marleen Gorris's A Question
of Silence (1981), a crime drama in which the apparently unmotivated murder
of a male boutique manager by three unrelated women provokes an investiga-
tion which ultimately puts patriarchal society on trial.
2. De vers also adapted a Georges Simenon novel for television, Le Crime de M.
Stil (1995), a policier set in Africa.
3. Plein fer (Josée Dayan, 1990), another male-oriented crime drama, centers on
financial malpractice, family rivalry and revenge in the world of boules (bowls),
in Marseilles.
4. Esposito's documentary, Sous les jupes de la Madone (1995), denounced
women's oppression in Mafia-dominated Calabria and their submissive role as
the indirect accomplices of murder, forced to respect the code of honor and the
omertà (law of silence); it also showed women's attempts to stop the never-
ending Mafia-related killings.
5. The series of thrillers commissioned for the popular late 1990s/early 2000s M6
television series 'Vertiges' specifically revolve around a young woman whose life
is endangered but who survives her ordeal.
6. Jean-Paul Rappeneau's film credits include Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) starring
Gerard Depardieu.
7. Before this film, Deneuve played a detective in Hugo Santiago's Ecoute voir
(1978) and an amateur detective in Jean-Pierre Mocky's comedy Agent trouble
(1987). In Téchiné's Le Lieu du crime (1986) she plays a young mother con-
fronted with murder.
8. Another example of a film featuring a woman killer is Alain Bonnot's La Liste
noire (1984), starring Annie Girardot, which provides some motivation for the
protagonist's killing of her daughter's murderers (recalling Jeanne Moreau's
revenge on her husband's killers in Truffaut's La Mariée était en noir).
9. Huppert played the role of a real-life parricide in Chabrol's Violette Nozières
(1978) and was also a murderess in La Cerimonie (1995), Chabrol's adaptation
of Ruth Rendell's The Judgement of Stone, which recalls the story of the Papin
sisters.
10. Valeria Sarmiento's atmospheric thriller, LTnconnu de Strasbourg (1999), begins
with Madeleine (Ornella Mutti) accidentally killing her jealous husband, but
then shifts into an investigation of the state of mind of her amnesiac lover, Jean-
Paul (Charles Berling).
11. Diane Bertrand's Un samedi sur la terre (1996), like Parfait amour!, is an auteur
film based on the reconstruction of a woman's murder. Its complex, fragmented
flashback structure constitutes a puzzle which invites the spectator to try and
understand what happened (and to what extent the woman is responsible for
her own death).
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12. Claude-Jean Philippe was the presenter of the Cine-club on Antenne 2.

13. Claire Devers's television film in the series Gauche/Droite, La Voleuse de St
Lubin (2000), is a 'social problem' film which explores the conditions in which
an honest young working-class mother is reduced to shoplifting to feed her
children. Sólveig Anspach's television documentary, Que personne ne bouge!
(1999), about a gang of 'real life' women bank robbers, also raises the question
of women's social and economic suffering as the motivation for their crimes.
14. Women were only allowed to become chief inspectors in 1975.
15. In contrast, there have been a number of strong woman-centered crime series
on television, from Madame le Juge (Claude Chabrol, 1977) starring Simone
Signoret to Julie Lescaut (Gilles Béhat and Josée Dayan), starring Véronique
Genest, and Une femme d'honneur (Gilles Béhat and Michèle Hauteville), star-
ring Corinne Touzet as a ' gendarmette\ in the 1990s. Other series dealing with
law and order include Le Juge est une femme (1993) starring Florence Pernel,
and Quai Noi (1998) featuring a woman customs officer.
16. Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1989), an action thriller in which Jamie Lee Curtis
plays a novice police officer who is virtually destroyed by the job, opens with a
fetishizing gun sequence which contrasts with Balasko's humorous, more
matter-of-fact approach.
17. Another rural thriller is Daniele Dubroux' tragi-comic UExamen de minuit
(1998), which involves a farmer who becomes a bank robber in order to satisfy
the desires of the woman he falls in love with.
18. These homoerotic representations of gay, black murderers can be linked to the
literary tradition of Jean Genet.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Road Movies
The road movie, like the western, is generally considered an archetypal

American genre. It is most often associated with its best known postwar
manifestations, namely, the existential male buddy road film, influenced by
Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), which reached a climax with Easy
Rider (Denis Hopper, 1967), and the outlaw couple on the run, a cycle
initiated by Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). Prior to Thelma and
Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), the road movie typically privileged the explo-
ration of alienated and inassimilable masculinities, and the concomitant
refusal of the institutions on which postwar capitalist societies were based.
For Corrigan, it 'promotes a male escapist fantasy linking masculinity to
technology and defining the road as a space that is at once resistant to
while ultimately contained by the responsibilities of domesticity: home life,
marriage, employment' (Cohan and Hark, 1997: 3). The physical journey
which constitutes the main ingredient of the genre is more often than not
doubled by a 'spiritual quest' (Roberts, 1997: 53), a symbolic journey of
self-discovery for its insecure, nomadic male protagonist(s) whose anti-
social behavior usually leads to tragedy.
However, as Cohan and Hark have argued (1997: 2), the road movie
provides 'a ready space for the exploration of the tensions and crises of the
historical moment during which it is produced'. In the 1930s, the road was
used in romantic comedies as a way of interrogating class differences and
deferring sexual tension (as in It Happened One Night, Frank Capra,
1934), and in social dramas featuring displaced communities (as in The
Grapes of Wrath, John Ford, 1940). Thelma and Louise (written by Callie
Khouri) demonstrated that in the post-feminist 1990s it can also be appro-
priated to represent what Manohla Dargis has called 'a wilful refusal of the
male world and its law' (Dargis, 1991: 92).' Given that women have
traditionally been assigned roles within the private (domestic) space, except
when in the company of men, a woman's lone presence on the road is
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particularly transgressive. Indeed, Thelma and Louise's interrogation of

both a patriarchal society and the masculine bias of the road movie (how-
ever problematic it has been for some feminist critics) has signaled a turning
point in the genre in the United States, showing how the transforming space
of the road can be used to explore female fantasies and desires, and giving
rise to other Hollywood road movies featuring marginalized characters
such as gays, lesbians and ethnic minorities.
In France the road genre is a relatively rare phenomenon, as was high-
lighted by the success of Manuel Poirier's Western (1997), a gentle male
buddy road film featuring a couple of ill-assorted immigrants on the road
in Brittany. Indeed, Williams (1982) lists only three French road movies,
Le Salaire de la peur (Georges-Henri Clouzot, 1953), a classic male ac-
tion drama, and two Godard films, Pierrot le fou (1965) and Weekend
(1967), one a romantic vision of the outlaw couple, the other a satirical
critique of French society.2 In the 1970s, Bertrand Blier's cult film, Les
Valseuses (1974), an anarchic comedy featuring a male buddy duo
(played by Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere), provoked a furor
among feminists because of its provocative and abusive treatment of
women encountered along the road. In contrast, an early European
feminist-influenced model of women taking to the road to escape their
unsatisfactory lives is to be found in Alain Tanner's Messidor (1979).
This film focuses on two young women from very different backgrounds
who journey together into the Swiss countryside, cause mayhem and ul-
timately pay the price since, as in Thelma and Louise, they find that
there is no way back to their previous existence.
Three French women's road movies also date from this period, namely,
Nadine Trintignant's Premier voyage (1979), a film about a brother and a
sister (played by Trintignant's own children) who set off on the road to find
their father after their mother's death, Nelly Kaplan's surrealist Charles et
Lucie (1979), featuring an outlandish, destitute couple in their fifties, and
Diane Kurys's Cocktail Molotov (1980), set in May 1968, which centers on
a young teenage woman and two young men hitching back to Paris from
Venice and who miss out on the May events. Kurys's film is disappointing
as a way of inflecting May 1968 with a woman's political perspective,
focusing more on the personal rebellion of the central character, Anne (Elise
Caron), against the values of her bourgeois mother. However, Anne's expe-
riences on the road do allow her to develop a proto-feminist consciousness
of her position as a woman (Tarr, 1999a: 39-54). Like Jacqueline Audry's
earlier road movie, Les Petits matins (1962), about a young woman hitch-
ing down to the south of France, Trintignant, Kaplan and Kurys are not
interested in developing suspenseful genre films about doomed fugitives
surrounded by a hostile society, but rather use the road as a space in which
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to explore interpersonal relationships away from the constraints of the

(patriarchal) domestic sphere.
French women's films of the 1980s and 1990s also appropriate the road
in ways which distinguish them from American variants of the genre. They
are grouped here according to whether they feature female fugitives from
the law, lone women who have dropped out of conventional society, parents
seeking to renew their relationships with their children, or women travelling
as a group. 3 The genre is given a final twist in Sophie Calle and Greg
Shepard's video diary, No Sex Last Night (1996), an autobiographical re-
working of the road movie on home terrain, that is, a car journey across
the United States, which is the occasion for a self-reflexive investigation of
the couple's relationship with each other. What is of interest is the extent to
which these films use the road as a way of seeking liberation from the
oppression of hegemonic norms, and offer a reflection on women's lives
and/or on changing gender roles.
Women on the run
The fascination of the mid-1980s with women who kill, exemplified by

Isabelle Adjani's role in Claude Miller's road movie, Mortelle randonnée
(1985), is taken up and reworked in two women's films of the same year,
Caroline Huppert's Signé Charlotte (1985) and Josiane Balasko's Sac de
noeuds (1985). In both these films, a woman's (supposed) murder of her
boyfriend or husband leads to her becoming a fugitive, and both star
Isabelle Huppert in what seems to be a concerted, if relatively unsuccessful,
attempt to redirect her star image towards more popular forms of filmmak-
ing. The differences between the two films, one a thriller-cum-melodrama,
the other a farce, demonstrate how women's (real or imagined) criminality,
and the road experience itself, can be given completely different meanings.
Caroline Huppert, a successful television director, started her career in
the theater, directing her sister Isabelle in an adaptation of Musset's On ne
badine pas avec Vamour (1977). Her television films include an adaptation
of Zola's Madame Sourdis starring Nathalie Baye (1979) and Elle voulait
faire du cinema (1983), based on the life of Alice Guy-Blaché, starring
Christine Pascal. Despite its star cast, Signé Charlotte/Sincerely Charlotte,
her first and so far only film for the cinema, was not a success, judged
critically both for its awkwardly constructed screenplay and its perform-
ances. Its focus on a weak, easily-swayed man who is caught between two
diametrically opposed women offers an extremely problematic construction
of femininity.
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The eponymous Charlotte (Huppert), the 'bad' girl, first appears in the
opening credit sequence as a nightclub singer with a punk hairstyle, whose
(dreadful) song about fragmented memories and lost love prefigures the
story to come. A suspense narrative is initiated when Charlotte is seen
leaving her boyfriend's flat, a look of desperation on her face, and it
subsequently transpires that he has been murdered. This elliptical sequence
is reprised and amplified in two later flashbacks when Charlotte insists,
first, that she did not kill him, then, that she killed him by accident.
Meanwhile, however, Charlotte takes to the road and manipulates her
former lover, Mathieu (Niels Astrup), a musician, into aiding and abetting
her. Mathieu lives with Christine (Christine Pascal), a teacher, and is a
father to Christine's young son, Frederic, but he persuades Christine to let
him join Charlotte on the road, ostensibly to protect her from the police
but actually to pursue his desire for her. (Charlotte is an outrageous, exces-
sive version of sensible, rational Christine, as she proves by stealing Chris-
tine's passport and wearing a wig which makes her look like her.) Mathieu's
meeting with Charlotte leads to a car accident which leaves them both
hospitalized, but exuberant Charlotte organizes their escape, steals the nec-
essary cars, clothes and papers, and even persuades Christine to give her
money and the keys to her parents' holiday home in the Landes. The illicit
couple set off on their journey south, where Charlotte confesses to her
crime and Mathieu, undaunted, determines to escape with her to Spain.
However, when Christine arrives with Frederic, Charlotte quietly disap-
pears again, to Mathieu's despair. The film's epilogue, set two years later,
shows Mathieu seeing Christine (now his wife) and her son and baby off
on a train, then spotting Charlotte with another man, her older, jealous-
looking Spanish husband, and exchanging a few words with her before
finding himself alone with his memories and regrets.
Though Charlotte's unexplained desire to escape the law is the film's
initial driving narrative force, the meaning of the journey shifts to represent
a crisis in Mathieu's identity. Mathieu is presumably attracted by free-
spirited but selfish Charlotte (even though he has already lived with her for
six years) because she embodies his repressed desire to escape his ordered,
domestic bourgeois existence with gentle, forgiving Christine (the director
declared that Mathieu was the character she most identified with in the
film). The film thus sets up a stereotypical dichotomy between the 'good'
and 'bad' woman, who compete for the love of the same hapless, gullible
male. Yet Huppert as Charlotte is far from credible or satisfying as a femme
fatale. The film refuses to explore her motivation, and when she eventually
claims to have killed her lover in a fit of jealousy (there just happened to be
a loaded revolver lying around in his flat), she comes across as an impulsive
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child-woman (an 'adorable emmerdeuse') rather than a free spirit whose

transgressive behavior marks a rejection of conventional feminine roles.
Balasko's background as an actress with the Splendid café-théàtre in-
forms her first film comedy, Sac de noeuds/All Mixed Up, which draws on
the Splendida pleasure in outrageous situations and crude language at the
same time as it illustrates Balasko's ongoing concern to give a voice to those
who are normally marginalized. The film clearly transgresses expectations
of what was considered appropriate for women's cinema at the time (de-
spite the presence of Claude Miller as Balasko's technical advisor), and in
the absence of French funding was eventually financed by Warner Brothers.
Balasko's provocative comic style is reminiscent of Blier's without the atten-
dant misogyny, and Sac de noeuds, a female buddy movie, was seen by
some as constituting a woman's response to Les Valseuses.4
In Sac de noeuds Balasko plays Anita, an unhappy, unattractive woman
who neglects herself because she is grieving for her dead child and has sex
with the local grocer to pay for a bottle of gas to commit suicide. Her co-
star, Huppert, plays Rose-Marie, a mini-skirted, bird-brained platinum
blonde, who suffers from repeated beatings at the hands of her violent
policeman husband. The two meet in Anita's depressing HLM apartment
when Rose-Marie seeks refuge from her drunken husband and interferes
with Anita's suicide attempt. In the ensuing fracas, the husband gets knifed
and the two women run off to escape the police, sleeping rough and
eventually using the husband's gun to exact money from people they meet.
They are joined on the road by Rico (Farid Chopel), a reluctant escaped
convict (and an immigrant of Portuguese origin) who would like to get
back into prison. At La Souterraine, Anita stops off to exact revenge on the
doctor responsible for her child's death, but does not go through with it. In
Marseille, Rico discovers that his unfaithful wife is working in a peepshow
run by gang leader, Coyote (Coluche), and wrecks what he thinks is Coy-
ote's country house. The culmination of their journey is marked by a brief
period of tranquillity as Rose-Marie comforts Rico and the threesome sleep
out in the open amid the furniture from Coyote's house. However, Rico
then spots a man who had earlier raped him at razor point, tries to get his
revenge, and ends up being knifed to death. Back in the banlieue, pregnant
Rose-Marie looks glumly at her scrapbook of their adventures until Anita
suggests going out again. Grabbing the gun and a wad of money, they
discover a young man stealing their car radio, and commandeer him to
become their chauffeur. The film closes with glorious shots of the open road
winding through sunlit mountain scenery.
Balasko's inventive appropriation of the road movie has not received the
critical recognition it deserves and was criticized in particular for its awk-
ward mixing of farce and tragedy. However, the choice of a comic female
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Rose-Marie (Isabelle Huppert) and Anita (Josiane Balasko) sleep rough in

Sac de noeuds (1985). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from
Josiane Balasko.
duo to lead the plot is in itself a reason for paying the film attention, as are
the performances of its stars. Balasko's Chaplinesque female tramp is well
matched by Huppert's fragile, stick-like Barbie doll figure, who turns
against her abusive husband and invests her affection on the marginalized
Rico. The film's black humor illustrates the isolation, violence and poverty
of women's lives in the banlieue and makes a mockery of the forces of law
and order. But it also provides a cartoon-like, comic fantasy of women
rebelling against their oppression by taking to the road, stealing cars and
wielding a gun, and refuses to punish them for their transgressions (the
women survive, whereas the men do not). The women's friendship, which
is formed on the road (and prefigures that of Gazon maudit), enables them
to stop being victims and start taking control of their lives.
Each of these films constructs Huppert as a woman who kills her lover/
husband, steals cars to make her escape (with Balasko's help in Sac de
noeuds) and gets away with it, in Signé Charlotte because she uses her
sexuality to get other men to shelter her and help her disappear, in Sac de
noeuds because her husband (whom she had knifed in self-defense) turns
out not to be dead. In each case, the threat posed by an armed, angry
woman is defused. Signé Charlotte uses the road to transfer attention from
Charlotte's adventures to her lover's temptation to abandon his adult re-
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sponsibilities, turning it into a male melodrama. Sac de noeuds, on the

other hand, downplays the theme of female revenge (as befits a comedy
aiming at a mass audience), but uses the road to provide its female protag-
onists with an imaginative space for exploring freedom, friendship and
power, a subversive message which is disguised by its farcical style.
Lone women on the road
If the road can provide a space for female friendship, it can also constitute
a reflection on women's alienated relationship to society, in particular
through the figure of the woman travelling alone who, arguably, defies
conventional expectations of how women should live out their femininity.
This theme is explored in Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni hi (1985) and, more
than a decade later, Laetitia Masson's A vendre (1998), both of which use
a complex flashback structure to investigate a woman's life on the road
after her death (Sans toit ni hi) or disappearance (A vendre). They can be
compared with Liliane de Kermadec's La Piste du télégraphe (1994), a
historical road movie which traces the journey of a woman who, contrary
to expectations, achieves her objective of walking (alone) from New York
to Siberia in the 1920s (discussed in chapter 9).
Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond, Varda's sixth feature, was initially refused the
avance sur recettes but turned out to be her most commercially successful
film to date, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 1986,
and attracting more than a million spectators. Sandrine Bonnaire, who was
awarded the Cesar for best actress, plays Mona, the young vagabond of
the title, whose radical otherness prevents her from being known and
understood by those who meet her, and, indeed, by the spectator (and
filmmaker), too. The interest of the film's form and content for feminist
(and other) critics is evident in the multiple analyses it has solicited (e.g.
Flitterman-Lewis, 1990: 285-315, Forbes, 1992: 91-4, Hayward, 1990:
285-96, Smith, 1998: 114-134). For Flitterman-Lewis, Varda offers a
threefold challenge to dominant cinema: 'She devises new textual strategies
that rework the function of narration; she disrupts the patriarchal logic of
vision by reconceiving the voyeuristic gaze; and she provides a discursive
space for questions of sexuality, reflecting on what it means to be a woman
and to represent one's own desire' (1990: 286). Hayward takes a similarly
positive line, arguing that the film is both political and feminist in its
conception and message. But as Forbes points out, even if it creates a
remarkable female character who is 'the opposite of the female cinematic
icon' (1992: 93), it nevertheless presents 'a highly pessimistic vision of
women in society and in the cinema' (94).
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Shot in winter in the South of France without a finished script and with
a mix of professional and non-professional actors, Sans toit ni hi consti-
tutes an investigation into first the death, then the last few weeks of life, of
the mysterious Mona. It is constructed in part through the testimonies of
people who met her (variously presented), in part through the reconstruc-
tion of past events which are (tenuously) linked to the testimonies (the
flashbacks defy chronological order and are woven into the narrative in a
highly complex manner), and in part through a series of punctuating, single
tracking shots, unattached to any particular viewpoint, which document
Mona's trajectory 'from triumphant wanderer with leather jacket and pack
to frozen, crying vagrant in tattered boots and wine-soaked blanket'
(Flitterman-Lewis, 1990: 288). The complexity of the film's fragmented,
cyclical narrative structure (it begins with the discovery of Mona's frozen
corpse and ends with her stumbling to her death) is matched by its hybrid
generic features, mixing the woman's road movie with elements of the
thriller, the documentary and the modernist art film. (Varda had originally
intended to make a documentary about the lives of the rural poor, traces of
which remain in the portraits of the soixante-huitard goat farmer and the
North African vineyard workers.)
The film makes clear from its second sequence, accompanied by Varda's
introductory voice-over, that Mona, who is seen in the distance emerging
from the sea, defies any fixity of knowledge and identity. Rather her pres-
ence inspires others to project on to her their own fears and desires. Her
smell, dirtiness, independence and indifference to normal social relations
make her repellent to some, and (momentarily) fascinating to others, espe-
cially the women caught in various traditional roles who at first see in her
the brave embodiment of freedom, love, or rebellion. However, the specta-
tor never really knows what she wants or thinks, as Mona herself is denied
a subjective perspective. Not normally talkative, the most she lets slip is
that she was once a secretary, that she got fed up with 'office Napoleons',
and that she prefers being on the move ('je bouge'). But her wandering life,
hitching rides and camping out in the cold, desolate wintry landscape, lacks
any political (or other) purpose, as is clear from her encounter with the
goat farmer and with Mme Landier (Macha Méril), the botanist who is
trying to save the local plane trees from disease.
The series of tracking shots, marked by Joanna Bruzdowicz's jarring,
haunted music, demonstrate both Mona's radical alterity and one of the
ways in which the film redefines the way the woman is 'looked at'. Each
shot begins and ends with her absence, either because she walks in or out
of the frame, or because the camera itself keeps on traveling until it alights
on a random object. Mona thus eludes being caught up in a fixed, fetishiz-
ing gaze. At the same time, her apparently purposeless journey is repeatedly
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Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) hitches a ride in Sans toit ni loi (1985). Source:
BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Ciné-Tamaris.
shot moving right to left, 'in the wrong direction, against the culture,
against the tide' (Smith, 1998: 15), a direction which Hayward directly
associates with death. As these scenes confirm, Mona's detachment from
others leads progressively to the deterioration of her equipment, her health,
her inviolability (she gets raped), her ability to read the social situation in
which she finds herself (she is terrified by the Bacchanalian revels), and
finally to her exposure and death.
Although Varda herself saw Mona as a survivor rather than a victim
(Flitterman-Lewis, 1990: 309), Sans toit ni loi demonstrates a shift away
from the optimism of Cléo de 5 a 7 or UUne chante, Vautre pas, where the
central protagonists achieve some sort of self-knowledge and acceptance of
(and by) others. However its box-office success suggests that spectators
recognized its representation of a woman's escape from patriarchal control
only through utter solitude, indifference and death. The film can perhaps
thus be read as an implicit critique of the post-feminist notion that feminism
had already achieved its goals (as well as of May 1968's dreams of social
change).
Solitude, indifference and resistance to patriarchal control are also char-
acteristics of Laetitia Masson's second collaboration with actress Sandrine
Kiberlain,5 A vendre/For Sale, which got a mixed reception when it was
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screened at Cannes. A vendre shares with Sans toit ni loi the device of
multiple testimonies as a way of trying to get a purchase on the identity of
the absent central protagonist, in this case the nomadic France Robert
(Kiberlain). It also has a complex, cyclical narrative structure, involving
flashbacks which reconstruct France's experiences but which are unattached
to any particular viewpoint, and whose status is therefore ambiguous.
However, the film differs, both in its more linear and less fragmented
narrative drive (after the opening sequence, the testimonies and flashbacks
build up in chronological order), and in its focalization through the point
of view of the detective, Luigi Primo (Sergio Castellito). Luigi is employed
by France's would-be husband, nightclub owner Lindien (Jean-Francois
Stévenin), to find France and bring her back after she disappears on their
wedding day, having stolen his cash. The film's framing and structuring
narrative concerns Luigi's increasingly obsessive investigation, traveling
from Marseilles to France's native village in the Champagne area and then
back down through Roissy, Paris and Grenoble to Marseilles, each stop
involving interviews with people who had known her.6 Embedded within
it, and seemingly triggered by and subordinate to it, are fragments of
France's own earlier parallel journey, fragments which become more and
more developed as sequences, and which flesh out and ultimately converge
with Luigi's own reconstruction of her life. The two strands merge, briefly,
when Luigi tracks France down in Marseilles, has sex with her, and then
lets her go (so betraying Lindien's trust). In an ambiguous open ending,
following shots of Luigi waiting for her, alone, in Genoa, France, destitute
in New York, appears poised to accept his offer of a return ticket.
The most problematic aspect of the film as a woman's film is the way it
positions the spectator to sympathize with Luigi's frustrated and frustrating
attempts to reconstruct and understand France's history and identity. Luigi,
whose gaze and voice dominate the image and soundtrack, is a disturbed,
depressed man whom it is difficult to like. In the opening sequence (set in
Marseilles in early September, very near the end of his quest) he pays
Mireille, a prostitute (Chiara Mastroianni), for sex as well as for informa-
tion; in the course of his questioning he constantly probes France's sexuality
rather than other aspects of her identity; when he reaches Paris, he momen-
tarily abandons his investigation in order to terrorize his ex-wife (Mireille
Perrier). As the journey progresses, Luigi's fascination with the absent,
unknowable France causes his own identity to disintegrate; he starts to
drink heavily and begins to identify with his prey ('I am France Robert').
Though at the end he recognizes his 'monstrosity', destroys his paperwork
and retreats to Genoa, it is difficult to accept (as we are presumably meant
to, given that he 'knows' France so well) that his desire for France, and his
willingness to pay for her to come back to him, is any different from that
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of the other men she has encountered (that is, a projection of their own
needs). The film refuses the multiple, fractured perspectives which charac-
terize Sans toit ni loi and effectively allows France's narrative to be con-
tained within a narrative of male desire.
The enigma proposed by the film is the meaning of France's financial
transactions with others (and not just her stealing from Lindien). The spec-
tator discovers that, having twice been let down by men (the local village
Lothario, the man who gives her a lift out of the village), she decides to
make men pay for having sex with her, starting with the bank clerk (Roshdy
Zem) who wants to marry her, then the husband of her bourgeois employer
who eventually dismisses her. Though this suggests that France's body is
'for sale', a number of factors make her situation more complex. Although
she is fascinated by and friendly with prostitutes (the black woman in Paris,
Mireille in Marseilles), she does not regard her own transactions in the
same way (she has feelings for the men she expects to pay her), and is re-
pelled by the scene of prostitution that she witnesses in New York. Also,
she does not actually need the money at first, finding jobs in a supermarket,
as a cleaning woman, or as a bedroom sales representative. Furthermore, as
well as charging men to be with her, she also pays others for their time. She
sends her parents regular payments to compensate for the cost of her keep
between the ages of 18 and 26 (a device which enables Luigi to trace her
movements); and, later, she offers the bedroom salesman money to keep
her company at night (unsuccessfully) and pays Mireille to talk to her on
her birthday. Her insistence on payment and dislike of gifts can thus be read
as a defensive strategy in a world in which the emotions are not to be
trusted. Money gives her a value in her relationships, and also enables her
to keep her distance and maintain her independence and control, a control
which her impending marriage to Lindien threatens to undermine. Yet she
also craves human contact, as is clear from the multiple close-ups of her
piquant, sad, desperate face and disheveled hair. Her desire to offer the por-
trait that has been painted of her in New York as a gift 'to a friend' is a
sign that she is entering a new economy, and ready to accept the destiny
that has been awaiting her at the end of the road. Whereas earlier, the film
is punctuated with images of her tall, gawky body running on an athletics
track or exercising on a running machine, expressing a restlessness which
never actually leads anywhere, in the end, the anticipatory voice-over of her
final telephone conversation with Luigi (whether real or imagined) is ac-
companied by an image of her standing still by the phone booth. 7
The technical brilliance of the lighting, editing, music and photography
of A vendre obscures the fact that in the end it is little more than an
elaborate love story, in which the heroine plumbs the depths to find a hero
willing to accept her and love her for what she is (the road being the site of
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ROAD MOVIES
a transformative experience for Luigi, as much as for France). Whereas

Mona travels as the need and opportunity arises, regardless of personal
relationships, France moves when her relationships cause her distress (when
a lover gets too possessive or when she gets abandoned, as she does even
by Mireille). Her alienation (which is an extreme form of the alienation
experienced by young women represented in films discussed in chapter 2)
is finally resolved by her (potential) recuperation into the system, whereas
Mona remains radically outside it, at the cost of her life. Though neither
film is focalized through the point of view of the lone woman traveler
(unlike the more goal-oriented narrative of La Piste du telegraph è), the
women's lack of subjectivity, gaze and voice take on very different mean-
ings. Whereas in Mona's case it exemplifies her refusal to be pinned down,
in France's case it is recuperated and given meaning by the intrusive male
investigator. In neither case, though, does the lone woman's experiences on
the road, outside social norms and dependent on others for transport,
enable her to return to society, transformed and empowered.
Parents and children on the road
Two unusual and highly successful personal films of the early 1990s, Nicole
Garcia's Un weekend sur deux (1990) and Christine Pascal's Le Petit prince
a dit (1992), use the road movie to highlight the problematic relationships
between divorced parents and their children. Filmed from both the adult's
and the child's perspective, these spontaneous, unauthorized journeys allow
the adult to discover and attempt to compensate for failure as a parent. In
the first case the 'bad' mother has lost touch with her children, and in the
second the apparently devoted father has nonetheless failed to realize that
his young daughter is seriously ill. Both in their different ways challenge
conventional gendered representations of the family and parenthood. 8
Nicole Garcia (born 1948), a pied noir, was a successful actress before
making her first short, Quinze aout (1985), featuring herself and her young
son. Her first feature-length film, Un weekend sur deux/Every Other Week-
end, co-written with Jacques Fieschi, stars Nathalie Baye as Camille Val-
mont, a young, divorced mother who is also an actress, and takes as its
theme the difficulties faced by a woman who wants to reconcile her desire
for a career with her desire to have a meaningful relationship with her
estranged children (a theme which must resonate for many women in the
film industry, and is reprised in Le Petit prince a dit). The film was selected
for the Venice Film festival in 1990 and released to wide critical acclaim.9
In Un weekend sur deux, Camille has refused to continue playing the
role of the conventional wife and mother (demonstrated in a brief black-
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G E N R E FILMS
and-white home movie flashback to two scenes from her past life). How-
ever, she has paid the price by losing contact with her two young children,
Vincent and Gaélle, who are in the custody of their father. On the weekend
in question, impecunious Camille tries, unsuccessfully, to reconcile looking
after her children for the weekend with an appearance at a Rotary Club
charity gala in Vichy. When her ex-husband threatens to take the children
away, however, Camille immediately decides to run away with them in the
Club's rental car. Her hastily improvised journey takes them from the
Auvergne down to the coast and on to Spain as she tries to get to know
and love her children better while avoiding being tracked down. Various
setbacks put her motherhood to the test, including Gaélle getting ill and the
openly hostile Vincent running away; but Camille eventually learns to listen
to Vincent and understand his passion for astronomy. Though Vincent
betrays their location (he is worried about missing school), when his father
appears he kisses his mother goodbye, indicating some level of reconcilia-
tion. Camille chooses to remain alone in the mountains, a small figure in a
barren landscape; but she sees the comet she had promised to show Vincent.
The ending emphasizes her solitude, but also suggests that she has learned
something from her journey.
The framing, mise-en-scène and wintry lighting of the film underline
Camille's difficulty in reclaiming her identity as a mother. At the beginning,
she is represented as more of a child than an adult, in the way she eats her
breakfast or wanders around her apartment in T-shirt and pants or initially
refuses to go to Vichy (just as Vincent refuses to see his mother). Subse-
quently, the interior settings often frame her looking out of a window or
into a mirror or otherwise imprisoned by her surroundings (and by conven-
tional social expectations). Most obviously, when she is on the phone to
her husband in the hotel in Vichy, the camera's initial close-up shot of her
behind the glass of the phone booth zooms out to expose her like a prisoner
in a cage.10 In contrast, other, often exterior scenes delight in showing her
active, muscular body and physical energy, as when she hitches up her skirt
and turns cartwheels on the beach, oblivious of time and space. Yet even
here she is caught up in the critical, scrutinizing gaze of Vincent, who
watches her with the seriousness of a rigid, disapproving parent, and longs
for a 'normal' mother who would know her child's medical history and not
lose her handbag. (The opposition between mother and son is reinforced
by repeated shots showing a physical obstacle between them, like the back
of a bench or the bars of a bed.)
Although Garcia claims not to have wanted to make a conventional road
movie (Garcia, 1990: 21), the heroine's pursuit by her ex-husband and
betrayal by her young, recalcitrant son are recognizable elements of the
genre, as is the mise-en-scène of the road, the night-time settings and
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ROAD MOVIES
anonymous hotel rooms, and Camille's recurrent transport and money

problems. The film owes much to the superb cinematography of William
Lubtchanski (from the palatial, labyrinthine Vichy hotel to the gray seaside
and austere mountain scenery) and to the touching performance of Nathalie
Baye (the independent mother of Kurys's La Baule Les Pins) as the glam-
orous actress who is also an unconventional, vulnerable mother. Un week-
end sur deux vividly expresses Camille's contradictory desires and
professional constraints, using the road as a space in which to focus on the
dilemma of reconciling independence and motherhood.
Le Petit prince a dit/The Little Prince Said (the title comes from a
nursery rhyme) won the Louis Delluc award and is often considered Chris-
tine Pascal's best film. Its potentially depressing subject, a child's fatal
illness, is addressed in a way which alternates gravity and light-heartedness
(unlike Nadine Trintignant's more sentimental 1971 film about the death
of a child, Qa n arrive quaux autres). Like UHomme fragile, the film also
provides a positive portrayal of fatherhood. It centers on Adam (Richard
Berry), a former doctor, now a busy researcher, who has the custody of his
ten-year-old daughter, Violette (Marie Kleiber), an endearing, rather pudgy
little girl, whom he repeatedly chastises for being clumsy and slow. The
film's opening sequence, which shows him fetching her from school and
taking her to his workplace, suggests that she has coordination problems
which he fails to see. At the instigation of Violette's vibrant, slightly eccen-
tric actress mother, Mélanie (Anemone), he takes her to be examined at the
hospital where he works and discovers that she has an incurable brain
tumor. In despair, he grabs her from the scanner, still in her vest and pants,
and sets off in his jeep, refusing to submit her to painful treatment which
would only delay an inevitable death. The film then follows father and
daughter on the road together as they travel from Lausanne to Milan
(where they witness Mélanie in rehearsal as she learns the devastating news)
and then to Genoa (where they pick up a stray dog) before Violette per-
suades her father to drive to the family's former holiday home in France,
where she (temporarily) reunites her two parents.
The road episode, which constitutes the middle section of the film, ex-
plores Adam's feelings but also shows Violette learning to confront her
condition and helping Adam to do so too. Adam's inability to relate to
Violette is conveyed by his confused behavior, diving into the motel pool
when she falls in, then forcing her to swim length after length as though to
prove that she is still alive. However, leaving his watch behind, he commits
himself to her, driving off through gorgeous mountain scenery and singing
nursery rhymes with her as they go (a moment marked by the swelling of
the film's emotive theme music). The journey provides Violette with a
privileged moment at the top of a mountain, when wind, mist and cloud
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GENRE FILMS
sweep over the setting, ambient sounds and her breathing and heartbeat
dominate the soundtrack, and a butterfly alights on her face. After the
grayness of the road to Milan and Genoa, Violette tells Adam about her
out-of-body experience, and Adam in turn tells her about her tumor and
her approaching death. The film's final sequence takes place in the magical
space of the family villa, suffused with sunlight, surrounded by greenery
and accompanied by birdsong. Adam, Mélanie and Violette momentarily
recapture their former happiness as a family as they play at splashing water
over one another and contrive to get rid of Lucy, Adam's Eurasian mistress
and colleague, who is horrified that Violette is not being rushed to hospital
for treatment. Lucy's departure means that Violette can find peace, and the
film ends on her lying in bed, her mother watching from the sidelines, her
father hugging a pillow by her bedside, a close-up of her face dissolving to
a black-and-white still and then a fade to white.
The film is a star vehicle for Richard Berry (the unhappy father in Kurys's
La Baule Les Pins), whose occasional aggressiveness and insensitivity to-
wards Violette suggest that his commitment to her is motivated by guilt
and impotence as well as love. It also elicits a wonderful performance from
Marie Kleiber, entering the child's world and depicting both the pathos of
her budding sexuality (she tries on make-up and refuses to let her father
see her in the bath) and the strength of her determination to bring her
parents back together again. Arguably, though, the fact that the parent-
child bond is threatened by an unpredictable outside factor and not by the
behavior of the parents themselves enables the film to eschew the problems
and difficulties of parenting in favor of a more sentimental approach (rep-
resented through endless, cloying shots of Adam giving Violette a hug).
Both these films foreground parents who are working out new ways of
relating to their children (in each case the ex-husband has custody of the
children), while the children themselves are represented fairly convention-
ally (the little boy is rebellious and independent, the little girls are not,
though Violette is certainly very self-willed). However, Un weekend sur
deux's focus on a mother who takes to the road in order to work out her
problematic relationship with her children, leaving behind both ex-husband
and job, genuinely revitalizes the road genre. In contrast, the road element
in Le Petit prince is incorporated within a family melodrama which, unu-
sually, does not problematize the mother's role, allowing her to maintain a
job and the affection of her ex-husband as well as enjoying mother-
daughter intimacy. Instead it opts for a new take on the more conventional
father-daughter romance, using the road to show the father's impotence
when it comes to questions of life and death.
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ROAD MOVIES
Female bonding
The theme of female friendship on the road, developed in Thelma and

Louise (and already a feature of Messidor and Sac de noeuds) has given
rise in the 1990s to a number of films about women traveling together,
including The Company of Strangers (Cynthia Scott, 1991), Boys on the
Side (Herbert Ross, 1995) and Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha,
1993).11 These are not violent action films but use the road to foreground
relationships between women and the potential for female solidarity, an
important aspect of Marion Vernoux's Personne ne m'aime (1994).12
Marion Vernoux (born 1966), whose work, like Masson's, is associated
with i e jeune cinema frangais', worked as a production assistant, script-
writer and television director before making her first feature, Personne ne
m'aime/Nobody Loves Me. Shot in Super 16 on a limited budget, the film
provides a humorous tale of a group of women traveling across France in
a camper-van, intercut with the troubled history of a mother-daughter
relationship. It was generally well received by the critics and nominated for
the Cesar for best first film. Vernoux's casting of Bernadette Lafont and
Jean-Pierre Léaud was an homage to Jean Eustache's cult film La Maman
et la putain (1972), and the film also stars Bulle Ogier, another iconic star
of both New Wave and post-1968 French cinema. Though Vernoux (1994)
otherwise claims to dislike the New Wave, some of her stylistic choices are
reminiscent of New Wave techniques, in particular her use of a lightweight,
handheld camera, location shooting, and the occasional direct address to
camera. In order to avoid the unrealistic, polished perfection of mainstream
cinema imagery, she had the film retouched at the laboratory stage, making
the colors harsher and emphasizing the grain. The resulting rough-and-
ready imagery is at times reminiscent of a home movie.
The film's complex, fragmented narrative is constructed as a puzzle, the
various strands of which are finally brought together in a somewhat farcical
manner. It opens with sequences introducing Marie (Lio), who is getting
her little daughter, Lili, ready to attend her (Lili's) father's wedding in the
North of France, her mother Annie (Laffont), who is being thrown out of
a flat, and her father Lucien (Léaud), who complains about being pestered
by them both. Annie's homelessness instigates the main narrative strand, as
she persuades her neurotic sister, Franchise (Ogier), to drive off in her blue-
and-yellow camper-van to check whether Franchise's husband, Paul, is
attending a conference or away with his mistress. En route they pick up
Cricri (Michelle Laroque), the manager of the conference venue, whose
newfound friendship with Annie inspires her to walk out on her job and
husband, and Dizou (Maaike Jansen), one of her employees who, like
Antoine Doinel in Les 400 coups, has never seen the sea. Their progress
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GENRE FILMS
Franchise (Bulle Ogier) and Annie (Bernadette Lafont) on the road in their
camper-van in Personne ne maime (1994). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with
permission from Bloody Mary Productions.
through the French countryside (shot between the suburban town of Meu-
don and the coast of Normandy) is intercut with a series of convoluted
flashbacks which reconstruct Marie's disastrous relationships with Annie,
Lucien and various lovers, and account for the fact that Annie and Marie
have not seen each other for seven years. The narrative strands converge by
the seaside where the quartet meet Lili and discover that Paul is having an
affair with Marie (his own niece). Annie and Marie are reunited just as
Franchise manages to knock her husband down with the camper-van. In
the final sequence, a low-angle shot from the point of view of the ridiculous
fallen husband pans to and fro over the faces of Lili, Annie, Cricri and
Dizou, looking down at him quizzically and smiling at each other.
The camper-van journey is a useful device for bringing women together
and allowing the audience to share in their discoveries about themselves
and each other. Although the improbable Dizou, who is in her fifties, loves
her husband and (eleven) children, and has a satisfying sex life, the other
women's lives are tinged with unhappiness, represented with a judicious
mixture of pathos and humor. Neurotic, inhibited Franchise is obsessed
with her appearance (she first appears with a white mask on her face) and
with talking and behaving properly; she is also fussy about her food and
dependent on tranquilizers and sleeping pills. Loud-mouthed extrovert An-
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ROAD MOVIES
nie drinks too much and smells. The flashbacks indicate that her drinking
was a factor in the breakdown of her relationship with Marie who, in turn,
feeling that nobody loves her, regularly lets herself be abused and aban-
doned by men (Lili was the result of a one-night stand with a taxi driver).
Cricri's efficient but frenzied business activities disguise the fact that she has
been living with a man she does not love any more and who will not give
her a child.
Despite bickering between the sisters (and constant mocking of Franco-
ise's affections), various scenes highlight moments of affectionate female
bonding, as when they sing together in the van or chat on the sea front.
Cricri looks after Annie (especially after she has sex with a stranger who
collapses in the van) and Dizou keeps an eye on ditzy gun-toting Franchise.
Most importantly, though, Marie's feeling that nobody loves her is finally
challenged by the happiness of her reunion with her mother. Although the
film's open ending is highly ambiguous (Annie, Marie and Franchise still
have a lot to sort out), the very last shot shows the camper-van flashing
past the sea front where Annie's erstwhile lover, propped on a bench, makes
a remarkable return to life. Vernoux may claim that Personne ne m'aime is
not specifically a woman's film (Roth-Bettoni, 1994: 21), but its energy and
pleasure lie in its use of the road to foreground lonely but resilient women
and the ways in which they can validate each other's lives in the absence of
satisfying relationships with men.
The postmodern road film
Sophie Calle's and Greg Shepard's road movie, No Sex Last Night (1996),
is a postmodern art film which blurs the boundaries between fiction, docu-
mentary and autobiography. Its exposure of the director's private life (and
the lives of others) to public scrutiny within a scenario which has been
artificially contrived (and carries en element of personal risk) is typical of
the work of writer and photographer Sophie Calle (born 1953). Calle's
previous work includes a series of exhibitions/installations marrying text
and image, including Suite vénitienne (1980), which documents how she
followed and photographed an unknown man in Venice, and L'Hotel
(1983), in which she photographs and comments on the intimate, personal
objects belonging to clients at a hotel where she was working as a maid.
More recently, she has exhibited the birthday presents she was given be-
tween 1980 and 1993 (1998). Her experimentation with form in No Sex
Last Night, her first full-length film, has something in common with the
self-referential films by Dominique Cabrera and Judith Cahen described in
chapter 5. However Calle's staged documentary road film creates a more
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radical uncertainty about the status of sound and image as a representation

of reality and/or performance.
As Calle's voice-over explains at the beginning of the film, No Sex Last
Night is the result of a project she developed to hang on to her (tenuous)
relationship with her New York boyfriend, Greg Shepard, whom she had
met two years earlier. Her opening offscreen narration accompanies a black
screen with a rectangular peep-hole at the center, alerting spectators to their
voyeuristic desire to see, and to the fact that the action may be hard to
decipher. Calle wants Shepard to drive her across America in his gray 1950s
Cadillac and marry her in Las Vegas on her way to taking up a post as
visiting professor in San Francisco. Shepard simply wants to make a film.
To get him to agree to the journey, Calle proposes that they should make a
film of it and, given that they are at first hardly on speaking terms with one
another, they purchase two camcorders so that each can record the journey
separately. The film's final montage, put together some months after the
completion of the journey, interweaves and mingles extracts from their
individual video diaries (the dates of their recordings remaining displayed
in the corner of the screen). It begins with separate monologues as each
speaks to the camera alone (Sophie often using French). A sense of echo
develops later as their comments about the same feeling or situation are
edited together (often related to the state of the car or the question of
whether or not they will get married). At the end, after the journey is over,
they both comment on what the film has meant to them, for Sophie a game,
for Greg, a way of being honest about himself for once. Throughout,
however, Sophie's voice and narrative predominate, casting Greg as the
fascinating but often hostile other whom she hopes to tame.
No Sex Last Night is dedicated to Calle's friend, the photographer-
novelist Hervé Guibert, who died of AIDS just before she started her
journey, and an early sequence in the film is devoted to her 'burying' him
at sea. It also has an end dedication to Chris Marker, director of La Jetée
(1962), and an important influence on the film's aesthetics. Its fragmented
narrative plays with the contrast between stasis and mobility, using a
rapid succession of still images to represent moments when the car has
stopped, and more flowing moving images when the car is on the road.
It is very richly textured, especially as there is little synchronicity between
soundtrack and image, and the soundtrack is saturated with ambient
noise. Shots of the road (often at night), the bleak January countryside,
the snow-covered desert, the tacky bars and hotels, form the backdrop
to the more suspenseful, narratively significant sequences, which docu-
ment the uncertain progress of Greg's car and the couple's progress to-
wards the wedding.
It is clear from the first that Greg cares more about the car (his 'honey')
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ROAD MOVIES
Greg Shepard and Sophie Calle at their drive-in wedding in No Sex Last
Night (1996). Supplied by and reproduced with permission from Pierre
Grise Distribution.
than about Sophie. The state of the car structures each day on the road,
and their journey repeatedly comes to a halt in order for the car to be
repaired, with multiple shots of Greg caressing it and other men (mechan-
ics) admiring it. Sophie inwardly reproaches Greg for not having sorted out
the car's problems before she arrived in New York, and keeps a tally of the
repairs, the time taken (fourteen hours one day) and the costs. Meanwhile
Greg gets angry with Sophie for not letting him have the money he needs
for the car (she herself does not mention the fact that she is paying for
everything). Though he first says no, Greg finally agrees to marry Sophie in
a drive-in wedding, and they then spend their wedding night uncomfortably
in the car, before abandoning it in Los Angeles. The film's other, related,
recurrent motif is the series of still images of the bed(s) where Sophie and
Greg spend each night, with Sophie's wistful voice-over comment, 'No sex
last night', reduced to just 'No' as the film progresses. Her inability to
arouse Greg's desire changes only after the wedding and the loss of the car
and, just as newly-married Sophie admits to feeling pleased not be an 'old
maid', so Greg admits that knowing she is his wife and that he can take
her as he pleases has enabled him to have sex.
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However, the spectator must have reservations about Sophie's motivation

in marrying Greg, which seems perverse, given that she is aware that he is
also obsessively writing to and phoning another woman (either Kate or
Hannah). The difference in their desire for one another is painfully obvious
in the way they film and talk about each other. Greg criticizes Sophie's nose
and chin and wishes he loved her more; Sophie lovingly films Greg pissing
by the roadside, wanting to record his penis for posterity. (The spectator is
often put in a position of embarrassment at knowing more about each
person's inner thoughts than their partner does.) At the same time, given
Calle's record as an artist, the spectator is inevitably led to wonder to what
extent her role as jealous mistress and overjoyed newly wed is just a perfor-
mance.13 The viewer suspects that the wedding, however 'real', takes place
to give the film an aesthetic or dramatic focus (as Greg later admits), rather
than with the intention of presenting marriage as ideologically desirable in
itself. (Indeed, Calle subsequently restages the marriage in Paris just in
order to be photographed wearing a white wedding dress.) In other words,
the experimental nature of the film's project and its self-conscious concern
with the construction of images suggest that the wedding itself is best
considered as an example of ironic, postmodern pastiche.
In this film, the road is used humorously to expose a man's obsession
with a car and a woman's obsession with a man, objects of desire which
are both patently fallible. At the same time it functions aesthetically to
allow both Calle and Shepard to transcend the difficulties of their personal
relationship through the blurring of self-expression with art and artifice.
Conclusion
There are fewer women's road movies than there are comedies, crime dra-
mas or historical films, but the road is clearly a productive area for women
directors to work in, even if there is little stylistic or thematic commonality
between their different inflections of the genre. Furthermore, a number of
them have been commercially successful, be it an auteur film like Sans toit
ni loi, a woman's film like Un weekend sur deux, or a comedy like Sac de
noeuds. What they share is the temporary or definitive abandonment of the
domestic space and, in most cases, therefore, of 'home life, marriage, em-
ployment' as experienced from a female point of view. Their nomadic road
movie heroines transgress notions of what is socially and sexually accepta-
ble for women, their occupation of the road constituting a symbolic rebel-
lion against conventional conceptions of women's space and women's
supposed 'passivity'. If one or two films depend on stereotypical represen-
tations of femininity {Signé Charlotte) and/or foreground male subjectivity
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ROAD MOVIES
(Signé Charlotte, A vendre, Le Petit prince a dit), others construct the road
as a place where anything is possible, allowing w o m e n to occupy unfamiliar
spaces where alternative ways of behaving can be explored, be it in relation
to female friendship (Sac de noeuds, Personne ne maime), motherhood
(Personne ne maime, Un weekend sur deux), the heterosexual couple (No
Sex Last Night), or women's place in contemporary society more generally
(Sans toit ni hi, A vendre).14
Significantly, these films do not rely on action heroines (apart from the
comic heroines of Sac de noeuds), nor on goal-driven, suspenseful adven-
ture narratives. 1 5 N o r do they foreground the technology of the means of
transport, except ironically, as in No Sex Last Night. Rather, their explo-
rations of interpersonal relationships on the road are marked by the recur-
rent use of fragmented, non-linear narratives and open endings, stylistic
devices which demonstrate h o w French w o m e n directors appropriate ele-
ments of popular genres for their own auteurist purposes.
Notes
1. For analyses of Thelma and Louise, see also the collection of articles entitled
'Should we go along for the ride? A critical symposium on Thelma and Louise
in Cimaste, December 1991.
2. Godard's films typically associate women with sexuality, consumerism, treach-
ery and death (see Mulvey and MacCabe, 1980).
3. Chantal Picault's L Acer oche-coeur (1987) offers another road theme, namely,
the study of an obsessive young woman pursuing her older, disaffected married
lover across France from Paris to the Còte d'Azur.
4. Blier's own 'feminine' version of Les Valseuses was Merci la vie (1991), starring
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Anouk Grinberg.
5. Love Me (2000) is the third part of Masson's 'trilogy' with Kiberlain.
6. Luigi's interview with France's rigid, conventional farming parents looks like a
parody of television reports about life in the provinces, or even Perdu de vue, a
program devoted to the investigation of missing persons.
7. France is described by one of her lovers as a 'coureuse', the word meaning both
a woman who runs and a woman who chases men, though in fact France more
often tries to run away from them.
8. Mississipi One (1992), a black-and-white feature by photographer Sarah Moon,
also uses the road to explore the relationship between adult and child, in this
instance the increasingly tender relationship between a young girl and the male
fugitive who has abducted her.
9. Cahiers du cinema called the film 'Vévénement de la rentrée1 ('the event of the
season'), and devoted several articles to its director and star.
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GENRE FILMS
10. Garcia uses a similar shot in Place Vendóme to depict the growing worries of
Vincent Malivert (see chapter 7).
11. Michèle Rosier's Pullman Paradis (1995) features a group of tourists traveling
by bus to Normandy, providing a cross-section of French society rather than a
specifically woman-centered road film.
12. It is also the theme of Nadine Trintignant's Les Fugueuses (1995).
13. Calle appears as a bride in a series of photographs entitled Double Blind (1994),
the making of which is mentioned at the end of the film.
14. Another interesting use of the road is to be found in Dominique Cabrera's
Nadia et les hippopotames (2000), which interweaves a woman's search for the
father of her baby with the overnight journey taken a by a group of strikers at
the time of the 1995 rail strikes in France.
15. Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) may prove the
exception in its representation of two young women on the road for a spree of
(hardcore) sex and murder. More typically, Princesses (Sylvie Verheyde, 2000)
uses the road to enable two half-sisters of different class backgrounds to get to
know each other in the search for their unknown father.
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CHAPTER NINE
Historical Films
Whereas comedies, crime films and road movies have traditionally been
considered male-oriented genres, the historical film has a more ambivalent
status. Feminist film theorists working on popular cinema and female spec-
tatorship have identified cycles of historical films such as Gainsborough
costume dramas in Britain and Belle Epoque films in France, which provide
specific viewing pleasures for women (Cook, 1983, Harper, 1987, Sellier,
2000). Such films combine the spectacular visual pleasures of period recon-
struction with star performances and melodramatic plots which foreground
female desire and articulate gender-related issues, even if they are usually
resolved by a return to patriarchal order. This tradition is particularly clear
in the work of Jacqueline Audry, the first commercially successful (and
critically neglected) French woman director of the postwar period. Audry's
numerous costume films, including Les Malheurs de Sophie (1946), Gigi
(1949), Minne, l'ingènue libertine (1950), Olivia (1950), Mitsou (1956), La
Garconne (1957) and Le Secret du chevalier d'Eon (1960), the last a
(relatively) big-budget film de cape et d'épée, shamelessly use their period
settings to explore female sexuality and the feminine condition. 1
A new kind of history film emerged in France after May 1968, indirectly
inspired by the work of Foucault, the New Left and the Annales school of
history (Forbes, 1992). These films challenged dominant representations of
the past by exploring the lives of ordinary people, rediscovering lost or
forgotten moments in history and giving a 'voice' to the oppressed. Second
wave feminism gave the new history a particular inflection in its desire to
retrieve and represent female voices and female narratives which had hith-
erto been 'hidden from history'. It challenged the centrality of histories of
great men in documentaries (see chapter 5), semi-autobiographical films
about the lives of girls and women (see chapter 1 ), and also in more self-
conscious art films which disrupt the pleasures of classic narrative and film
spectacle, drawing attention both to women's oppression and the construct-
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edness of history (and film). For example, Michèle Rosier's George quii
(1973) interjects the present in the past in a theatrical, distancing style,
using the figure of George Sand (played by Anne Wiazemsky, the star of
Jean-Luc Godard's ha Chinoise, 1967) to support the struggle for women's
rights in the 1970s. Liliane de Kermadec's dark, slow-moving Aloi'se (1974)
draws attention to the solitude and alienation of Aloi'se Porrax, a misunder-
stood, temperamental artist (played as a young woman by Isabelle Huppert
and as an older woman by Delphine Seyrig), who was interned for 40 years
in a psychiatric hospital until her death at the age of 78 in 1964. Marguerite
Duras's India Song (1975) uses a languorous, poetic narrative, organized
around the suicidal despair of the fictional Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine
Seyrig) to evokes colonial malaise.2 In contrast, theater director Ariane
Mnouchkine (born 1939) demonstrated that women could also handle big-
budget historical spectaculars by following up her filmed version of 1789
(1974), the Theatre du Soleil's widely acclaimed play about the French
Revolution, with Molière (1978). Molière, a historical fresco visually in-
spired by seventeenth century paintings, is an exciting four-hour epic based
on the life and times of the seventeenth century actor-dramatist and
his company of actors. It was chosen to represent France at Cannes and
was hugely successful at the box office (attracting over two million specta-
tors).
One of the most significant developments in popular French cinema of
the 1980s has been the form of historical film identified as 'heritage cin-
ema'. As defined by Higson (1993), Vincendeau (1995) and others, heritage
cinema draws on the adaptation of literary classics or other aspects of the
nation's historical and cultural heritage to produce a sense of national
identity through the nostalgic pleasures of period reconstruction. Arguably
the sumptuous image tracks and 'museum aesthetic' of such films work to
absorb the impact of what might otherwise be troubling narratives, and so
offer escape from the anxieties of the present into a more colorful, less
complicated past, where everyone knows their place. In France, heritage
cinema has been typified by a series of period films starring Gerard Depar-
dieu, including Danton (1982), Fort Saganne (1984), Jean de Florette
(1986), Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Germinal (1993), which privilege
the male rather than the female, and narratives of action as much as the
exploration of emotions. Indeed, Austin goes so far as to suggest that it is
unusual for the French heritage film to incorporate elements of melodrama
(Austin, 1996: 150), while Powrie identifies the 1980s 'nostalgia film' spe-
cifically with 'the crisis of masculinity' (Powrie, 1998). However, there are
signs of a growing feminization of the genre in the 1990s, not least because
of the appearance of a series of films directed by women which focus on
the lives of famous women, discussed below. Their foregrounding of female
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H I S T O R I C A L FILMS
protagonists raises questions about the extent to which women's histories

interrogate dominant understandings of national heritage.
Rather than opting for the mainstream heritage genre, most women di-
rectors have continued making relatively low-budget historical films based
on childhood memories and family histories (as discussed in Part One).
Among these are a number of films which are set in the colonies or evoke
the Algerian War, their 'soft', domestic topics contrasting with the 'hard',
military male-authored accounts of colonialism identified by Frederic
Strauss (1990: 30). These films are not just nostalgic period pieces, but to
varying degrees provide a critique of French colonialism and racism from a
child's or woman's point of view. The term 'historical film' is thus deployed
here to embrace a range of films which have in common a setting in the
past. They are subdivided first into growing-up films set in France's former
colonies (or elsewhere outside metropolitan France), and films which ex-
plore the impact of the Algerian War, then into costume dramas centered
on women's history within metropolitan France, and female biopics.
Colonialism, race and childhood
Austin has argued that, 'What seems to characterize women's representa-

tions of colonialism is a critical perspective, but on a personal or domestic
rather than a historical or epic scale' (Austin 1996: 94). Certainly, women's
films about growing up in the colonies would seem to bear out this judge-
ment. These films center on the (relatively) innocent child, who is normally
marginalized by his/her disadvantaged position within the family and soci-
ety at large, but whose experiences bring a critical point of view to bear on
the adult world which allows the mechanisms of colonialism and racism to
be perceived. They include Euzhan Palcy's box office hit, Rue Case-Nègres
(1983), set among the sugar cane workers in Martinique in 1930, and two
semi-autobiographical fictions, Claire Denis's highly acclaimed Chocolat
(1988), set in Cameroon in 1957, and Marie-France Pisier's Le Bai du
gouverneur (1990), set in New Caledonia, also in 1957. Two more recent
films (not discussed here), Quelque part vers Conakry (Franchise Ebrard,
1993), winner of the Camera d'or at Cannes in 1992, and Le Voyage de
Babà (Christine Eymeric, made in 1992 but not distributed until 1994), are
both set in West Africa in the early 1970s immediately after independence.
They focus on the interethnic relationships between French and African
children as a way of criticising the after-effects of French colonialism and
the ways in which racism distorts human relationships. In a slightly differ-
ent vein, Yolande Zauberman's first feature, Moi Ivan, toi Abraham (1993),
selected for the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes, moves away from
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G E N R E FILMS
semi-autobiographical fictions and colonial settings, and tackles the rise of

anti-Semitism in Europe through a drama set amid a Jewish community in
Poland in the 1930s.3
Rue Cases-Nègres/Black Shack Alley was the first feature to be directed
by Euzhan Palcy (born 1957), a black woman filmmaker from Martinique
who, angry at the lack of representations of black people on television,
wrote and directed La Messagère (1974), the first television drama to
address life in Martinique with an all-black cast speaking creole (Lejeune,
1987: 181). After training at the Vaugirard Film School in Paris, in 1981
Palcy received the avance sur recettes for Rue Cases-Nègres (an adaptation
of Joseph Zobel's 1950 novel), the first time it had been awarded to a
Caribbean filmmaker. While seeking a producer, she also made a highly
successful short film in Martinique, L'Atelier du diable (1981), about the
relationship between a young boy and an old man.
Rue Cases-Nègres begins with a montage of sepia-tinted postcards of
Martinique in the early 1930s, introducing an element of nostalgia for the
past but at the same time clearly addressing a black audience (there are no
whites). The film is dedicated to 'all the Black Shack Alleys around the
world', and constructs a vivid portrait of a poverty-stricken community of
sugarcane plantation workers, interweaving folkloric scenes of village life
with scenes of protest at the workers' exploitation by the white béké colo-
nialists. The film is focalized from the point of view (and occasional voice-
over) of José (Garry Cadenat), a twelve-year-old boy who is being brought
up by his larger than life grandmother, Amantine (an award-winning, pipe
smoking performance by Darling Legitimus), and given spiritual and polit-
ical guidance by his emaciated neighbor, wise old Monsieur Medouze
(Douta Seek). Medouze instills in José an awareness of his lost African
roots and a sense of the injustices of black history, while Amantine looks
to the future by encouraging him pursue his formal schooling, and leaves
the plantation to fund his secondary school education by taking in washing
in the shantytown of Fort-de-France (the Martiniquan capital). There is a
gentle mockery of France's mission civilisatrice ('civilizing mission') in that
José's path to success lies in learning about French prefectures and alpine
glaciers, but it is his essay on the exploitation of black people that eventu-
ally wins him a full scholarship and enables Amantine to stop working.
The film ends, rather sentimentally, with Amantine's death back in Rue
cases-nègres and José about to embark on his new life in the city, taking his
memories with him.
The visual pleasures of period reconstruction, evident in the evocation of
white colonial life in the city, are mitigated by the fact that events are
glimpsed from José's naive but critical point of view. The harshness of the
colonial regime and its attendant racism is particularly evident in the case
254
of Leopold, José's half-caste friend, whose dying father (an aristocratic

white landowner) refuses to hand on his name to his son, and who ends up
being brutally punished for trying to steal the plantation accounts and
prove corruption. But its pernicious effects on black consciousness are also
evident in the way the cinema cashier has internalized prejudices against
blacks and José's older friend Carmen is satisfied with becoming a gigolo.
The film's condemnation of colonialism and its effects is nevertheless tem-
pered through the emphasis on the strength and cohesion of the collectivity
of Rue Cases-Nègres and through José's own coming-of-age narrative
which demonstrates, paradoxically, that the acquisition of French education
and culture can provide an empowering tale of personal survival.
Rue Cases-Nègres won the Silver Lion at Venice and enjoyed an immense
success, both in France and abroad. Palcy herself was then enticed to
America to direct A Dry White Season (1989), a star-studded film about
apartheid in South Africa. Her third film, Simeon (1992), features a return
to Martinican culture with a black cast and a good-humored, whimsical
fantasy about a little girl who manages to capture the spirit of a dead
musician, enabling him to inspire her father and his fellow musicians with
the energy and spirit of authentic Martinican music. (The cast includes a
number of well-known black performers, including the Martinican group,
Kassav.) Although it is not a historical film, Simeon stresses the need for
France's postcolonial ethnic minorities to reclaim a distinctive heritage in
relation to white metropolitan culture.4
Another critical approach to French colonialism is to be found in Cho-
colate the first film to be directed by Claire Denis (born 1948), who had
worked for some fifteen years as an assistant to directors as diverse as
Costa-Gavras and Jacques Rivette, and was assistant director to Wim Wen-
ders and Jim Jarmusch. Chocolat, based in part on her memories of
growing up in Cameroon, went on to achieve international success. The
film's symbolic function is clearly indicated by the name of its (white)
central protagonist, France (played as a young woman by Mireille Perrier),
whose return to Cameroon in 1980 to revisit the house where she grew up
provides the framing narrative for a long flashback set in 1957. As she
travels along the dusty roads with two anonymous black figures, father and
son, who have given her a lift, her memories take over. The image dissolves
into shots of a different vehicle and a different countryside, and herself as
a little girl, aged about eight (played by Cécile Ducasse), sitting in the back
of the truck with the family's black houseboy, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé).
The film traces the development of her complex relationship with Protée,
from playful intimacy to the moment when, banned from the house by
France's mother, Aimée (Giulia Boschi), Protée exacts his revenge by caus-
ing both himself and France to burn the palms of their hands on the hot
255
GENRE FILMS
A colonial childhhood: France (Cécile Ducasse) and Protée (Isaach de Ban-

kolé) in Chocolat (1988). Supplied by and reproduced with permission
pipe of the generator.5 The framing narrative returns to France's car journey
and her conversation with the driver, an African-American disillusioned
with his own search for his roots, who advises France to go home. The film
ends with a shot of a plane taking off, leaving behind a group of African
airport workers, chatting and laughing, blithely unconcerned about
whether they are being looked at or not, in charge of their own affairs and
'free' of French colonialism. There is a humorous visual rhyming between
the start of France's memories, when Protée and the Deputy Governor,
France's father Marc (Francois Cluzet), take a leak together by the side of
the road, and the final shot in which the anonymous Africans do likewise,
backs to the camera, the white colonist having been evacuated from the
frame.
Much of the film's interest depends on the way it questions colonial
relationships by deconstructing the relationship between looking and being
looked at. The object of the male gaze in classic cinema has conventionally
been female, but ethnic others have also been feminized and mastered by a
256
eurocentric gaze. Chocolat calls into question traditional relations of look-

ing by allowing both the little girl and, occasionally, Protée to be the subject
of the look. Thus the spectator is invited to sympathize with Protée's ago-
nized humiliation when he thinks he has been seen by Aimée and France
taking a shower in the servants' quarters, a scene influenced by Denis's
reading of Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks (Kaplan, 1997: 168). Protée's
presence and strength contrast with Marc's absence and weakness (he leaves
the bungalow in Protée's care while he goes off on an expedition into the
bush) and narrative tension is generated by the exchange of looks between
handsome, dignified Protée and beautiful, frustrated Aimée.6 However, his
impossible, subaltern position is highlighted by the arrival of Luc, an un-
conventional white man who takes up residence in the bungalow along
with other whites whose plane has crashed in the region. Luc willfully
goads Protée by his ability to cross the boundaries between white and
black, colonizer and colonized (a form of transgression which is not avail-
able to the colonized other). But although Protée throws Luc out of the
house, he is unable to respond when Aimée makes an advance to him.
Though he is reluctant to be owned and objectified, he cannot just simply
assume freedom and subjectivity, though the film perhaps opens up the
possibility that he should.
Denis explicitly refuses a lush setting for Chocolat which would play into
nostalgia for an exotic, imperialist past. Instead the mise-en-scène demon-
strates the desperate attempts of the white colonialists to impose order on
the land they have appropriated (in the bungalow, in the row of stones
outside, in the construction of an airstrip), and to maintain a eurocentric
racial hierarchy. It also shows how that order is breaking down. The ser-
vants' polite bemusement at the visit of an English colonel highlights the
absurdity of colonial rule, the hidden presence in the bungalow of the
French planter's black mistress/housekeeper reveals its hypocrisy, the need
for blacks to rescue the crashed plane demonstrates its fragility, and the
degeneration of the relationship between Protée and France shows that it
will not be overthrown without people being hurt. The framing narrative
also prevents the spectator from being seduced by the representation of a
closed-off past. It opens up a critical perspective on the significance of
France's personal (and symbolic) drama, as well as alerting the spectator to
the ways in which the experiences of a colonial childhood still inform the
adult's expectations, assumptions and desires.
Marie-France Pisier (born 1944), a feminist actress who made her acting
debut with Francois Truffaut, also drew on her own colonial background
for her very successful 1984 novel, Le Bai du gouverneur, which she then
adapted and directed as her first feature film. Le Bai du gouverneur/The
Governor's Party differs from Chocolat not just in its setting (New Cale-
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donia is still a TOM attached to France), but in the age and status of its
central protagonist and its more conventional growing-up narrative. It in-
terweaves two parallel narrative strands, the intimate friendship between
teenager Thea Forestier (Vanessa Wagner) and her school friend Isabelle
Demur (Edwige Navarro), and Thea's awareness of the fact that her mother,
Marie (Kristin Scott-Thomas), is having an affair with the doctor (Laurent
Grevill) who tended to her when she fell from her horse riding alone along
the beach one morning. The two narrative strands come to a head on the
day of the climactic Governor's party, which is being held to mark the
change in status of the colony to a TOM, and the replacement of the
Governor by a High Commissioner. Thea discovers that Isabelle's family is
about to leave the island, and she reacts by sabotaging the lighthouse due
to bring the liner, The Resurgence, into port, and transferring her affections
to a young man, Jean-Baptiste, who becomes her lover. Thea's father, the
Deputy Governor (Jacques Sereys), orders his wife to put an end to the
scandal by slapping the doctor at the party, but she gets drunk and only
does so when the doctor himself tells her that their affair is not serious.
The party simultaneously marks the end of the mother's affair, Thea's loss
of her virginity, and the end of an era. Yet at the same time the ending also
suggests that nothing has really changed: TOM is just a word, literally the
word 'MOT' reflected off the packing cases in the harbor water.
If the film offers a critique of the colonial regime, it is primarily through
the role of Thea's father, an exceptionally harsh, authoritarian figure, who
deals roughly with his family. He hits his son when he misbehaves, and
sacks the lighthouse keeper for political reasons, even though Thea con-
fesses her responsibility for the damage. The Kanaks are present primarily
to provide local color, like the little scamps peering in through the windows
of the department store and making fun of the French preparations for the
arrival of the Commissioner. There is a critique of racism in the scene when
Thea and Isabelle are shocked by the doctor's intimacy with the daughter
of the Kanak household he is visiting, and a hint of political unrest when
the maid's brother protests about the Kanaks being deprived of alcohol
prior to the Commissioner's visit. But the political situation is not addressed
as explicitly as in the novel, which details the exploitation of the Kanak
nickel workers and the involvement of the Kanak servants in a plot to
demonstrate against the new Commissioner.
The film draws on the conventional pleasures of costume drama with its
period reconstruction and lush, brightly-lit scenery (shot on location). It is
also explicitly concerned with exploring active female sexuality and desire,
as in Thea's knowing humiliation of Jean-Baptiste before agreeing to make
love, or Marie's flaunting of her perfect, naked body. Whereas in Chocolat
costume is used to highlight racial tension, as when Aimée asks Protée to
258
help her do up her evening dress, in Le Bai du gouverneur Marie's dressing

for the ball merely illustrates her frustrated, problematic relationship with
her husband. Though Le Bai du gouverneur draws attention to the deca-
dence of the colonial regime through its dysfunctional colonial family, it
barely touches on the question of colonial power relations, as in the more
provocative Chocolat. It does, however, provide a lively portrait of an
intelligent, rebellious adolescent girl.
Documentary filmmaker Yolande Zauberman drew on her origins as the
daughter of an immigrant Polish Jewish family for her innovative first
feature, Moi Ivan, tot Abraham/Ivan and Abraham, which provides an
oblique purchase on European history in the years leading up to the holo-
caust. Shot on location in the Ukraine with a cast of unknown, mostly
amateur actors, using black-and-white filmstock, the film reconstructs the
suspicions and tensions of life in a shtetl somewhere on the borders of
Poland in the 1930s. Its use of mysterious voices on the soundtrack and
dialogue in Yiddish but also in Polish, Russian and Romany, enhances the
film's poetic quality while creating a distancing effect which invites specta-
tors to become aware of their ethnic otherness in relation to the events
portrayed.
The film centers on two young boys, Abraham, a Jew (actually played by
Roma Alexandrovitch, a young tzigane), and Ivan, a goy, an apprentice in
the shtetl (Aleksandr Yakovlev), whose friendship is threatened by the
decision of Abraham's patriarchal grandfather, Nachman (Rolan Bykor), a
moneylender, to remove his grandson from Ivan's influence. The boys defy
Nachman by running away together, only to encounter other forms of
menace, particularly as Abraham, having cut off his locks and put on one
of Ivan's jumpers, is mistaken for a tzigane. Their flight is mirrored by that
of Aaron, a young Jewish Communist who has escaped from prison and is
wanted by the police, and Abraham's sister, Rachel, who has got herself cut
off from her family in order to be with Aaron. (Stubborn, strong-minded
Rachel provides a feminist perspective on the traditional Jewish family,
refusing to marry the man her grandfather has chosen for her, and letting
her father think, wrongly, that she is no longer a virgin.) Once Aaron has
found Abraham and persuaded him to go home, the runaway couple speed
on their way, intending to emigrate to the United States. However, Abra-
ham and Ivan return to the shtetl to find Abraham's house burnt to the
ground and his family dead, presumably at the hands of the anti-Semitic
rabble who had earlier (wrongly) blamed his grandfather for the disappear-
ance of the local aristocratic landowner and the loss of their jobs and land.
The film ends on a freeze frame of Ivan attempting to comfort Abraham,
an image of interethnic solidarity in childhood which contrasts with the
treacherous behavior of the ignorant, superstitious, poverty-stricken adults.
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GENRE FILMS
Abraham (Roma Alexandrovitch) in hiding in Moi Ivan, toi Abraham

(1993). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permission from Hachette Pre-
mière, (C) Benoit Barbier.
Moi Ivan, toi Abraham has little in common with the mainstream,
commercially-oriented heritage genre. In addition to its elliptical narrative
structure and the edginess of its editing, it derives a haunting, poetic quality
from its black-and-white photography and its meticulous documentation of
(and mourning for) a world that has since disappeared. Big close-ups of
individual faces are shot for their aesthetic value rather than for their role
within the narrative (recalling Eisenstein's attention to physiognomy). Alter-
natively, the camera lingers on shots of people in groups, particularly old
people (as in the scenes of Aaron arriving at an inn, the Jewish community
at prayer, or the Polish peasants expressing their fear of a stranger). The
boys, too, are shot in imaginative ways, as in the pre-credit sequence of
Ivan and Abraham's faces as they compare circumcised and uncircumcised
penises, and the scenes of Abraham riding a horse and later tending it in
the stable by feeding it with hay from his own mouth. But the film's concern
with the aesthetics of the image does not detract from its dramatization of
the effects of racism and the stark choices facing the Jews between fleeing
Poland or remaining to face death and destruction.
Two of these growing-up films focus on the privileged daughters of white
French colonizers, two on children whose ethnicity makes them a target of
racism. Chocolat and Le Bai du gouverneur differ in that the latter's focus
on the daughter's coming-of-age experiences provides a largely eurocentric
260
perspective on French colonial life. The former uses the daughter's perspec-
tive as both child and adult to identify the problematic and painful relation-
ships between colonizers and colonized and raises questions about the
legitimacy of French colonial rule. Rue Cases-Nègres and Moi Ivan, toi
Abraham differ in that the former offers a heartwarming narrative of a
young Martiniquan boy's coming-of-age within and despite a racist colonial
French society, whereas the latter spins into tragedy, taking its Jewish and
goy child protagonists on a journey towards cataclysmic horror at an epic
moment in European history.7 The classic narrative forms of Le Bai du
gouverneur and Rue Cases-Nègres, which are enhanced for metropolitan
spectators by the visual pleasures of period reconstruction and exotic loca-
tions, contrast with the more demanding, distancing techniques of Chocolat
and Moi Ivan, toi Abraham. Taken as a group, however, it is clear that,
despite their differences, women directors have made productive use of
historical dramas involving child or adolescent protagonists to challenge
conventional representations of French colonial and European history.
Colonialism, race and the Algerian war
Mainstream French representations of the decolonization of the Maghreb

have (like colonial films more generally) been dominated by male-centered
concerns, whether in war films such as Cher Frangin (Gerard Mordillat,
1989) or documentaries such as Bertrand Taverniere La Guerre sans nom
(1992).8 Two women's films provide an alternative woman-centered ap-
proach to the Algerian War (1954-1962), namely Outremer (Brigitte
Roùan, 1990) and Sous les pieds des femmes (Rachida Krim, 1997), both
of which are indebted to the memories and experiences of the daughter-
filmmakers' exiled mothers, one a pied noir, the other an Algerian immi-
grant.
Outremer/Overseas is the first feature to be directed by actress Brigitte
Roùan, who won a Cesar for La Grosse (1986), a short film written while
she was pregnant, about an out-of-work actress who prostitutes herself for
the price of the Actor's Guild minimum wage. Outremer explores the tragic
effects of the Algerian War on the lives of three adult pied noir sisters, Zon
(Nicole Garcia), Malène (played by Roùan herself) and Gritte (Marianne
Basler). It draws critically on Roùan's own family background (she was
brought up in a military pied noir family and her father, a naval officer,
went missing in action in Algeria), and is dedicated to her mother, who
provided the inspiration for Zon. Set mostly during the 1950s (and shot in
Tunisia because of the problematic situation in Algeria), it opens with a
dreamlike montage sequence which foregrounds a shot of barbed wire
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GENRE FILMS
against a blue sky, symbolizing the violence of the colonial regime and, as
a boat pulls away leaving a woman behind, the barrier it erects between
men and women as well as between colonizer and colonized. Its tripartite
structure cuts from one sister's story to the next, each separated by a fade
to white, but linked by the way each returns to, and sheds new light on,
some of the same incidents (in particular, a dance at which the sisters arrive
in a private plane piloted by Zon). This structure not only foregrounds
loyalties between the sisters but also allows their differences in age and
attitude to represent the changes in the attitudes of the pieds noirs towards
the land and people they once thought were theirs.
The first section focuses on Zon, the most traditional of the sisters, an
immensely sensual woman who suppresses her desires in order to be a
dutiful wife and mother. She embodies the leisured, insulated colonial life-
style, wishing only to keep things as they are, and pushing her husband,
Paul, to remain in the Navy even when he starts to fear for his 'nerves'.
Her bigotry is hidden under an elegant, self-righteous facade, but is hinted
at when she tells her daughter that the Arabs are not really her brothers,
even though they may be brothers in Christ. When Paul is reported missing
presumed dead, it becomes clear that the grief-stricken Zon, who was
thought to be pregnant, is actually terminally ill with stomach cancer, her
imminent death symbolic of the dying, colonial regime. In the second sec-
tion, Malène, a small, harried woman married to a charming but effete
man who always has his head in a book, has taken over the running of
their farm. She supervises (with her manager) the wine-making and the
Arab workers, and, as Naomi Greene argues (1996: 115), successfully
represses her awareness of the terrible social injustices perpetrated by the
colonial regime. Despite her determination to protect 'her' property as the
guerilla activity increases (she patrols the land with a gun, while the villa is
surrounded with barbed wire and guarded by the army), Malène is am-
bushed and shot dead while driving into town. It is left to the third section
and the very different experiences of Gritte to offer a glimmer of hope for
communication and understanding between the French and the Algerians.
Gritte, a nurse, values her independence and keeps putting off her marriage,
apparently unconsciously resisting male and colonial control (she reacts to
her fiance's patriarchal discourse by vomiting). Dragged off to assist a
wounded fellagha in the Arab district, she becomes passionately involved
with a mysterious, silent Arab whom she saves from being tracked down
by the Army, but who is later shot dead by the men guarding Malène's
villa. An epilogue set in 1964 at Gritte's wedding in Paris (to a man who
does not appear to camera) stops short of hearing Gritte pronounce her
vows. Instead, the camera pans up to the stained glass window and a vision
262
of the two dead sisters laughing down at her, an image of the past which
literally suspends and puts in question her attempt to start a new life.
Outremer is problematic as a (post)colonial film in that it foregrounds
the points of view of three privileged white women and marginalizes the
voices and experiences of the Algerians themselves, refusing to address 'the
most troubling and guilty zones of the past' (Greene: 116). (A similar
criticism can be made of Le Bai du gouverneur.) Arguably, its nostalgic
reconstruction of the costumes and lifestyles of the colonizers is a form of
mourning for the loss of the colonial era, though one which emphasizes the
weakness of the men and the strength of the women. On the other hand,
its innovative handling of time, including its use of abrupt cuts and cryptic
images, disrupts the conventional visual pleasures of heritage cinema. Fur-
thermore, the film's changing perspective on the Arabs, however marginal-
ized they are, gives it an important political and historical dimension. From
being peripheral to Zon's story and objects of exploitation and fear in
Malène's, in Gritte's they are represented for the first time as victims of the
colonial regime, as freedom fighters and, more problematically perhaps, as
objects of desire. Outremer's subjective account of the sisters' material and
geographical losses and displacements (and their own peripheral relation-
ship with events) is thus organized in such a way as to produce a critical
understanding of the need for the end of empire.
Sous les pieds des femmes/Where Women Tread is the first feature film
written and directed by painter Rachida Krim (born 1955), whose highly
regarded first short film, El Fatha (1992), depicts in a sensuous, painterly
style the rituals of an Algerian wedding. Sous les pieds des femmes, in
contrast, takes a more obviously political topic. The original screenplay
developed out of interviews with Krim's mother (whom Krim knew to have
been in prison when she herself was a small child) and other Algerian
women who had taken part in the struggle for independence in France.9
The film tells the story of a shy, illiterate young immigrant, Aya (Fejria
Deliba), already married with children, who becomes heavily involved in
the FLN resistance after her husband, Moncef, agrees to give shelter to his
cell leader, Amin.10 The history of the period is recounted, not through a
straightforward linear narrative, but rather through flashbacks evoked from
the point of view of Aya in the present (played by Claudia Cardinale), and
accompanied by her voice-over. Still living in France and married to Mon-
cef, and now a fond grandmother, Aya is forced to confront her past when
Amin, who had returned to Algeria after independence, comes to visit, their
first contact in thirty-five years. The rather theatrical framing narrative,
which takes place over the course of twenty-four hours, is punctuated by
lengthy shots of the withdrawn, anguished Aya contemplating in the mirror
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the reflection of her heavily made-up, westernized face, expressive of the

loss of her Algerian identity.
The more dynamic flashback scenes to Aya's troubled relationship with
Amin serve two purposes. First they document Aya's trajectory as an FLN
activist, from serving coffee to collecting subscriptions (an activity which
takes her out into the street where she witnesses a brutal police raid), to
transporting arms and, disguised as a French woman (Rose Benoit), carry-
ing out an assassination on the French officer who had uncovered the
FLN network. Second, they chart her growing critique of the FLN's at-
titude towards women and sexuality, from her horror at the FLN cell's
decision to execute a couple of adulterous lovers, Farid and Ai'ssa, to her
realization that Amin himself is unable to accept her as a liberated, Al-
gerian woman and that, therefore, the revolution she has fought for will
not take place. Amin's disappearance from her life dates from the moment
when she refuses to lower her eyes to him any more, after he has rejected
her for wearing a magnificent Algerian dress. (Her attempt to show him
that the French have not destroyed all aspects of Algerian culture si-
multaneously underlines the transformation of her own identity.) The final
flashbacks provide a brief critique of French colonialism by recalling her
imprisonment, torture, trial and sentencing, but more importantly, they
record her inner despair at the loss of Amin and Algeria. The return to
the framing narrative allows her partly to redeem this loss by persuading
Amin, whose own son has become an Islamic fundamentalist, to listen to
her critique of the past and of the way women are treated in Algeria
today. Amin finally acknowledges that 'Where women tread lies truth', a
re-working of the more conventional Arabic proverb, 'Where mothers
tread lies paradise', which explains the film's title. By the end, then, Aya
is able to renounce her mourning for an impossible, forever lost Algeria,
move into the outside world, and look to the future and the possibility
of change.
Sous les pieds des femmes appeared at the same time as Yamina Bengui-
gui's Memoires d'immigrés (discussed in chapter 5), showing a similar de-
sire to transmit the history and memory of first generation immigrants, but
focusing on the political activism absent from Benguigui's film. It is also a
more obviously woman-centered film, constructing a complex, active hero-
ine who challenges stereotypical representations of Algerian wives and
mothers. It demonstrates solidarity between women in its final image of
three generations of Algerian women settled in France and in its evocation
of French women assisting Aya in the political struggle. However it has not
been a commercial success, due perhaps to its wordiness, its at times
wooden direction, and its casting (there is little physical similarity between
Cardinale and Deliba). Nevertheless, it is notable as the first full-length
264
Three generations of women of Algerian origin in Sous les pieds des fem-
mes (1997). (C) S. Raymond/MPA.
feature by a woman of Algerian origin, and one which infuses a period love
story, an action movie and a psychological drama with a political, feminist
analysis.11
Both Outremer and Sous les pieds des femmes use a fragmented narrative
structure to represent their histories of the Algerian War, a device which
distances them from straightforward, commercial period dramas. Outre-
mer's tripartite structure encourages a prismatic, shifting perspective on
events which, though dramatized from the points of view of the privileged
white settlers, also displays the inevitability and Tightness of the end of
empire. Sous les pieds des femmes' complex framing narrative makes its
critique of the past more explicit, and deliberately refuses nostalgia for a
past which is informed by patriarchal discourses which the heroine cannot
control. In each case, the films foreground women's experiences and points
of view, demonstrating the active roles played by women, whether as colo-
nizers (including the pro-Algerian Gritte) or as immigrant insurgents. Their
fractured family dramas demonstrate the inadequacy of men in both the
familial and (if more obliquely) the public arena, and they both take issue
in their different ways with authoritative, male-centered historical perspec-
tives on the war years.
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G E N R E FILMS
Costume drama and women's history
With the exception of Rue Cases-Nègres, a literary adaptation, the films

discussed so far have largely been inspired by women's personal or family
memories and experiences. Few women's films tackle more conventional
forms of period drama, perhaps in part because women are still rarely
trusted with the large budgets such dramas require. Nevertheless, this ab-
sence is still surprising, given women's successful record in making histori-
cal drama series for television, ranging from Nina Companeez's Les Dames
de la Cote (1979), a history of World War One seen from women's points
of view, and UAllée des wis (1996), a rewriting of the life and times of
Louis XIV focusing on Mme de Maintenon (Dominique Blanc), to Josée
Dayan's Rivière Espérance (1995), a nineteenth century family saga center-
ing on life on the river Dordogne at Souillac, and her high profile collabo-
ration with Gerard Depardieu on Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, (1998),
Balzac (1999) and Les Miserables (2000). Two feature films which appro-
priate the genre (in addition to the biopics discussed below) are Le Moine
et la sorcière (Suzanne Schiffman, 1987) and Le Comptoir (Sophie Tatis-
cheff, 1998), both directed by women making their first feature after a long
career in other roles and both inspired by popular feminism in their focus
on a woman's story (though neither enjoyed box-office success).
Suzanne Schiffman (born 1929) is best known for her collaboration with
Francois Truffaut, but she was also an assistant on Rivette's Paris nous
appartient and a continuity girl for Godard until 1968. It was only after
Truffaut's death in 1984 that Pamela Berger, an American historian, ap-
proached her with the idea of collaborating on a film based on the diary of
Etienne de Bourbon, a former Inquisitor. However, Le Moine et la sorcière/
The Monk and the Witch is influenced less by New Wave filmmaking
techniques than by the heritage aesthetic of other films of the 1980s set in
the Middle Ages, like Le Retour de Martin Guerre (Daniel Vigne, 1982)
and Le Nom de la rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986). In particular, it
foregrounds the 'authenticity' of its picturesquely reconstructed medieval
costumes and settings.
Le Moine et la sorcière is set in 1293 in a village somewhere near Lyons
(shot in the Limousin). Its narrative concerns the disruption of village life
brought about by the arrival of an Inquisitor (Tcheky Karyo) who is deter-
mined to root out heresy. The Inquisitor is indifferent both to the insistence
of the local priest (Jean Carmet) that the villagers are godfearing people,
and to the villagers' own claims that the real threat to their lives comes
from the Count, the local landlord, who has diverted water from their land.
The film focuses on his confrontation with Elda, a 'woman of the forest'
(Christine Boisson), who has powers of healing. The sexually repressed
266
Inquisitor is disturbed by her beauty (a few brief flashbacks indicate that

he is haunted by his past traumatic encounter with a woman) and discon-
certed because he cannot find fault with her lucid (and ecologically sound)
descriptions of the healing powers to be found in nature. Fearful of being
accused of cowardice, the Inquisitor decides to denounce Elda for heresy
when he discovers her assisting a village woman who thinks her sick baby
will be cured by Saint-Guinefort. (The pre-credit sequence establishes the
basis for the local, presumably heretical cult of Saint-Guinefort, a dog who
saved a baby's life only to be killed by its uncomprehending master.) How-
ever, he is thrown into disarray when his past returns in the shape of the
daughter of the woman he had raped as a youth, who joins forces with
Elda, and the priest finally persuades him to recognize his error and retract
his denunciation.
The film attempts to address the phenomenon of the Inquisition and its
persecution of women by attributing the Inquisitor's antagonism to sexual
repression and remoteness from the world, and grounding the powers of
the 'witch' in alternative medicine rather than superstition or witchcraft.
But its period look fails to mask its weak, schematic characterization,
dialogue and plot, which divides the world into powerful men with per-
verse, deathly powers (the Count, the Inquisitor) and ordinary women with
life-enhancing powers (mothers and healers). It may aim to critique the
powers of church and state and make a case for the superiority of women's
down-to-earth practical knowledge as against that of the blinkered church-
man and vengeful aristocrat. However, its male-centered narrative (Elda is
mostly perceived from the point of view of the Inquisitor or the priest) and,
more seriously, its improbable happy ending (which unites the women) do
little justice to the history of women who were actually put to death as
'witches'.
Le Comptoir/Marie's Counter (1998), a first film by Sophie Tatischeff,
the daughter of Jacques Tati (and editor of Coline Serreau's first films), is
rather different in tone, though its visual pleasures also derive from the
picturesque reconstruction of village life. Instead of a life and death struggle
of ideologies, however, it traces the history of a remote Breton village from
the arrival of electricity through World War One, the Popular Front and
the German Occupation to the 1970s. It does so ostensibly through the
history of a wooden bar counter but actually through the more melodra-
matic history of Marie (Mireille Perrier), who runs the bar, and Jean (Chris-
tophe Odent), whose father made the counter, and whose unrequited love
for Marie structures the various episodes. A distancing effect is achieved
through the use of a framing narrative set in 1975, which begins with the
sale of the contents of Marie's bar (with Marie played by Perrier aged by
an unconvincing wig). The counter is bought by a young Parisian woman,
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G E N R E FILMS
Joèlle (played by singer Maurane), who invites people out to the farm at La
Pointe to see it, and the villagers, thinking it must still be a bar, arrive for
an evening's drinking. The assembled community provides the context for
the flashbacks and ultimately for bringing the elderly Jean and Marie to-
gether again. At the end, after Marie has shown the counter's new owner
how to get rid of the revelers, she appears to be about to fulfil her childhood
dream of leaving for Brest. Instead the film cuts to a 'happy ending', with
Jean finding her in their old, private meeting-place beside the sea.
Le Comptoir's first flashback shows Marie and Jean meeting as children,
when little Marie, the headstrong daughter of the woman running the bar,
drives off in Jean's father's horse and cart. Subsequent flashbacks then chart
the circumstances which tie her to the village: her failed marriage with
Pierre, Jean's cousin, her taking over the bar from her mother and her
relationship with other men, including her friendship with Jean. The film
offers a sassy history of a strong, independent, childless working-class
woman who is attractive to men and who is not afraid of tackling danger
and responsibility. But it also undermines that story by overlaying it with a
sentimental, romantic subplot, which tends to prioritize Jean's feelings and
reactions to events. At the same time it signals the impact of history and
modernity on village life primarily through a series of picturesque recon-
struction of Breton costumes, agricultural machinery and bar interiors,
leaving the spectator with nostalgic glimpses of the past rather than an
understanding of how people's lives have been affected by socio-economic
and political change. Nevertheless, the choice of 1975 for the framing
narrative invites the spectator to reflect on shifts in women's lives since the
sexual revolution of the 1960s and the beginning of the women's move-
ment.
Both Le Moine et la sorcière and Le Comptoir take issue with conven-
tional representations of the past, the first by engaging (if inadequately)
with a feminist perspective on the role of the Inquisition, the second by
focusing a history of the twentieth century on a relatively ordinary woman.
Each has a potentially empowering narrative concerning a childless, inde-
pendent woman survivor whose lifestyle challenges normative representa-
tions of women's lives as wives and mothers. Elda literally lives outside
society and, however unconvincingly, successfully resists both church and
state in her assertion of her 'feminine' powers, Marie lives by her own rules
within the constraints of village life. Yet their histories are narrated at a
distance, perceived primarily from a male point of view (even though the
male protagonists prove to be the weaker characters), and overlaid with
sentimentalism, be it for solidarity between suffering women or for hetero-
sexual romance. Nevertheless, whereas Le Moine et la sorcière's (poorly
executed) classic narrative and heritage aesthetic betray a rather simplistic
268
version of the past, Le Comptoir's fragmented narrative allows some space

for a reflection on social change.
Female biopics
Although women characters have become increasingly prominent in male-

authored costume dramas of the late 1980s and 1990s (like Regis Warg-
nier's Indochine, 1992 and Bertrand Taverniere La Lille de d'Artagnan,
1994), Susan Hayward argues that this phenomenon can be attributed,
paradoxically, to postmodernism's rejection of history and the death of
feminism in France (Hayward, 1993: 287). However, as Elaine Showalter
points out (1998: 22), there are few films centering on epic real-life hero-
ines. In the 1990s, a handful of male-authored films have focused on the
lives of women who have been adopted as national icons, namely Jacques
Rivette's Jeanne d'Are (1994) starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Bern's
Lucie Aubrac (1997) starring Carole Bouquet (and foregrounding Daniel
Auteuil as Raymond Aubrac) and Luc Besson's Jeanne d'Are (1999) star-
ring Milla Jovovich. (Mention might also be made of Michel Boisrond's
1991 television drama about Marie Curie, Une femme honorable). The
rarity of such representations may be due to the fact that images of women
acting in the public sphere still fit uneasily into a genre which privileges the
reconstruction of the national heritage through male icons and masculine
endeavors. The lives of famous/heroic women run the risk of disturbing
patriarchal expectations about what women's lives should be like (small-
scale, domestic and subordinate). Their transgressive behavior is therefore
often tamed and 'feminized', as in Camille Claudel (Bruno Nuytten, 1988),
starring Isabelle Adjani,12 which is unable to separate Camille Claudel's
creativity as an artist from her troubled relationship with her tutor and
lover, Auguste Rodin (Gerard Depardieu), and her tragic demise and incar-
ceration (Pollock, 1998).
Seven films of the 1990s directed by women center on a historical female
figure who refuses the conventional limitations on women's roles, though,
significantly, only four of these figures are French.13 Christine Laurent's
Eden Miseria (1990), an elliptical, low-budget art film, explores the life of
the mysterious Swiss explorer and writer, Isabelle Eberhardt (Danuta Zar-
azik), who died at the age of 27 in southern Algeria where she had lived in
the desert dressed as a man (and whose diaries had just been published at
the time of the making of the film). Vera Belmont's costume drama, Milena
(1991), a lengthy international television co-production filmed in Prague, is
based on the life of Czech journalist Milena Jesenska (Valerie Kapriski), the
translator of Kafka and an outspoken, rebellious non-Jewish woman who
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GENRE FILMS
died in Ravensbriick because of her anti-Nazi activities. Josée Yanne's Boul-

evard des Hirondelles (1993), starring Elisabeth Bourguine, provides a low-
key chronological account of the events described in lis partiront dans
Vivresse, the diary of Resistance heroine Lucie Aubrac. The four films
discussed below contrast Liliane de Kermadec's art film, ha Piste du télé-
graphe (1994), charting Lisa Alling's walk from New York to the Bering
Strait in the late 1920s, with three more mainstream costume dramas:
Marquise (Vera Belmont, 1997), the rags-to-riches story of one of Molière's
leading actresses, Artemisia (Agnès Merlet, 1997), an episode in the life of
the woman who is generally considered to have been the first professional
woman painter in Europe, and Les Enfants du siede (Diane Kurys, 1999),
which centers on the relationship between nineteenth century writers
George Sand and Alfred de Musset.
La Piste du télégraphe/The Telegraph Road, a period road movie based
on a true story, was written and directed by Liliane de Kermadec (born
1928), whose first feature dates back to the 1970s. Shot mainly in the
Ukraine in a gamut of sepia colors, it is a beautiful, slow-moving film,
which has not received the critical attention it deserves. It opens in New
York in 1927 (the year Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic by plane) and fol-
lows the journey along the telegraph road of penniless Russian-born cham-
bermaid, Lisa Ailing (Elena Safonova), who leaves behind the city, her lover
and her Chinese girlfriend in order to walk to her parents' homeland in
Siberia. The film constitutes an admiring portrait of a mature, single-
minded woman who learns to live rough amid nature (the film is punctu-
ated by the occasional breathtaking close-up, like that of the porcupines in
the woods) and is not deterred by hunger or cold or her encounters on the
road. She momentarily grabs at romance with middle-class John (Christo-
pher Chaplin), and later sleeps with Mike, a forester, who saves her from
the cold (before dying in the snow himself). She also works whenever work
is available, sweeping the floor in a café, working for a friendly woman in
a Trading Post store, then later as a counter clerk in Dawson City Post
Office. But she does not particularly care either about her appearance
(though she looks good in her big winter coat), or about communicating
with others (though she likes singing). Against all the odds, and despite
John's attempts to stop her, she survives the telegraph road, thanks in part
to the help of the admiring engineers who save her life when she falls into
a frozen river. The film ends with the thaw which means that she can cross
the Bering Strait. However, an end title points out that, although someone
saw her disembark on the beach of Providenga in Siberia, 'Russian soldiers
took her away. Stalin was in power!'.
La Piste du télégraphe is an atmospheric film with a minimal, episodic
plot which proceeds through long takes and little dialogue. It relies on the
270
Lisa Ailing (Elena Safonova): the stubbornly determined woman wanderer
of La Piste du télégraphe (1994). Source: BIFI. Reproduced with permis-
sion from Liliane de Kermadec.
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G E N R E FILMS
visual pleasures of its beautiful but perilous autumn and winter landscapes
as much as on its display of vintage cars and trains and other period
artifacts. Its quirky story of a stubbornly determined woman wanderer is
unusual, not just as a period film about a woman who has been 'hidden
from history', or as a woman's road movie (Lisa's arduous but meaningful
trek contrasts with Mona's purposeless wandering in Varda's Sans toit ni
loi), but also because it goes against the grain of period films about immi-
gration into the USA in the interwar years. Here, Lisa, 'the rebel' (the title
of the song accompanying the film, the words of which were written by
Kermadec herself), wants not to make a life in America but rather to leave
America in order to search for her roots. Yet if the political atmosphere in
America is constructed as less than desirable (evidenced by the reference to
the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti), Lisa's final destination is even less hospita-
ble. Her disappearance at the end of the film suggests in fact that there is
simply no place for such an unconventional, uncompromising woman.
Marquise, which Vera Belmont co-wrote, directed and produced, is a
rather lightweight affair compared with the earlier Milena. Based on the
life of infamous actress and courtesan, Marguerite (Marquise) Duparc, it is
played by top box-office star Sophie Marceau. It traces Marquise's rapid
rise from being a poverty-stricken dancer and prostitute in the provinces to
becoming the favorite of Louis XIV, the inspiration behind Racine's theater,
and the lover of both Molière (Bernard Giraudeau) and Racine (Lambert
Wilson). But whereas the first two thirds of the film demonstrate how
Marquise uses her sexuality to further her career, climaxing with her success
as the eponymous heroine of Racine's Andromaque, the last third switches
awkwardly in tone from a comic period romp into a debt to All About Eve
(Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950). Jealous, pregnant Marquise finds herself re-
placed on stage and in Racine's affections by younger Marie, her maid, an
erstwhile friend whose career she had fostered. (Marie is played by Estelle
Skornit, recognizable to British spectators as Nicole from the Renault Clio
car advertisements). The film ends melodramatically with Marquise upstag-
ing her rival by dying on stage after eating a box of poisoned chocolates.
Although Marquise's life is far from uninteresting, the film is more con-
cerned with bawdy spectacle than women's history, as is clear from its
opening scene in which Molière's troop of actors arrive in a small town and
the women, needing to relieve themselves, bare their naked bottoms to the
watching crowd (and camera). Sexy young Marquise is represented both as
an object of desire for her (diegetic and cinema) audience and as a woman
who is in control of what she is doing, whether it be dancing for the crowd
(causing her future husband, the actor Duparc, known as Gros-René, to
fall in love with her) or having sex with a paying customer. When stage
272
fright prevents her from uttering a word on the one occasion Molière tries
her out as an actress, she reacts by dancing in an increasingly uninhibited
and titillating way, flashing her bare legs and cartwheeling in front of the
King without wearing underwear. The film's emphasis on bodily functions,
which includes scenes of the King sitting on his toilet and bathing in front
of the court, presumably aims to bring the visual pomp and splendor of
Versailles to life. Certainly, its mise-en-scène fulfils the French heritage film's
need for 'bigger wigs, more boisterous girls, sneerier aristocrats, a vast
wardrobe and lavish locations' (Walker, 1996: 26). However, its very mod-
ern, initially light-hearted treatment of a young woman's drive to fame and
fortune is undermined by the shift into melodrama which typically punishes
the woman for her audacity. The film's chances at the box office in France
were severely damaged by Marceau's widely publicized critical attack on
the director.
Artemisia was Agnès Merlet's second film (after Le Fils du requin), and
is the only film discussed here by a director associated with 'le jeune cinema
francos'. In this film, Merlet opts for the more commercial formula of sex
and spectacle, though she gives it an edge through the periodic use of a
handheld camera and the interventions of the heroine's voice-over. Drawing
on the pleasures of period reconstruction, with a particular focus on sump-
tuous costumes and on the mise-en-scène of the artists' studios and work-
places, the film takes as its topic a formative moment in the life of
seventeenth century Italian artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, the first profes-
sional woman painter in Europe (and the subject of Merlet's first short,
Artemisia, made in 1982). It thus continues the work of Camille Claudel in
re-evaluating women's place in art history and questioning what lies behind
female creativity. Instead of evoking Artemisia's entire life history, however,
it concentrates on Artemisia (Valentina Cervi) as a sexy, self-willed
seventeen-year-old with a passion for drawing the human body, who is
determined to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of a woman
painter. She does so by persuading her father, Orazio Gentileschi (Michel
Serrault), a well-known painter, first to let her work with him in his studio,
then, since she cannot be admitted to the Academy, to take lessons in
perspective from his friend and rival, Agostino Tassi (Miki Manojlovic).
The film reaches a climax when Gentileschi discovers that Artemisia and
Tassi have become lovers and takes Tassi to court for rape. In Merlet's
version of the famous trial of 1612, Artemisia refuses to accuse her lover,
even under torture. Instead, Tassi admits to rape at the sight of her pain
and is sent to prison, leaving Artemisia bitter at her father's action which
has left her a social pariah (since she has been proved to be no longer a
virgin). The end title states that she never saw Tassi again, but the final
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G E N R E FILMS
sequence shows her, dressed magnificently in black, leaving her father's

house and stealing Tassi's easel which she sets up on the beach, her voice-
over indicating that Tassi will always remain an inspiration to her.
When Artemisia was shown in the USA, Merlet's choice of incident and
interpretation provoked a furor among feminist art historians because it
flies in the face of evidence that Artemisia sustained the accusation of rape
against Tassi. However, Merlet insists that the trial transcripts are funda-
mentally ambiguous and contradictory, that the trial itself was the 'real'
rape, that the film does not avoid showing Artemisia's angry, violent and
painful reaction to her first sexual encounter with Tassi, and that Artemisia
and Tassi definitely had a passionate relationship which lasted several
months. Certainly, whatever the historical 'truth', the film exposes the
patriarchal ideology and power relationships which prevent Artemisia act-
ing as an autonomous individual and condemns the role of the over-
possessive father and the misogynistic, authoritarian representatives of the
law. At the same time, its problematic interpretation of Artemisia's relation-
ship with Tassi promotes two stereotypical notions, first, that a woman
artist is dependent on a man (an alternative father figure) to channel her
creativity (as in Camille Claudel) and, second, that a woman is more likely
to fall in love with her rapist than to seek justice.
However, there is more to the question of historical authenticity than the
debate over the significance of the trial, or Germaine Greer's additional
objection that the casting of Artemisia should have respected a (later) self-
portrait which represents her as 'a burly girl' (Greer, 1998: 6-7). By ending
the film with the outcome of the trial and reducing the rest of Artemisia's
career to an end title, Merlet denies her audience the life story of a woman
who is, arguably, a genuine feminist heroine. In fact Artemisia, who died in
1653, went on to marry, have a daughter, separate from her husband, and
run her own professional artist's studio. Merlet's film prefers a romantic
vision of art informed by passion to the more classical view of art as the
result of a lifetime of craft. Yet Artemisia's representation of the artist's
relationship to her art is also controversial and contradictory. For some art
historians, Artemisia's paintings of mythological subjects like the raped
Lucretia contemplating suicide or Judith slaying Holofernes are expressions
of her reactions to her own rape. However, Merlet shows Artemisia getting
Tassi to pose as Holofernes, and her painting is used in the trial to demon-
strate her intimacy with the male body. Artemisia is thus represented as
empowered by passion rather than damaged by rape, and at the same time
inspired by the observation of others as much as by her own experiences.
In fact, what is most striking about Artemisia is the way it establishes
and validates Artemisia's desire to look at the world, even as, paradoxically,
it offers her body to the spectator as an element of spectacle. The film's
274
Artemisia Gentileschi (Valentina Cervi) at work in Artemisia (1997). Sup-
plied by and reproduced with permission from the Ronald Grant Archive.
275
GENRE FILMS
dazzling opening montage sequence of close ups of an eye are followed by

scenes of Artemisia stealing a candle in the convent to light the reflection
of her own body in order to reproduce the human figure in her drawings.
In defiance of the fact that women are banned by the church from seeing
and painting the male nude, she persuades a beautiful, young fisherman to
let her touch and observe his body as a reward for a kiss. She also spies on
a couple making love on the beach, then later on Tassi and others in a
brothel. The resulting images of torsos and genitals which pervade her
scandalous drawings of the male nude certainly reverse normative expecta-
tions of representations of nudity in French cinema. When Tassi starts to
teach her perspective, to see landscapes and not just figures, the film mo-
mentarily changes its point of view, and Artemisia becomes the object of
his look and his desire (as in the moment when he brutally penetrates her,
not realizing she is still a virgin). But her sexual awakening reaffirms her
identity as both subject and artist, and it is she who turns Tassi into an
object of desire (as well as an object to be painted) and takes the initiative
in their sensuous, shared relationship. Artemisia is thus a potentially em-
powering film in its assertion of a woman's right to look at herself, at men,
and at the world in general, and makes a strong contrast with the represen-
tation of the artist reduced to tragic victim in Camille Claudel. Were it not
for the furor about its lack of historical authenticity (a feature of many
biopics about famous men), Merlet's postmodern reworking of Artemisia's
story could simply be enjoyed as what Elaine Showalter has called 'an
exciting movie about a feminist heroine who can love, battle and paint
alongside men' (1998:22).
Les Enfants du siècle/The Children of the Century is the last woman's
heritage film of the 1990s and the first film by Diane Kurys to depart from
her customary semi-autobiographical subject material. It focuses on the
brief, tempestuous love affair between two 'monstres sacrés' of nineteenth
century French literature, George Sand (Juliette Binoche) and Alfred de
Musset (Benoit Magimel), which is given the heritage treatment through
spectacular reconstruction of the literary salons and bordellos of 1830s
Paris and the canal life and ornate hotel interiors of 1830s Venice. With
Christian Lacroix designing the film's beautiful period costumes and Juliette
Binoche, currently France's most exportable female star, playing Sand, Ku-
rys clearly hoped to reach a large international audience. The film's release
in France was accompanied by marketing tie-ins such as a coffee table book
about the making of the film, a CD, a website for teachers, and an exhibi-
tion at the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris. However, critical reception
of the film was so negative that director Patrice Leconte was prompted to
complain about the lack of support French critics give their own film
276
industry. The film did less well at the box office than anticipated, even
though it is in many ways a classic French heritage film.
Les Enfants opens with a long heritage-style credit sequence which lov-
ingly details the now defunct art of setting up the printing blocks for the
pages of a book. The book in question is Musset's La Confession d'un
enfant du siede which recounts his earlier love affair with Sand, and the
subsequent narrative is framed by Sand's reactions to its publication. In a
prologue sequence which shows Sand, the writer, as also an accomplished
horsewoman, a mother and the owner of a country estate, her friend and
publisher Francois Buloz (Robin Renucci) tries unsuccessfully to persuade
her to counter Musset's image of her as his 'patroness' by writing her own
version of events. In the closing sequence, the older Sand finally promises
him the book, discovers that Musset has just died and, at his graveside,
declares to camera that he was the only man she had ever really loved. The
film ends with a freeze frame of her face followed by a shot of her walking
off, alone, into the distance, leaving the spectator with the knowledge that
she is about to write her own story (the passionate love story Kurys's film
has just told).
The intervening narrative begins with crosscutting sequences which build
up a portrait of the two lovers. A series of short scenes establish Sand's
determination to circumvent the conventions normally restricting women's
lives: she abandons her marriage, moves to Paris with her children, changes
her name to George, starts wearing male clothing and smoking in public,
forms a relationship with actress Marie Dorval (Karin Viard), and uses her
writing to defend women's rights. Meanwhile, Musset is portrayed as a
dandy and libertine who is also a spoiled, violent child, adversely affected
by the death of his father. The couple meet just after Sand reads to a literary
gathering an outspoken passage criticizing women's role within marriage
and asserting women's right to sexual pleasure. Musset arrives in time to
console her for the critics' negative reactions and, after a halting start, their
friendship develops into a romantic passion, consolidated by the decision
to travel to Venice to seek inspiration for their work (Sand has already
provided Musset with the material for his future Lorenzacdo). Thereafter,
the affair starts to disintegrate as Sand gets ill, Musset gets mugged, and
the two temporarily go their separate ways, Musset in gambling, whoring,
drinking and opium, Sand in work (she is forever writing) and an affair
with the doctor who is tending her. The couple separate after Musset tries
to strangle Sand in an opium-induced delirium, but resume their affair
when they are back in Paris until Musset's jealousy makes their relationship
unbearable. After their final separation, Musset's family hide the letters
Sand writes to him, and eventually Musset returns from exile in the country
277
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and starts writing his book, meeting Sand again just for one last poignant
rain-soaked farewell.
Like Artemisia, Les Enfants du siede constructs a woman who is passion-
ate about her art, embarks on doomed affair, and is left alone to pick up
the pieces. However, Sand is an artist who is already in control of her life,
an independent, married woman with children and a circle of Bohemian
friends, and not a teenage girl enjoying her first sexual experiences. Her
affair with Musset, younger than her by six years (she is 29) but already a
published author, is an affair between equals rather than between an aspir-
ing young artist and an older, paternalistic male. Sand survives the break-
down of their relationship without going mad, becoming destitute, losing
her creative skills or becoming dependent on another man. (In this respect,
the film can be productively compared with the problematic representations
of contemporary love affairs conducted by mature women discussed in
chapter 3). Indeed, arguably the film demystifies their relationship, demon-
strating the difficulty of romance when the man's capricious behavior be-
comes intolerable, and showing an independent woman unable to set aside
her writing (or her children) for very long, even when she is in love. Yet
this reading is at odds with the film's determined foregrounding of romantic
passion, not just in its selection of narrative incidents but also through its
panoply of autumnal colors, its excessive and intrusive music track, its
constant references to the art and literature of the period, and, above all,
its casting of Juliette Binoche, who brings to the film her star image as 'a
passionate and tragic femme fatale' (Vincendeau, 2000b). Kurys's reduction
of Sand's life to a single passionate relationship, despite her long, subse-
quent career as a writer and political observer, thus produces an ambivalent
heroine, whose radical challenges to conventional notions of femininity are
finally contained.
Although art house films like Eden miseria and La Piste du télégraphe
provide more complex, challenging representations of women who have led
extraordinary lives than more mainstream heritage films like Marquise,
Artemisia and Les Enfants du siede; the latter do at least bring a (limited)
awareness of women as agents of history to a popular audience. However,
whereas Artemisia emphasizes the liberating nature of youthful female cre-
ativity, Marquise and Les Enfants du siede, the two films centered on
French women, deny their heroines an empowering ending, the one poison-
ing herself out of jealousy, the other doomed to infinite regrets for a lost
love. Although these films show that women are capable of directing big-
budget films with star casts and fabulous sets and costumes, they also
demonstrate the difficulty of constructing women as autonomous subjects
within a European cultural heritage.
278
Conclusion
The most obvious feature of French women's films set in the past, in the
1990s as well as the 1980s is the persistence of the autobiographical, in
particular as a vehicle for portraying the disintegration of colonialism.
These films do not provide a historical 'sweep' but draw their strength from
staying close to women's experiences and expertise in the personal and
domestic as a way of re-inscribing women and children into history. By
implication, they (mostly) offer a critique of women's evacuation from
earlier colonial and postcolonial narratives and create new places of mem-
ory for those normally excluded from history, establishing a critical reflec-
tion on historical events and not just a nostalgic evocation of the past. As
Catherine Portuges has argued, the mise-en-scène of a woman-centered
cinema of memory 'destabilizes hegemonic ideas of nationality, sexuality,
and the family' (Portuges, 1996: 81). These films redress the amnesia and
distortions of dominant historical films by foregrounding an awareness of
issues affecting women and children and articulating an anti-imperialist,
anti-racist consciousness.
In the 1990s, however, there has also been a significant shift away from
the personal and domestic towards the representation of women in the past
who have occupied more public spaces. The number of women's biopics in
particular suggests that women directors are moving towards more popular
forms of historical films, using costume dramas which project women's
lives against the backdrop of epic historical canvases.14 Although to date
their representations of famous/heroic women have been limited and limi-
ting (their heroines end up dead, or alone and grief-stricken), the genre
encourages reflection on women as both historical and cinematic subjects,
and so has the potential for destabilizing hegemonic ideas of women's roles
within the context of the national past.
Notes
1. For critical work on Jacqueline Audry, see Flock (1998) and Tarr (1993).
2. Mention might also be made of Christine Lipinska's J e suis Pierre Rivière,
(1975), based on the memoirs of a nineteenth-century Norman peasant who
killed his mother, sister and brother with a scythe (made shortly before René
Allio's better-known 1976 film, Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma
soeur et mon frère). See also the work of Daniele Huillet with Jean-Marie Straub
in this field.
3. Agnieska Holland's Europa, Europa (1990) provides a woman's dramatization
of the holocaust.
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G E N R E FILMS
4. A different approach to music as heritage is to be found in Joyce Sherman

BunuePs Salsa (2000), a contemporary youth-oriented musical in which a young
white French musician unproblematically appropriates Cuban music and a girl-
friend of Cuban origin. If Salsa celebrates hybridity (from a eurocentric perspec-
tive), Simeon is more concerned with maintaining distinctiveness and authen-
ticity.
5. Cbocolat contrasts with Noir et blanc (see chapter 7) by providing a clear
motivation for Protée's sadistic behavior.
6. There is a tradition of women's writing about the attraction between white
women and the exotic 'boy', see for example Doris Lessing's The Grass is
Singing (1950).
7. Catherine Corsini's television film ]eunesse sans Dieu (1995), an adaptation of
the novel by Odòn von Horvath, also evokes the rise of Fascist anti-Semitism,
this time in 1930s Germany.
8. For further reading on representations of the Algerian War, see Dine (1994) and
Hennebelle (1997).
9. The escape of Algerian women from Fleury-Mongis prison features in Charlotte
Silvera's Louise Vinsoumise (see chapter 1).
10. Another reconstruction of the period featuring women active in the FLN is to
be found in Vivre au pardis (Bourlem Guerdjou, 1999). Okacha Touita's Les
Sacrifiés (1982) offers an earlier, extremely critical version of the role of the
FLN and MNE in France.
11. In Les Silences du Palais (1994), a Franco-Tunisian co-production set in the
1950s in the Beys' palace in the years preceding the granting of Independence,
Moufida Tlatli analyzes the corruption of the Tunisian regime from the point of
view of the women servants.
12. Adjani herself purchased the rights to Camille Claudel's story and co-produced
the film.
13. In contrast Agnieszka Holland's Rimbaud Verlaine/Total Eclipse (1997) centers
on the relationship between the two well-known nineteenth century French
(male) poets.
14. Patricia Mazuy's Saint-Cyr (2000) is also a biopic, based on the life of Madame
de Maintenon (Isabelle Huppert) and the school for disadvantaged girls which
she set up to redeem her sinful life.
280
Conclusion
Women's filmmaking in France is clearly thriving, thanks primarily to the

specificity of the French national context which privileges (non-gendered)
auteur cinema and, particularly in the 1990s, encourages young directors
to make their first, second and even third films. At the time of writing, the
number of films by women released in the year 2000 far outstrips those for
1999 (see supplementary filmography listing films by women in 2000). Yet
it is perhaps necessary also to utter a word of caution; 13.7% of the total
national production for the last decade is still very far from establishing
parity between the sexes (which is what a number of critics have claimed),
and women's presence in what is still a male-dominated industry may well
be tolerated mainly because they tend to adopt strategies which deny the
significance of their work in terms of gender.
The question remains, however, as to the extent to which films by women
implicitly express or interrogate their otherwise unarticulated position as
'the second sex'. As in other countries, the post-feminist 1980s saw an
abandoning of the militant themes and/or aesthetic distancing strategies of
1970s feminist filmmaking. Nonetheless, a significant proportion of films
by French women of the postwar generation challenge and offer alterna-
tives to traditional representations of a woman's life from adolescence
through to marriage and motherhood (as in the work of Diane Kurys, Aline
Issermann, Genevieve Lefèbvre and Catherine Breillat), while films by
women of the Mitterrand generation explore the consequences for women
of the fragmented family and liberation from traditional norms (as in the
work of Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Noémie Lvovsky, Martine Dugowson
and Christine Carrière). Although films explicitly focusing on women's
experiences may have waned in the mid-eighties, they resurfaced in the
1990s, both in the work of i e jeune cinema francos' and in the way women
directors appropriated popular genres.
Films by women associated with 'le jeune cinema franâis' have intro-
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CONCLUSION
duced new cinematic spaces (young women and children on the margins,
whether in the city or the provinces) and also reworked themes of interest
to female spectators (the mother-daughter bond, female friendship, family
histories). Their innovative use of cinematic language has produced new
representations of the feminine, which avoid the cliches and sterotypes of
mainstream cinema and articulate a more unexpected, complex way of
being female. They document a more fragmented, isolated society, but they
have also (especially in the work of Sandrine Veysset, Claire Simon, Domi-
nique Cabrera and Judith Cahen) contributed to the renewal of social
themes in narrative, documentary and essay films relating to identity and
citizenship.
The ways in which women have reworked themes of interpersonal rela-
tionships using elements drawn from popular genres has produced some of
the most innovative and exhilarating films discussed here, whether it be the
comedies of Coline Serreau and Josiane Balasko, the crime dramas of Tonie
Marshall and Claire Denis, the road movies of Nicole Garcia and Marion
Vernoux, or the historical films of Brigitte Roùan and Yolande Zauberman.
The best genre films open up new spaces for women and innovative repre-
sentations of femininity. In particular, Josiane Balasko's comedies are not
only among the most popular films in the corpus, they also demonstrate
the most consistent and progressive use of a socially aware feminist agenda,
centered on independent, fearless, funny, unglamorous heroines. Whereas
many women filmmakers are reluctant to deconstruct 'femininity' and the
beauty myth and still foreground actresses with slim, glamorous, desirable
bodies, Balasko's films problematize the acquisition and performance of
femininity and make average looks and comfortable body size attractive.
Despite growing numbers of women filmmakers, making films is still the
domain of a privileged few. It is striking, therefore, that a number of their
films are expressly concerned with sexual and ethnic difference and the
need for sexual and racial tolerance. Arguably, the difficulty of articulating
women's issues directly means that women filmmakers displace their con-
cerns onto other marginalized groups (including children). As a conse-
quence, a number of their films foreground boys, ethnic minority men
(especially black men) and gays, whereas ethnic minority women continue
to be rare and lesbians rarer still. Fortunately, a small number of women of
Maghrebi origin (Zai'da Ghorab-Volta, Yamina Benguigui and Rachida
Krim) have started to make feature-length films themselves, though Euzhan
Palcy is to date the only African-Caribbean filmmaker (others are making
short and documentary films). But no contemporary woman filmmaker has
yet made a film specifically addressing lesbian desire, and the relative rarity
of relationships between women as a central structuring device in the most
commercially successful films by women is a cause for concern. Although
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CONCLUSION
they often privilege female subjectivity and the resilience of women, their
desire to address a wider audience means that they tend to focus on or
share the film's narrative with a man's point of view. Interestingly, women's
representations of men recognize that gender roles are fluid and shifting,
through their constructions of feminized, vulnerable men (friends, lovers,
fathers) who are still desirable despite being inadequate and misguided.
There are fewer films which offer positive representations of how women's
identities, too, are fluid and changing.
In the year 2000, a number of trends can be detected, which confirm the
value of the categories we have established. First, there is an increasing
number of documentaries, ranging from Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse, in which Varda combines social observation with self-reflexivity
(modeling the role of the filmmaker on that of the 'gleaners' of the title) to
Sophie Bredier and Myriam Aziza's Nos traces silencieuses, in which Bre-
dier attempts to trace her identity as a Korean orphan brought up by
adoptive parents in France. Second, there are a significant number of films
by new directors, such as Anne Villacèque's black comedy, Petite chérie,
and Caroline Vignal's growing-up film, Les Autres filles, as well as second
or third films by directors associated with 'le jeune cinema francos', like
Laurence Ferreira Barbosa's La Vie moderne, Laetitia Masson's Love me
and Sylvie Verheyde's Princesses (though none of these have had the impact
of their earlier films). Third, there are new films by seasoned directors,
including Patricia Mazuy's woman-centered costume drama, Saint-Cyr,
Jeanne Labrune's contemporary comedy of manners, f a ira mieux demain,
and Claire Denis's award-winning homosocial crime drama, Beau travail,
set amid the men of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti.
However, the two films of 2000 which have most marked women's film
history are Le Gout des autres, a first film by writer-actress Agnès Jaoui,
and Virginie Despentes' adaptation of her cult novel of the same name,
Baise-moi. Le Gout des autres is a group film with a star cast (led by Jaoui's
partner, Jean-Pierre Bacri) which recounts in bittersweet, comic fashion the
misadventures of assorted couples who either learn or not that they need
to overcome cultural differences and accommodate 'other people's tastes'
(the film's title) if they are to find happiness in love. The film demonstrates
both that women are still successfully appropriating comedy as a genre (it
attracted over three million spectators), and that they are most successful
when they address both male and female audiences.
In contrast, Baise-moi, directed by Virginie Despentes with former porn
star Coralie Trinh Thi (and starring two porn actresses in the leading roles),
is the latest in a long line of women's films which have shocked the estab-
lishment because of their explicit sexual imagery. (The film was released at
the same time as Catherine Breillat's Une vraie jeune fille, made in 1976,
283
CONCLUSION
which is a very explicit, physical representation of a young girl's sado-

masochistic sexual experiences). However, while the representation of sex
in women's films may have become more explicit, it is normally shot at
least in part from the woman's point of view, and is designed not to arouse
the spectator (male or female) but rather to extend the exploration of
personal relationships and the failure of the heterosexual couple. The
amateurish-looking Baise-moi, however, takes the representation of sex into
a new domain for French women's cinema by combining elements of the
hardcore porn film (particularly close-ups of blow jobs) with a female
revenge narrative located within a road movie format. Whereas French
women directors have hitherto lacked a fascination with 'women with guns'
and action/adventure movie-making, the heroines of Baise-moi take to the
road in order to fuck and kill anyone who stands in their way. The film
generated a huge controversy, but it is not yet clear whether it marks a new
departure for women's filmmaking in its (extremely rare) use of violence to
express female anger and malaise, or whether it will go down as a footnote
in women's filmmaking history. One thing is certain, though, and that is
that, unlike Le Gout des autres, where men and women share misunder-
standings, pleasures and pains, Baise-moi is driven by a notion of sexual
difference as unavoidable and grotesque, where the only answer to women's
victimization by men is to make men the victims. Whereas Beauvoir argued
in The Second Sex that anatomy was not destiny and that gender was
constructed, not given, women's filmmaking in France shows that that
debate is far from over.
284
Filmography:
Films Directed by Women 1980-1999
Note: The filmography consists of all feature-length and medium-length

films directed or co-directed by women and produced with French or ma-
jority French funding (whatever the nationality of the director) during the
period 1980-1999. They are listed according to their year of release and
not their date of production (dates given refer to their theatrical release in
Paris). Viewing figures have been compiled with the help of the CNC
(February 2000), Le Film francais (No. 2812, 28 January 2000) and Les
Fiches du cinema (available on the BIFFs data base). Most have not been
released in Britain, but many are available on videotape in France, or can
be viewed at the Forum des Images, Paris. (For availability on videotape in
Great Britain, consult MovieMail: http://www.moviem.co.uk.)
Film Director(s) Release Date Viewership
1980
Cocktail Molotov Diane Kurys 06.02.80 470,900
Contes pervers Regine Desforges 25.06.80 333,000
Femme enfant, La Raphaèle Billetdoux 24.09.80 73,600
Femme intégrale, La Claudine Guilmain 30.07.80 56,700
Honorable société, L Arielle Weinberger 16.04.80 >5,000
Ma chérie Charlotte Dubreuil 13.02.80 162,600
Plogoff, des pierres contre Nicole Le Garrec 18.11.80 93,344
des fusils
Premier voyage Nadine Trintignant 27.02.80 25,200
Simone Barbès ou la vertu Marie-Claude Treilhou 27.02.80 51,000
1981
Agatbe et les lectures Marguerite Duras 07.10.81 14,700
illimitées
Amour nu, L Yannick Bellon 07.10.81 941,000
285
FILMOGRAPHY: FILMS DIRECTED BY W O M E N 1980-1999
Flambeuse, La Rachel Weinberg 13.05.81 18,400

Homme atlantique, U Marguerite Duras 25.11.81 N.A.
(45m)
Homme fragile, U Claire Clouzot 22.04.81 59,900
Juliette du coté des Claudine Bories 28.10.81 N.A.
hommes (50m)
Neige Juliet Berto, 20.05.81 643,000
Jean-Henri Roger
1982
Chassé-croisé Arielle Dombasle 24.03.82 >5,000
Còte d'amour, La Charlotte Dubreuil 20.10.82 34,800
Documenteur (60m) Agnès Varda 20.01.82 N.A.
Elia Kazan outsider Annie Tresgot, 15.09.82 N.A.
(56m) (Doc) Michel Ciment
Etat de bonheur Maria Koleva 16.06.82 >5,000
permanent, U (Doc)
Us appellent ca un Nathalie Delon 29.09.82 17,570
accident
Jeux de la comtesse Catherine Binet 24.03.82 52,900
Dolingen de Gratz, Les
Mur murs (Doc) Agnès Varda 20.01.82 54,100
Qu'est-ce qu'on attend Coline Serreau 01.09.82 87,600
pour ètre heureux?
Une histoire d'Emil et Anne-Marie Lallement 22.12.82 N.A.
Joaquin (1972)
1983
Cap Canaille Juliette Berto, 23.02.83 85,600
Jean-Henri Roger
Clementine tango Caroline Roboh 19.01.83 95,380
Coup de foudre Diane Kurys 06.04.83 1,631,270
Destin de Juliette, Le Aline Issermann 21.09.83 83,900
Dialogue de Rome (63m) Marguerite Duras 04.05.83 8,600
Femmes Tana Kaleya 22.06.83 212,100
Fragments pour un Maria Koleva 27.07.83 >5,000
discours tbéàtral (Doc)
Grain de sable, Le Pomme Meffre 19.10.83 18,200
Rue cases-nègres Euzhan Palcy 21.09.83 1,284,100
Un bomme a ma taille Annette Carducci 16.11.83 67,000
Voiture, La Maria Koleva 03.08.83 N.A.
1984
Garce, La Christine Pascal 05.09.84 519,200
Intrus, L' Irene Jouannet 19.09.84 16,400
Tricbe, La Yannick Bellon 08.08.84 609,300
286
FILMOGRAPHY: FILMS DIRECTED BY W O M E N 1980-1999
1985
Amants terribles, Les Daniele Dubroux 16.01.85 51,300
Contes clandestins Dominique Crèvecoeur 10.07.85 >5,000
Enfants, Les Marguerite Duras 29.05.85 59,300
Eté prochain, I! Nadine Trintignant 09.01.85 367,700
Années 80, Les Chantal Akerman 25.06.85 41,900
Homme au chapeau de Maud Linder 18.09.85 18,900
soie, U (Doc)
Louise Vinsoumise Charlotte Silvera 13.03.85 71,900
Nanas, Les Annick Lanoé 30.01.85 584,400
Notre mariage Valeria Sarmiento 11.09.85 16,600
Nuit portejarretelles, La Virginie Thévenet 20.03.85 231,500
Rouge baiser Vera Belmont 27.11.85 740,190
Sac de noeuds Josiane Balasko 20.03.85 633,200
Sans toit ni hi Agnès Varda 04.12.85 1,080,000
Signé Charlotte Caroline Huppert 20.02.85 90,200
Tristesse et beauté Joy Fleury 28.04.85 68,600
Trois hommes et un Coline Serreau 18.09.85 10,251,400
couffin
Vertiges Christine Laurent 06.12.85 21,600
1986
Amant magnifique, L' Aline Issermann 11.06.86 104,200
Golden Eighties Chantal Akerman 25.06.86 41,900
Havre Juliet Berto 04.06.88 10,800
Il était une fois la téle Marie-Claude Treilhou 26.02.86 N.A.
(58m) (Doc)
Interdits du monde, Les Chantal Lasbats 15.01.86 142,200
(Doc)
Noir et blanc Claire Devers 19.11.86 45,100
Pékin-Central Camille de Casablanca 08.10.86 42,200
1987
Accroche-coeur Chantal Picault 25.11.87 >5,000
Avril brisé Liria Begeja 09.12.87 8,800
Coeurs croisés Stephanie de Mareuil 03.06.87 7,300
Eolie suisse Christine Lipinska 10.06.87 N.A.
Jup on rouge, Le Geneviève Lefèbvre 17.06.87 75,800
Jeux d'artifices Virginie Thévenet 18.03.87 39,000
Keufs, Les Josiane Balasko 16.12.87 1,071,400
Moine et la sorcière, Le Suzanne Schiffman 23.09.87 34,700
Petite allumeuse, La Daniele Dubroux 12.08.87 161,500
Un homme amoureux Diane Kurys 07.05.87 786,500
1988
Ane qui a bu la lune, L' Marie-Claude Treilhou 24.02.88 11,990
Chocolat Claire Denis 18.05.88 793,700
287
F I L M O G R A P H Y : FILMS D I R E C T E D BY W O M E N 1980-1999
Classified People (60m) Yolande Zauberman 02.11.88 N.A.

(Doc)
Complot, Le Agnieszka Holland 07.09.88 512,800
De sable et de sang Jeanne Labrune 04.05.88 57,900
Frequence meurtre Elisabeth Rappeneau 30.03.88 473,700
Jane B. par Agnès V. Agnès Varda 02.03.88 48,000
(Doc)
Kung Fu Master Agnès Varda 09.03.88 35,800
Lumière du lac, La Francesca Comencini 23.11.88 23,900
Maison de jade, La Nadine Trintignant 02.11.88 77,100
Maison de Jeanne, La Magali Clément 10.02.88 47,000
Poker Catherine Corsini 13.01.88 17,000
Prisonnières Charlotte Silvera 12.10.88 46,700
Pyramides bleues, Les Arielle Dombasle 22.06.88 17,600
Surprises de l'amour, Les Caroline Chomienne 16.11.88 >5,000
Trois soeurs Margarethe Von Trotta 21.09.88 155,090
36 Fillette Catherine Breillat 23.03.88 52,700
1989
Après la pluie Camille de Casabianca 05.04.89 8,400
Barbare, La Mireille Dare 07.06.89 54,100
Chimère Claire Devers 31.05.89 57,700
Embrasse-moi Michèle Rosier 15.03.89 >5,000
Enfants du désordre, Les Yannick Bellon 22.11.89 667,400
Histoires d'Amérique Chantal Akerman 04.10.89 13,200
Man No Run (Doc) Claire Denis 18.10.89 >5,000
Mon cher sujet Anne-Marie Miéville 18.10.89 32,300
Papa est parti, maman Christine Lipinska 08.02.89 68,000
aussi
Pentimento Tonie Marshall 13.12.89 57,600
Peaux de vaches Patricia Mazuy 31.05.89 44,000
Romuald et Juliette Coline Serreau 22.03.89 856,900
Un été d'orages Charlotte Brandstròm 21.06.89 34,000
Vallèe des anges, La Aline Issermann 02.11.89 >5,000
Zanzibar Christine Pascal 04.10.89 17,900
1990
Bai du gouverneur, Le Marie-France Pisier 28.02.90 93,600
Caste cuminelle (Doc) Yolande Zauberman 10.10.90 >5,000
Eden miseria Christine Laurent 31.01.90 >5,000
Europa Europa Agnieszka Holland 14.11.90 203,400
Fille du magicien, La Claudine Bories 28.01.90 >5,000
Fète des pères, La Joy Fleury 14.03.90 539,300
Feu sur le candidat Agnès Delarive 04.07.90 11,200
Jeu du renard, Le Anne Caprile 06.06.90 6,700
288
Baule Les Pins, La Diane Kurys 14.02.90 724,100

Outremer Brigitte Roùan 19.12.90 127,400
Plein fer Josée Dayan 26.09.90 10,300
S'en fout la mort Claire Denis 05.09.90 51,500
Un été après Vautre Anne-Marie Etienne 19.12.90 >5,000
Un weekend sur deux Nicole Garcia 29.08.90 534,000
Voulez-vous mourir avec Petra Haffter 13.06.90 >5,000
moii
1991
Annabelle partagée Francesca Comencini 23.01.91 >5,000
Contre-allée, ha Isabel Sebastian 30.01.91 56,200
Homme imagine, U Patricia Bardon 01.05.91 >5,000
Jacquot de Nantes Agnès Varda 15.11.91 239,700
Jalousie Kathleen Fonmarty 26.06.91 31,000
Jour des rois, Le Marie-Claude Treilhou 20.03.91 83,290
Ma vie est un enfer Josiane Balasko 04.12.91 1,170,500
Milena Vera Belmont 09.01.91 86,800
Mima Philomène Esposito 16.01.91 34,429
Nuit et jour Chantal Akerman 11.09.91 40,400
Plaisir d'amour Nelly Kaplan 10.04.91 42,000
Rien que des mensonges Paule Muret 11.12.91 54,700
Sale comme un ange Catherine Breillat 19.06.91 34,200
Un homme et deux Valerie Stroh 30.10.91 27,600
femmes
1992
Affùt, L' Yannick Bellon 26.02.92 85,670
Amelia Lopez O'Neill Valeria Sarmiento 05.02.92 9,500
Après l'amour Diane Kurys 04.03.92 542,170
Border Line Daniele Dubroux 25.03.92 42,470
Crise, La Coline Serreau 02.12.92 2,350,100
Mamies, Les Annick Lanoé 10.11.92 169,200
Max et Jérèrnie Claire Devers 14.10.92 626,100
Mississipi One Sarah Moon 12.02.92 >5,000
Olivier Olivier Agnieszka Holland 28.10.92 49,100
Petit prince a dit, Le Christine Pascal 25.11.92 566,400
Règie du je, La Francoise Etchegaray 23.09.92 >5,000
Sam suffit Virginie Thévenet 29.04.92 27,200
Sans un cri Jeanne Labrune 06.05.92 12,000
Siméon Euzhan Palcy 16.12.92 123,900
Vagabond Anne Le Monnier 11.11.92 >5,000
1993
Boulevard des hirondelles Josée Yanne 17.03.93 12,800
Cahier volé, Le Christine Lipinska 28.04.93 14,400
289
Comment font les gens Pascale Bailly 16.06.93 N.A.

(51m)
Fils du requin, Le Agnès Merlet 24.11.93 64,400
Gens normaux n'ont rien Laurence Ferreira Barbosa 03.11.93 154,500
d'exceptionnel, Les
Histoires d'amour Anne Fontaine 02.06.93 19,300
fìnissent mal en general,
Les
Jacques Rivette, le veilleur Claire Denis, Serge Daney 17.03.93 >5,000
(Doc)
Moi Ivan, toi Abraham Yolande Zauberman 26.05.93 83,300
Ombre du doute, L' Aline Issermann 20.10.93 75,300
Pas d'amour sans amour Evelyne Dress 03.11.93 23,800
Quelque part vers Franchise Ebrard 16.06.93 >5,000
Conakry
Rupture(s) Christine Citti 27.10.93 >5,000
Sida, une histoire qui n'a Paule Muxel, 24.11.93 5,000
pas de fin (Doc) Bertrand de Solliers
Toxic Affair Philomène Esposito 26.05.93 197,600
1994
A la folie Diane Kurys 28.09.94 126,900
Amoureux, Les Catherine Corsini 01.06.94 18,000
Dieu que les femmes sont Magali Clement 01.06.94 25,300
amoureuses
Elles ne pensent qua ca Charlotte Dubreuil 16.03.94 42,700
Espoir voile, L' (52m) Norma Marcos 16.07.94 N.A.
Fils préféré, Le Nicole Garcia 21.12.94 747,000
Grande petite Sophie Fillières 30.03.94 >5,000
J'ai pas sommeil Claire Denis 18.05.94 52,400
Je t'aime quand mème Nina Companeez 16.02.94 32,300
Loi du collège, La Mariana Otero 02.11.94 N.A.
Loin des barbares Liria Begeja 13.04.94 >5,000
Lou n'a pas dit non Anne-Marie Miéville 21.12.94 26,400
Mina Tannenbaum Martine Dugowson 02.03.94 381,900
Fas très catbolique Tonie Marshall 06.04.94 266,500
Fetits arrangements avec Pascale Ferran 05.10.94 299,500
les morts
Personne ne m'aime Marion Vernoux 09.03.94 113,200
Piste du télégraphe, La Liliane de Kermadec 30.11.94 >5,000
1995
A cran Solange Martin 15.02.95 10,400
Adultere (mode d'emploi) Christine Pascal 05.07.95 187,600
290
Ainsi soient-elles Patrick et Lisa 25.01.95 40,700

Alessandrin
Augustin (61m) Anne Fontaine 14.06.95 47,300
Cent et une nuits, Les Agnès Varda 25.01.95 49,000
Circuit Carole Emmanuelle Cuau 19.04.95 22,600
Croisade d'Anne Buridan, Judith Cahen 08.11.95 8,000
La
Dans la cour des grands Florence Strauss 12.07.95 >5,000
Dieu, Vamant de ma mère Aline Issermann 26.07.95 52,700
et le fìls du char cutter
En avoir (ou pas) Laetitia Masson 27.12.95 149,900
Fabuleux destin de Camille de Casabianca 12.07.95 32,300
Madame Petlet, Le
Pugueuses, Les Nadine Trintignant 23.08.95 26,600
Gazon maudit Josiane Balasko 08.02.95 3,990,100
Joints de mines sont plus Isabelle Quignaux 12.04.95 >5,000
étanches que les
chambres a air de nos
vélos, Les (Doc)
Lumière et compagnie Sarah Moon 20.12.95 N.A.
(Doc)
Mécaniques celestes Fina Torres 10.05.95 64,000
Oublie-moi Noémie Lvovsky 25.01.95 54,400
Péché véniel, péché mortel Pomme Meffre 01.02.95 >5,000
(1991)
Pullman Paradis Michèle Rosier 05.07.95 >5,000
Rosine Christine Carrière 18.01.95 43,300
Sida, paroles de famille Paule Muxel, 22.11.95 >5,000
(Doc) Bertrand de Solliers
Univers de Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda 9.11.95 >5,000
U
Voyage de Babà, Le Christine Eymeric 01.11.95 >5,000
(1992/9>4)
Yeux fermés, Les Francesca Archibugi 12.07.95 >5,000
1996
Age des possibles, L' Pascale Ferran 04.05.95 73,700
Belle verte, La Coline Serreau 18.09.96 747,900
Coùte que coùte (Doc) Claire Simon 07.02.96 21,500
Demoiselles ont eu vingt- Agnès Varda 21.02.96 N.A.
cinq ans, Les (Doc)
Des lendemains qui Caroline Chomienne 29.05.96 >5,000
chantent (70m)
Elle Valeria Sarmiento 12.06.96 >5,000
Enfants de salaud Tonie Marshall 03.04.96 177,400
Huitième nuit, La (40m) Pascale Breton 10.07.96 N.A.
291
Je n'en ferai pas un drame Dodine Herry 20.11.96 N.A.

(57m)
Journal du séducteur, Le Daniele Dubroux 28.02.96 130,100
Love, etc. Marion Vernoux 27.11.96 135,500
No Sex Last Night Sophie Calle, 17.01.96 17,000
Greg Shephard
Parfait amour! Catherine Breillat 23.10.96 67,100
Po di sangui Flora Gomes 05.10.96 8,800
Sept en attente Franchise Etchegaray 06.03.96 >5,000
Souviens-toi de moi Zai'da Ghorab-Volta 24.01.96 6,600
(59m)
Un divan a New York Chantal Akerman 10.04.96 153,200
Un samedi sur terre Diane Bertrand 28.08.96 9,000
Y aura-t-il de la neige a Sandrine Veysset 18.12.96 829,300
Noel?
1997
Artemisia Agnès Merlet 10.09.97 105,000
Autre chose a foutre Carole Giacobbi N.A. >5,000
qu aimer (55m)
Autre coté de la mer, U Dominique Cabrera 21.05.97 169,100
Clubbed to Death Yolande Zauberman 25.06.97 12,600
Eau douce (58m) Marie Vermillard 22.01.97 >5,000
J'ai horreur de l'amour Laurence Ferreira Barbosa 11.06.97 199,600
Marquise Vera Belmont 27.08.97 471,300
Nénette et Boni Claire Denis 29.01.97 84,700
Nettoyage a sec Anne Fontaine 24.09.97 431,700
Nous sommes tous encore Anne-Marie Miéville 19.03.97 23,100
id
Nuits blanches Sophie Deflandre 12.02.97 >5,000
Portraits chinois Martine Dugowson 25.06.97 107,400
Post co'itum animal triste Brigitte Roùan 03.09.97 213,300
Quadrille Valerie Lemercier 23.04.97 133,700
Rimbaud Verlaine Agnieszka Holland 05.03.97 27,100
Romaine Agnès Obadia 15.01.97 30,100
Sinon, oui Claire Simon 08.10.97 20,000
Sous les pieds des femmes Rachida Krim 26.11.97 24,200
Translantique Christine Laurent 03.09.97 >5,000
Un frère Sylvie Verheyde 26.11.97 54,100
1998
A vendre Laetitia Masson 26.08.98 372,400
Bruits de la ville, Les Sophie Comtet 18.11.98 >5,000
C'est la tangente que je Charlotte Silvera 05.08.98 13,600
préfère
Comptoir, Le Sophie Tatischeff 09.09.98 21,000
292
Dame du jeu, La (1995) Anna Brasi 28.10.98 N.A.

Demain et encore demain, Dominique Cabrera 14.01.98 8,600
Journal 1995
Dormez, je le veux Irene Jouannet 16.09.98 >5,000
Examen de minuit, U Daniele Dubroux 07.10.98 39,900
Inconnu de Strasbourg, U Valeria Sarmiento 19.08.98 24,480
Mémoires d'immigrés Yamina Benguigi 04.02.98 82,200
(1997) (Doc)
Mère Christain, La Myriam Boyer 09.12.98 *15,200
Place Venderne Nicole Garcia 07.10.98 *926,700
Si bleu si calme Eliane de Latour 30.09.98 >5,000
Si je faime . . . prends Jeanne Labrune 02.09.98 104,300
garde à toi
Un grand cri d'amour Josiane Balasko 07.01.98 442,300
Victor . . . pendant quii Sandrine Veysset 16.12.98 26,200
est trop tard
1999
Augustin, roi du Kung Fu Anne Fontaine 25.08.99 31,600
Buche, La Daniele Thompson 24.11.99 1,139,700
Derrière, Le Valerie Lemercier 28.04.99 872,700
Du bleu jusqu'en Sarah Levy 01.12.99 N.A.
Amérique
Enfants du siede, Les Diane Kurys 29.09.99 483,400
Haut les coeursl Sólveig Anspach 03.11.99 175,600
Je veux tout Guila Braoudé 17.11.99 123,600
Lila Lili Marie Vermillard 06.01.99 21,800
Mon pére, ma mère, mes Charlotte de Turkheim 16.06.99 714,600
frères et mes soeurs
Nouvelle Eve, La Catherine Corsini 27.01.99 422,000
Feau d'homme, coeur de Hélène Angel 15.12.99 *15,900
bète
Peau neuve Emilie Deleuze 15.09.99 26,400
Puce, La (42m) Emmanuelle Bercot 17.11.99 10,500
Qui piume la lune? Christine Carrière 22.12.99 *124,600
Revolution sexuelle n'a Judith Cahen 27.01.99 5,300
pas eu lieu, La
Rien a fair e Marion Vernoux 01.12.99 *69,300
Romance Catherine Breillat 14.04.99 343,900
Toni Philomène Esposito 20.01.99 >5,000
Vie ne me fait pas peur, Noémie Lvovsky 18.11.99 108,100
La
Vénus Beauté (Institut) Tonie Marshall 27.01.99 *1,326,800
* Viewing figures from 1999 a: i 2000 combined.
293
Supplementary Filmography:
Films Directed by Women 2000
Note: Viewing figures taken from Le film Frangais, No. 2866, 26 January
2001.
Film Director(s) Release Date Viewership
Aie Sophie Fillières 06.09.00 81,600

Après la reconciliation Anne-Marie Miéville 27.12.00 N.A.
Autres filles, Les Caroline Vignai 30.08.00 23,300
Baise-moi Virginie Despentes, 28.06.00 50,000
Coralie Trinh Thi
Beau travail Claire Denis 04.02.00 71,900
Bronx-Barbès Eliane de Latour 22.11.00 12,530
Qa ira mieux demain Jeanne Labrune 15.11.00 792,400
Captive, La Chantal Akerman 27.09.00 51,000
Cendres du paradis, Les Dominique Crèvecoeur 20.04.00 >5,000
(55m)
Chambre obscure, La Marie-Christine 29.11.00 10,300
Questerbert
Confort moderne Dominique Choisy 12.07.00 12,000
Du poil sous les roses Agnès Obadia 01.11.00 24,700
Elle et lui au 14ème étage Sophie Blondy 08.03.00 >5,000
Epouse-moi Harriet Martin 19.01.00 73,800
Filles ne savent pas nager, Anne-Sophie Biro 18.10.00 6,700
Les
Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Les Agnès Varda 05.07.00 77,300
(Doc)
Goùt des autres, Le Agnès Jaoui 01.03.00 3,761,600
Love Me Laetitia Masson 23.02.00 55,500
Mamirolle Brigitte Coscas 19.01.00 N.A.
Monsieur contre Madame Claudine Bories 04.10.00 >5,000
(Doc)
295
SUPPLEMENTARY F I L M O G R A P H Y : FILMS D I R E C T E D BY W O M E N 2000
Nadia et les hippopotames Dominique Cabrera 22.03.00 22,200

Nos traces silencieuses Sophie Bredier, 29.03.00 6,100
(Doc)(52m) Myriam Aziza
Paris, mon petit corps est Franssou Prenant 07.06.00 >5,8000
bien las de ce grand
monde
Petite cbérie Anne Villacèque 31.05.00 37,800
Petite conversation Hélène Lapiower 14.06.00 8,000
familiale (Doc) (65m)
Premier du nom, Le (Doc) Sabine Franel 24.05.00 5,100
Princesses Sylvie Verheyde 13.09.00 30,400
Saint-Cyr Patricia Mazuy 17.05.00 460,900
Salsa Joyce Sherman Bunuel 09.02.00 278,200
Sans plomb Muriel Teodori 19.07.00 >5,000
Secret, Le Virginie Wagon 01.11.00 18,300
Spirale du pianiste, La Judith Abitbol 14.06.00 >5,000
(Doc)
Terriens, Les (Doc) Ariane Doublet 28.06.00 55,400
Tot ou tard Anne-Marie Etienne 19.07.00 46,700
Une vraie jeune fille (1976) Catherine Breillat 07.06.00 38,400
Vie moderne, La Laurence Feirreira Barbosa 01.03.00 70,700
Vive nous! Camille de Casabianca 26.01.00 9,700
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306
Index of Film Titles and
Selected Proper Names
Page numbers in bold type indicate a substantial entry; page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.
A Comedy in Six Unnatural Angel, Hélène 127, 216 Baye, Nathalie 32, 98, 99,
Acts 193 n.2 Annabelle partagée 56, 289 105, 1 7 9 , 2 3 0 , 2 3 9 , 2 4 1
A Dry White Season 255 Annie Hall 168 Beau travail 283
A la folie 113, 132 n.6, 141 Anspach, Sólveig 109 n.4, Beauvoir, Simone de 1, 8, 54,
A Question of Silence 193 n.2, 120, 1 5 1 , 2 2 7 n . l 3 112, 147, 1 5 1 , 2 8 4
226 n . l Après l'amour 89, 90, 9 1 , Beineix, Jean-Jacques 4, 55,
A vendre 65, 81 n.5, 2 3 4 , 2 3 6 - 120, 161 n.13 94, 177
240, 249 Argent de poche, U 58 Belle de jour 82
Abel Gance bier et demain Artemisia 125, 141, 270, 2 7 3 - Belle noiseuse, La 141
146 276, 275, 278 Belle verte, La 8, 18 n . l 8 , 194
Abril,Victorial80, 187, 188 Audry, Jacqueline 1, 229, 2 5 1 , n.17
Adjani, Isabelle 55, 175, 204, 279 n.l Bellon, Yannick 4, 16 n . l 2 ,
230, 2 6 9 , 2 8 0 n . l 2 Augustin 194 n . l 3 77, 84, 85, 109 n.3, 159,
Adolescente, L' 26 Augustin roi du King Fu 80 197, 1 9 8 , 2 1 6
Adultere mode d'emploi 1 0 0 - n.2, 194 n.13 Belmont, Vera 4, 27, 30, 125,
102, 106 Auteuil, Daniel 181, 183, 269, 270, 272
Agathe 88 186 Ben et Benedict 84
Age des possibles, U 7 0 - 7 2 , Autre coté de la mer, U 107, Benguigui, Yamina 7, 151,
72, 81 n.9, 90, 159 1 5 1 , 1 5 3 - 1 5 5 , 156 152, 1 5 5 , 2 6 4 , 2 8 2
Agent trouble 226 n.7 Autres filles, Les 52 n.8, 283 Bercot, Emmanuelle 1 1 , 52
Ainsi soient-elles 73 Aziza, Myriam 147, 161 n.16 n.8
Akerman, Chantal 2, 16 n.7, Berléand, Francois 103, 201
1 7 n . l 2 , 5 2 n . 4 , 136, Bacri, Jean-Pierre 32, 86, 202, Bernheim, Nicole-Lise 147
137, 1 9 4 n . l 4 , 207 283 Berry, Richard 32, 85, 102,
Alessandrin, Patrick and Lisa Baise-moi 13, 109 n.2, 250 186, 1 8 9 , 2 0 5 , 2 0 6 , 2 4 1 ,
73, 81 n.10 n.15, 2 8 3 , 284 242
Alice Constant 142 Bai du gouverneur, Le 2 5 3 , Berto, Juliette 4, 197
All About Eve 272 257-259,260,261,263 Besson, Luc 4, 204, 269
Allée des rois, L' 266 Balance, La 205 Bhaji on the Beach 243
Allio, René 136, 142, 279 n.2 Balasko, Josiane 1, 4, 6, 8, 19 Billetdoux, Rachel 38
Aloise 252 n.25, 47, 92, 165-167, Binet, Catherine 52 n.6, 146
Amant magnifìque, L 46, 9 4 - 169, 185-189, 188, 192, Binoche, Juliette 1 6 9 - 1 7 1 ,
95,99 193 n.5, 1 9 5 n . l 8 , 2 1 1 , 194 n.14, 276
Amants du Pont Neuf, Les 212, 224, 227 n.16, 230, Birkin, Jane 1 0 1 , 148, 149
113 2 3 2 , 2 3 3 , 282 Black Panthers 148
Amants terribles, Les 121 Bankolé, Isaach de 212, 2 1 3 , Blancke, Sandrine 47, 48, 49
Amour nu, L' 4, 85, 89, 108 255 Blier, Bertrand 64, 229, 249
Amour viole, L' 16 n.12, 109 Barbare, La 38 n.3
n.3, 197, 198 Bardon, Patricia 56 Blue Steel 227 n.16
Amoureux , Les 42, 6 3 - 6 4 , Bardot, Brigitte 74, 82, 186, Bohringer, Romane 55, 74,
66,67 195n.l9 75,76
Anemone 166, 167, 169, 179, Barrault, Marie-Christine 4 1 , Boisson, Christine 89, 214,
2 1 1 , 2 1 3 , 2 1 4 , 215, 241 92, 1 1 6 , 2 1 0 266
307
INDEX
Bonnaire, Sandrine 216, 234, Chesnais, Patrick 4 5 , 96 Dalle, Beatrice 55, 69, 77, 82,
236, 269 Chimère 77, 120 197, 223
Bonnie and Clyde 228 Chinoise, La 252 Dames de la Cote, Les 266
Border Line 100, 121-122, Chocolate, 42, 2 2 1 , 2 5 3 , 2 5 5 - Danton 49, 252
161 n.13, 205 257,256,258,260,261, Darrieux, Danielle 127, 171
Bories, Claudine 38 280 n.5 David, Myriam 42, 91
Bouchez, Elodie 3 3 , 69 Chomienne, Caroline 175 Dayan, Josée 147, 226 n.3,
Boulevard des Hirondelles Chronique d'une banlieue or- 2 2 7 n . l 5 , 266
270 dinaire 154 De sable et de sang 107
Boyer, Myriam 113, 115, 116 Circuit Carole 116, 117-118, Defense de savoir 197
Boys on the Side 243 118, 119 Deleuze, Emilie 52 n.4, 107,
Brandstròm, Charlotte 27, Citti, Christine 89, 110 n.8 108
132 n.5 Classified people 150 Delsol, Paula 84
Braoudé, Guila 136, 180 Clement, Magali 89 Demain et encore demain 1 5 6 -
Brasseur, Claude 154, 207 Clementine Tango 4, 42, 55 157, 157, 161 n.24
Breillat, Catherine 2, 4, 6, 13, Cléo de 5 à 7 53 n.U, 56, Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans,
36, 38, 52 n.5, 55, 83, 236 Les 147
89, 98, 100, 102, 105, Clouzot, Claire 85, 106 Demy, Jacquesl47, 149, 150
120, 144, 205, 207, 209, Clubbed to Death 61, 6 8 - 7 0 Deneuve, Catherine 82, 199,
281,283 Cluzet, Francois 179, 256 200, 2 0 1 - 2 0 3 , 203, 226
Broken Mirrors 160 n.7 Cocktail Molotov 86, 113, n.7
Bruits de la ville, Les 80 n.2 229 Denis, Claire 2, 4, 6, 19 n.22,
Bruni-Tedeschi, Valeria 7, 32, Coeurs croisés 70 35, 42, 4 5 , 52 n.4, 65,
35,43,57,60-62,61, Collard, Cyril 19 n.25, 55 77, 107, 120, 1 4 7 , 2 1 9 ,
79, 138 Coma 198 2 2 3 - 2 2 5 , 2 5 3 , 255, 257,
Buche, La 8, 127, 180, 181 Comencini, Francesca 56 282, 283
Comment je me suis dispute Depardieu, Gerard 49, 167,
Qa ira mieux demain 283 . . . ma vie sexuelle 81 n.8 226 n.6, 229, 252, 266,
Qa n'arrive qu'aux autres 241 Companeez, Nina 26, 266 269
Cabrera, Dominique 7, 107, Company of Strangers, The Depart du pére, Le 81 n.7
140, 151, 154-156, 157, 243 Dernier baiser, Le 167
158, 159, 245, 250 n.14, Comptoir, Le 266, 2 6 7 - 2 6 8 , Dernier domicile connu 211
282 269 Derrière, Le 8, 185, 1 8 9 - 1 9 1 ,
Cage aux folles, La 189, 195 Comte de Monte-Cristo, Le 190, 192
n.21 266 Desforges, Regine 3 3 , 34, 55
Cahen, Judith 19 n.22, 80, Contes clandestins 55 Despentes, Virginie 13, 250
156-159, 194 n.10, 245, Contes pervers 55 n.15, 283
282 Contre-allée, La 53 n.13, 136, Desplechin, Arnaud 6, 7, 62,
Cahier volé, Le 27, 3 3 - 3 4 , 37, 200 81 n.8, 129
51,92 Corsini, Catherine 6, 35, 42, Destin de Juliette, Le 46, 84,
Calle, Sophie 161 n.24, 230, 63, 64, 81 n.4, 9 1 , 120, 86, 8 7 - 8 9 , 108
245, 246, 247, 248, 250 176,198,200,201,280 Desvos, Emmanuelle 62
n.13 n.7 Devers, Claire 6, 77, 107, 109
Camille Claudel 55, 269, 2 7 3 , Còte, Laurence 117,118,132 n . l , 120, 1 6 0 n . l 2 , 197,
276 n.3, 176 219, 220, 224, 226 n.2,
Canto, Marilyne 140, 154 Cote d'amour, La 109 n . l , 227 n.13
Cap Canaille 197, 286 109 n.5 Diabolo menthe 26, 32, 34,
Carax, Léos 4, 113 Coup de foudre 4, 32, 84, 8 6 - 86
Cardinale, Claudia 109 n . l , 8 7 , 5 7 , 9 0 , 9 1 , 1 0 8 , 113, Diefenthal, Frederic 60, 180
112,263,264 116,131 Dieu, I'amant de ma mère et le
Carducci, Annette 175 Cours après moi que je fils du charcutier 110
Carrière, Christine 6, 4 5 , 51 t'attrape 193 n.3 n.12
n.2, 116, 1 1 9 , 1 2 5 , 126, Coute que coute 136, 1 3 8 - Dieu que les femmes sont
281 140, 139 amoureuses 110 n.7
Casablanca, Camille de 180 Crèvecoeur, Dominique 55 1789 252
Caste cuminelle 150 Crime de M. Stil, Le 226 n.2 Dormez je le veux 38, 4 1 , 52
Célarié, Clementine 169, 170 Crise, La 8, 1 8 3 - 1 8 5 , 195 n.7
Cellier, Caroline 160 n.8, 200 n.17 Douce France 81 n.6
101 nuits, Les 147 Croisade d'Anne Buridan, La Dress, Evelyne 176
Céremonie, La 226 n.9 158 Du bleu jusqu'en Amérique 80
Chabrol, Claude 177, 216, Cuau, Emmanuelle 116, 117 n.2
226 n.9, 2 2 7 n . l 5 Cukor, George 142, 169 Dubreuil, Charlotte 89, 109
Chacun cherche son chat 81 Cyrano de Bergerac 226 n.6, n.5, 111, 112, 116
n.13 252 Dubroux, Daniele 38, 100,
Champetier, Caroline 67, 217 C'est la tangente que je préfère 121, 175, 205, 2 2 7 n . l 7
Charles et Lucie 109 n . l , 229 38, 4 0 - 4 1 Dugowson, Martine 6, 51 n.2,
Charlotte Forever 37 C'est Madame la France que 52 n . 3 , 70, 7 3 , 74, 120,
Cher Frangin 261 tu préferesi 81 n.7 141,281
308
INDEX
Dulac, Germaine 2 Fils préféré, Le 8, 127, 1 2 8 - Haine, La 67

Duras, Marguerite 2, 16 n.12, 129, 130 Haut, bas, fragile 132 n.4
88, 252 Flambeuse, La 200 Haut les coeurs! 109 n.4, 120
Dussolier, André 121, 172, Fleury, Joy 92, 125, 189 Havre 4, 287
173, 195 n.20, 199 Fontaine, Anne 67, 68, 80 n.2, Hexagone 81 n.6
Duval, Daniel 98, 99, 113 1 9 4 n . l 3 , 216, 217 Hiegel, Catherine 154, 187,
Ford, John 1 2 , 2 2 8 193 n.5
Easy Rider 228 Fort Saganne 252 Histoire d'Adele H 55
Ecoffey, Jean-Philippe 75, 201 Fragments pour un discours Histoiresd'A 16 n.12, 134,
Ecoute voir 226 n.7 théàtral 147 206
Eden Miseria 269, 278, 289 Frequence meurtre 127, 136, Histoires d'amour fìnissent
Effrontee, L' 37 198,199-200,200,201, mal en general, Les 67,
Elia Kazan, outsider 147 204,216 68,70
Elisa 37 Fugueuses, Les 131 n.3, 250 Hitchcock, Alfred 12, 121,
Elle voulait faire du cinema n.12 203
230 Holland, Agnieszka 16 n.7,
Elles ne pensent qu'à ca 109 Gainsbourg, Charlotte 37, 1 1 0 n . l 4 , 279 n.3, 280
n . l , 111 101, 180, 249 n.4 n.13
Embellie, L ' 1 0 9 n.l Galères de femmes 161 n.22 Homme fragile, U 85-86, 89,
Embrasse-moi 4 5 - 4 6 , 60, 288 Gar ce, La 197, 2 0 5 - 2 0 6 , 208, 106, 1 2 5 , 2 4 1
En avoir (ou pas) 6 3 , 6 5 - 6 7 , 209 Homme imagine, L' 56
66, 136, 159 Garcia, Nicole 6, 8, 121, 1 2 7 - Hommes préfèrent les grosses,
Enfants de salaud 127, 176, 129, 1 9 8 , 2 0 1 , 2 3 9 , 2 4 0 , Les 186
179-180 250 n.10, 2 6 1 , 2 8 2 Honorable Catherine, L 194
Enfants du désordre, Les 77 Garsonne, La 251 n.ll
Enfants du siede, Les 1 4 1 , Gazon maudit 1, 8, 92, 165, Huillet, Daniele 146, 279 n.2
270, 2 7 6 - 2 7 8 180, 1 8 5 , 1 8 6 - 1 8 8 , 1 8 8 , Huppert, Caroline 205, 230
Eraserhead 220 191, 1 9 2 , 2 3 3 Huppert, Isabelle 86, 87, 90,
Esposito, Philomène 6, 27, Gens normaux n'ont rien 205, 206, 2 3 0 - 2 3 2 , 233,
175, 197, 226 n.4 d'exceptionnel, Les 6, 57, 226 n.9
Et Dieu créa la femme 82, 195 59-61,62,62,63,79
n.19 George quii 45, 252 // était une fois la téle 147
Etat de bonheur permanent, L' Germinai 252 // suffìt d'une fois 194 n.l 1
155 Ghorab-Volta, Zai'da 67, 70, Inconnu de Strasbourg, L' 226
Etchegaray, Franchise 89, 90 151, 1 6 0 n . l 0 , 282 n.10
Eté meurtrier, V 55 G/g/251 Incruste, L' 52 n.4
Eté prochain, L' 111 Gilda 74 India Song 16 n.12, 252
Europa Europa 279 n.3 Girardot, Annie 167, 168, Indochine 269
Examen de minuit, L' 227 193 n.3, 2 1 0 - 2 1 2 , 226 Inter dit d'amour 53 n.10, 81
n.17 n.8 n.4
Girardot, Hippolyte 88, 90, Interdits du monde, Les 161
Fabian, Francoise 180, 193 94 n.19
n.8 Giraud, Roland 38, 172, 173 Intrus, L' 197, 205, 2 0 6 - 2 0 7 ,
Fabuleux destin de Madame Giraudeau, Bernard 90,128, 208, 209
Petlet, Le 180 272 Issermann, Aline 4 5 - 4 7 , 84,
Faustine et le bel été 26 Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Les 94, 110 n.12, 142, 179,
Félicité55, 102, 1 4 4 , 2 0 5 161 n . 1 8 , 2 8 3 281
Féminin masculine 160 n.9 Godard, Agnès 35, 177, 222, It Happened One Night 228
Femme de Jean, La 16 n . l 2 , Godard, Jean-Luc 13, 123,
84 141, 144, 161 n.15, 204, Jacques Rivette le veilleur 147
Femme enfant, La 38 229, 249 n.2 Jacquot de Nantes 147, 1 4 9 -
Femme flic, La 211 Goùt des autres, Le 2 8 3 , 284 150
Femmes d'Islam 151 Grain de sable, Le 136-138 J'ai horreur de l'amour 80 n.l
Femmes et le cinema, Les 147 Grand-mères de l'Islam 134 J'ai pas sommeil 219, 2 2 2 -
Ferran, Pascale 6, 7, 19 n.22, Grande petite 56 225,223
54, 70, 72, 90, 127, 129, Grande vadrouille, La 194 J'embrasse pas 64
130,159 n.15 Jane B. par Agnès V. 101,
Ferreira Barbosa, Laurence 6, Grapes of Wrath, The 228 147, 148-149
57, 60, 80 n . l , 177, 281 Grassian, Dolores 167 Jaoui, Agnès 283
Fète des pères, La 125, 189 Grinberg, Anouk 38, 46, 64, Jar din oublié, Le 161 n.17
Feuillère, Edwige 82, 194 n . l 1 249 n.4 Je suis Pierre Rivière 279 n.2
Fiancee du pirate, La 54, 167 Guerre sans nom, La 261 Je veux tout 136, 180-181
Fille de d'Artagnan, La 269 Guilmain, Claudine 26 Jean de Fior ette 10, 252
Fille du magicien, La 38 Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du
Fille préférée, La 53 n.12 Bredin: Dessins et merv- Commerce 1080 Bruxel-
Fillières, Sophie 56, 61 eilles 146 les 16 n.12, 1 3 6 , 2 0 7
Fils du requin, Le 6, 4 5 , 48, Guy, Alice 147, 161 n.17, Jeanne d'Are 269
49, 273 165 Jetée, La 246
309
INDEX
Jeunesse sans Dieu 280 n.7 Léaud, Jean-Pierre 26, 39, Mère Christain, La 113, 1 1 4 -
Jeux de la comtesse Dolingen 212,243 115,116
de Gratz, Les 52 n.6 Lefèbvre, Genevieve 92, 281 Méril, Macha 1 6 9 , 1 7 0 , 2 3 5
Jeux d'artifices 4, 42, 91 Lemercier, Valerie 8, 166, 167, Merlet, Agnès 6, 4 5 , 4 8 , 49,
Joints de mines sont plus 169,189,190, 192,195 125, 1 4 1 , 270, 2 7 3 , 274,
étanches que les chambres n.20 276
à air de nos vélos, Les Les Girls 142 Messidor 229, 243
150 Lieu du crime, Le 226 n.7 Miéville, Anne-Marie 16 n.7,
J oli mai, Le 158 Lila Lili 4 3 , 7 7 - 7 8 , 79, 120 131 n.3
Jouannet, Irene 38, 4 1 , 52 n.7, Lindon, Vincent 32, 183, 195 Milena 125, 269, 272
197,205-207 n.17 Miller, Claude 55, 204, 230,
Jour des rois, Le 1 2 7 - 1 2 8 , Liste noire, La 226 n.8 232
128, 129, 130 Lio 125, 207, 243 Mima 27, 289
Journal du séducteur, Le 175 Lipinska, Christine 27, 3 3 , 34, Mina Tannenbaum 6, 51 n.2,
Juge est une femme, Le 227 52 n.9, 92, 279 n.2 52 n.3, 7 3 - 7 5 , 76, 79,
n.15 Louise I'insoumise 27, 2 8 - 3 0 , H O n . l O , 141
Julie Lescaut 227 n.15 29, 37, 4 1 , 210, 280 n.9 Minne, Vingènue libertine 251
Jupon rouge, Le 9 2 - 9 3 , 108, Love, etc. 80 n . l , 161 n.13 Miou-Miou 86, 87, 166, 2 1 1 ,
161 n.13 Love Me 65, 249 n.5 217
Lucie Aubrac 269 Misérables, Les 266
Kahn, Cédric 65, 81 n.8 Lucrèce Borgia 82 Mississipi One 249 n.8
Kaplan, Nelly 2, 37, 54, 109 Lumière et Compagnie 147 Mitsou 251
n . l , 146, 167, 193 n.8, Lumières sur un massacre 161 Mnouchkine, Ariane 252
229 n.20 Moi Ivan, toi Abraham 68,
Karnaval 63 Lvovsky, Noémie 6, 28, 3 4 - 2 5 3 , 2 5 9 - 2 6 0 , 260, 261
Kermadec, Liliane de 234, 36,57,61,68,73,281 Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant
252, 270, 272 égorgé ma mère, ma
Keufs,Les4, 186,211,212- Ma chérie 116-117, 119, soeur et mon frère 279
213, 214, 225 285 n.2
Kiberlain, Sandrine 7, 60, 6 3 , Ma vie est un enfer 8, 186 Moine et la sorcière, Le 2 6 6 -
65, 66, 61, 79, 195 n.20, Magimel, Benoft 3 3 , 276 267, 268
237, 249 n.5 Mairesse, Valérie 166 Molière 252
Klapisch, Cédric 6, 77, 81 Mais qu'est-ce qu'elles veu- Mon cher sujet 131 n.3
n.13 lentì 134, 152, 171 Mon coeur est rouge 45
Koleva, Maria 1 1 , 146, 147, Maison de jade, La 94, 9 5 - 9 6 , Mon homme 64
155 100 Mon pére ce héros 37
Krim, Rachida 113, 151, 2 6 1 , Maison de Jeanne, La 8 9 - 9 0 , Mon pére, ma mère, mes
263, 282 9 1 , 125 frères et mes soeurs 180,
Kung Fu Master 100, 101, Maldoror, Sarah 3 3 , 147 181
106, 148 Malheurs de Sophie, Les 251 Monde à Venvers, Le 132 n.5
Kurys, Diane 2, 4, 26, 27, 3 2 - Maman et la putain, La 243 Moon, Sarah 147, 249 n.8
34, 84, 86, 87, 8 9 - 9 1 , Mamies, Les 171 Moreau, Jeanne 26
109 n.6, 113, 1 2 0 , 1 3 2 Man No Run 147 Mortelle randonnée 55, 204,
n.6, 141, 142, 144, 229, Marceau, Sophie 272, 273 230
2 4 1 , 242, 270, 276, 278, Mareuil, Stephanie de 70 Muret, Paule 100
281 Mariée était en noir, La 226 Mur murs 147
n.8
L.627 219 Marius et Jeanette 140 Nadia et les hippopotames
La Baule Les Pins 27, 3 2 - 3 3 , Marker, Chris 158, 246 140, 250 n.14
3 7 , 5 1 , 109 n.6, 113, Marquise 270, 2 7 2 - 2 7 3 , 278 Nanas, Les 1 6 9 - 1 7 1 , 174
2 4 1 , 242 Marshall, Tonie 1, 6, 8, 19 Nathalie Granger 16 n.12,
Labrune, Jeanne 6, 13, 19 n.22, 9 1 , 100, 105, 121, Nea 37
n.22, 94, 98, 107, 110 127, 1 6 0 n . l 2 , 176, 179, Neige 197, 219, 286
n.13, 1 2 5 , 2 1 6 , 2 8 3 180,211,213,214,282 Nénette et Boni 4 2 - 4 4 , 4 5 ,
Lafont, Bernadette 54, 167, Masson, Laetitia 6, 6 3 , 65, 5 1 , 77, 120
177,210,243,244 66, 81 n.5, 159, 234, Nettoyage à sec 216, 2 1 7 -
Laisse un peu d'amour 160 236, 249 n.5, 283 219
n.10 Mastroianni, Chiara 175, 237 Neufmois 194 n . l 6
Lanoé, Annick 169-172 Max et Jérémie 197, 225 Nikita 204
Larmes de sang 134 Mazuy, Patricia 52 n.4, 216, No Sex Last Night 161 n.24,
Laurent, Christine 142, 143, 280n.l4,283 230, 2 4 5 - 2 4 8 , 247, 249
269 Meffre, Pomme 27, 136, 137, Noce bianche 37
Lavanant, Dominique 169, 140 Noces barbares, Les 52 n . l 0
170 Mémoires d'immigrés: Noir et blanc 107, 219, 2 2 0 -
Le Bihan, Samuel 105, 107 I'heritage maghrébin 151— 221, 2 2 5 , 280 n.5
LeGarrec, Nicole 150, 285 153,153,264 Nom de la rose, Le 266
Le Rigoleur, Dominique 88, Mépris, Le 1 4 1 , 144 Nos traces silencieuses 161
94 Merci la vie 249 n.4 n.16
310
INDEX
NouvelleEve, La 91, 120, Petits matins, Les 229 Revolution sexuelle n'a pas eu
177-179,275,192 Pialat, Maurice 144, 161 n.l5, lieu, La 158, 194 n.10
Nuit américaine, La 141, 146 207, 219 Richard, Nathalie 63, 79, 81
Nuit porte jarretelles, La 55, Pie et pie et colégram 26 n.4
56, 58-59, 62, 79, 176 Pierrot le fou 204, 229 Rien à faire 136, 138
Nuits de la pleine lune, Les 58 Pisier, Marie-France 169-171, Rien que des mensonges 100
Nuits fauves, Les 19 n.25, 55 253, 257 Rimbaud Verlaine 110 n.14,
Nuytten, Bruno 55, 269 Piste du télégraphe, La 234, 280n.l3
239,270-272,271,278 Rivette, Jacques 83, 141, 169,
Obadia, Agnès 158, 175, 194 Place Venderne 8, 198, 201, 255, 266, 269
n.9 202, 249n.l0 Rivière Espérance 266
Ogier, Bulle 105, 117,243, Plaisir d'amour 193 n.8 Roboh, Caroline 4, 42, 55
244 Plein fer 226 n.3 Rochefort, Christiane 28, 58
Old Acquaintance 74 Plogoff, des pierres contre des Rohmer, Eric 58, 83, 90
Olivia 251 fusils 150 Romaine 158, 175-176, 179
Ombre du doute, U 45, 46- Pointe courte, La 10 Romance 39, 52 n.5, 83, 100,
48,45,49,50,125,198 Poker 63, 198,200,204 102-105,104,106, 120
On a perdu la cuisse de Jupi- Police 207, 219 Romuald et Juliette 4, 181-
ter 211 Portrait d'une jeune fille de la 183, 183,185
Opéra-Mouffe, L' 148 fin des années 60, à Brux- Roseaux sauvages,Les 52 n.4,
Oublie-moi 34, 57, 61-62, 63, elles 52 n.4 64
79 Portraits chinois 70, 120, 161 Rosier, Michèle 45, 46, 60,
Outremer96, 131 n.2, 132 n.13 252, 250 n.ll
n.6, 261-263, 265 Post co'itum animai triste 94, Rosine 45, 116, 118-120,
96-98, 97, 100, 121, 125, 126, 136
Pacòme, Maria 167, 184 122, 161 n.13 Roùan, Brigitte 6, 94, 96, 97,
Palcy, Euzhan 4, 253, 254, Poupaud, Melvin 60, 175 101, 121, 122, 131 n.2,
282 Pourquoi pas! 89, 90, 171, 132 n.6, 137, 261,282
Papa est parti, maman aussi 195 n.21 Rouge Baiser 4, 27, 30-32,
52 n.9 Premier voyage 52 n.9, 229 31,37,51
Paradis, Vanessa 37 Presle, Micheline 105, 127, Rue Cases-Nègres 4, 253,254-
Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les 176,180,214 255,261,266
149 Pretty Woman 160 n.8 Ruptures 89, 110 n.8
Parfait amour! 100, 103, 205, Princesses 250 n.l5, 283
208-210, 226 n.ll Prisonnières 210-211
Paris nous appartient 266 Prisonniers de Mao, Les 30 Sac de noeuds 4, 187,230,
Part de Vautre, La 110 n.13 Puce, La 52 n.8 232-234, 233, 243, 248
Pascal, Christine 55, 89, 100- Pudeur et l'impudeur, La 161 Sacrifiés, Les 280 n.10
102, 125, 142, 144, 146, n.24 Saint-Cyr 280 n.14, 283
161 n.14, 197,205,230, Pullman paradis 250 n.ll Salaire de la peur, Le 229
231,239,241 Sale comme un ange 205, 207-
Pas d'amour sans amour 176, Quadrille 189 208, 209
179 QuaiNol 227 n.l5 Salsa 280 n.4
Pas très catholique 91, 121, 400 coups, Les 26, 34, 48, Sam suffìt 176-177
211,213-216,215 243 Sambizanga 33
Peau d'homme, coeur de bète Que personne ne bouge! 151, Samie, Catherine 169, 170,
127, 216 227n.l3 193 n.5
Peau neuve 107-108 Quelque part vers Conakry Sans toit ni hi 3, 4, 81 n.3,
Peaux de vaches 216 253 148, 234-236, 236, 237,
Péché véniel, péché morfei 27, Qui plume la lune? 51 n.2, 248, 249, 272,
51 n.l 125,126 Sans un cri 125-126, 216
Pedale douce 189 Quignaux, Isabelle 150, 151 Sarmiento,Valeria 226 n.10
Pentimento 176 Qu'est-ce que tu veux, Julie? Schiffman, Suzanne 266
Pére Noèl est une ordure, Le 89 Sebastian, Isabel 136, 200
185 Qu'est-ce qu'on attend pour Second Sex, The 1,19 n.24,
Perii jeune, Le 81 n. 8 ètre heureux! 141, 171 20n.29, 54, 112, 151
Perder, Mireille 47, 237, 255, Secret du chevalier d Eon, Le
267 251
Personne ne m'aime 131 n.3, Rambo 172 Seigner, Mathilde 119,218
243-245, 244, 249 Rappeneau, Elisabeth 127, Sept en attente 89, 90-91
Petit prince a dit, Le 125, 239, 136,198 Serreau, Coline 1, 2, 4, 6, 8,
241-242, 249 Réage, Pauline 103 12, 89, 90, 125, 134,
Petite allumeuse, La 38, 121 Recreations 138 141, 152, 161 n.20, 165,
Petite chérie 283 Règie du je, La 90 166, 169, 171-173, 182,
Petite voleuse, La 37 Réponses de femme 148 184, 185, 188, 192, 194
Petites 34, 35 Reprise, La 136 n.17,282
Petits arrangements avec les Retour de Martin Guerre, Le Seyrig, Delphine 136, 137,
morts 127, 129-130 266 147, 252
31 I
INDEX
Si je faime . . . prends garde à Travolta et moi 52 n.4 Vampires, Les 196

toi 94, 9 8 - 9 9 , 99, 100, Treilhou, Marie-Claude 55- Varda, Agnès 2 - 4 , 10, 16
161 n.13 57, 89, 127, 147 n.12, 35, 53 n . l l , 55, 56,
Sida, paroles de famille 151 3 7 ° 2 l e m a t i n 5 5 , 82, 94, 177 73, 77, 81 n.3, 84, 100,
Sida, une histoire qui ria pas 36Fillette4, 36, 3 8 - 4 0 , 40, 101,147-150,159,234-
de fin 151 41,51,207 236, 272, 283
Signé Charlotte 205, 2 3 0 - 2 3 2 , Tresgot, Annie 147 Vas-y maman 193 n.3
2 3 3 , 248, 249 Triche,La4, 159, 1 9 7 , 2 1 6 - Vénus Beauté (Institut) 1,8,
Silences du palais, Les 280 217,218,219,225 1 0 0 , 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 , 108, 109
n.ll T r i n h T h i , Coralie 13, 250 Verheyde, Sylvie 42, 44, 4 5 ,
Silvera, Charlotte 27, 28, 38, n.15, 283 250 n.15, 283
4 0 , 4 1 , 2 1 0 , 280 n.9 Trintignant, Nadine 52 n.9, Vermillard, Marie 4 3 , 77, 78,
Simeon 255, 280 n.4 9 4 , 9 5 , 111, 131 n.3, 120
Simon, Claire 7, 19 n.22, 77, 147,197,229,241,250 Vernoux, Marion 19 n.22, 80
1 2 1 - 1 2 3 , 135, 136, 1 3 8 - n.12 n . l , 131 n.3, 136, 138,
140, 159, 160 n . l l , 282 Tristesse et beauté 92, 110 140, 2 4 3 , 245, 282
Simone Barbès ou la vertu 55, n.ll Véronique ou l'été de mes
56, 5 7 - 5 8 , 62, 79 Trois hommes et un couffin 1, treize ans 26
Sinon, oui 77, 121, 122-125, 4, 125, 165, 168, 169, Vertiges 1 4 2 - 1 4 3 , 145, 146,
124 171-174,173,181, 184, 159,287
Sirène du Mississipi, La 204 192 Vertigo 121, 203
Sois belle et tais-toi 147 Trottoirs de Paris, Les 161 Veysset, Sandrine 7, 8, 4 5 , 49,
Sous les jupes de la Madone n.22 51 n.2, 113, 115, 136,
226 n.4 Trou dans le Soulier: A la sor- 282
Sous les pieds des femmes tie du film 'Jacques Riv- Viard, Karin 7, 102, 109 n.4,
113, 1 1 6 , 2 6 1 , 2 6 3 - 2 6 5 , ette le veilleur', Le 11 1 2 0 , 1 7 7 , 2 7 8 , 194 n.12,
265 Truffaut, Francois 9, 13, 26, 277
Souviens-toi de moi 6 7 - 6 8 , 48, 55, 58, 74, 141, 146, Victor . . . pendant qu 'il est
70 169,204,266 troptard 4 5 , 4 9 - 5 0 , 136
Stévenin, Jean-Frangois 216, Tual, Denise 146, 147 Vie de Jesus, La 63
237 Turkheim, Charlotte de 180 Vie moderne, La 283
Surprises de Vamour, Les 175 Vie ne me fait pas peur, La 28,
S'en fout la mort 107, 219, 3 4 - 3 6 , 36, 5 1 , 73
Un demi-siècle déjà 147
2 2 1 - 2 2 2 , 225 Vie révée des anges, La 63,
Un divan a New York 194
HOn.lO
n.14
Take It Like a Man, Ma'am Violette Nozières 226 n.9
Un été d'orages 27, 51 n . l
193 n.2 Visiteurs, Les 189
Un frère 42, 44-45
Tapage nocturne 39, 55 Vivre au paradis 280 n.10
Un grand cri d'amour 188
Tati,Jacquesl58, 165, 175, Voleuse de St Lubin, La 160
Un homme à ma faille 175
194 n.9, 267 n.12, 227 n.13
Un homme amoureux 4, 113,
Tatie Danielle 194 n.12 Voyage de Babà, Le 253
1 4 2 , 1 4 3 - 1 4 4 , 145, 146
Tatischeff, Sophie 266, 267,
Un samedi sur terre 226 n . l l
194 n.9
Un weekend sur deux 121, Weekend 229
Tavernier, Bertrand 161 n.20,
128, 2 3 9 - 2 4 1 , 242, 248, Weinberg, Rachel 26, 200
205,219,261,269
249 Western 229
Tavernier, Nils 44, 97, 207
Une chante, Vautre pas, L' 16 Wilson, Lambert 30, 31, 272
Téchiné, André 64, 226 n.7
n.12, 55, 7 3 , 77, 84, 236 Women, The 169
Tendre Poulet 111
Une femme d'honneur 227 Working Girls 160 n.7
Thelma and Louise 228, 229,
n.15
2 4 3 , 249 n . l
Une femme honorable 269
Thévenet, Virginie 4, 42, 55, Yanne, Josée 270
Une vraie jeune file 38, 52
5 6 , 5 8 , 6 3 , 9 1 , 176 Y aura-t-il de la neige a Noèlf
n.5, 102, 283
Thompson, Daniele 8, 127, 7, 8, 4 5 , 49, 50, 51 n.2,
Univers de Jacques Demy, L'
192, 1 9 4 n . l 5 1 1 3 - 1 1 5 , 1 1 4 , 1 1 6 , 125,
147
Three Men and a Baby 172 131,136
US Go Home 42, 52 n.4
Toni 197
Tontaine et Tonton 160 n.12
Zanzibar 142, 144-146, 145
Tous les gargons et les filles de Valandrey, Charlotte 30, 31
Zauberman, Yolande 67, 68,
leur age 42, 52 n.4, 107 Vallèe des anges, La 142,
150, 1 5 1 , 2 5 3 , 2 5 9 , 2 8 2
Touzet, Corinne 210, 227 288
Zem, Roschdy 66, 69, 154,
n.15 Valli, Alida 92
238
Toxic Affair 17'5, 179 Valseuses, Les 229, 232, 249
Zylberstein, Elsa 74, 75, 76,
Travestir 161 n.21 n.4
180
312

Rollet, Brigitte - Tarr, Carrie - Cinema and The Second Sex - Women's Filmmaking in France in The 1980s and 1990s (2001, Continuum)

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Cinema And The Second Sex

Film Studies: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

The collection is available both in e-book and print versions.

Titles in Film Studies are available in the following subsets:

Film Studies: World Cinema

Other titles available in European Cinema include:

Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet

Film Studies: European Cinema

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published in 2001 by Continuum

This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2016

© Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet 2016

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9077-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012

Printed and bound in Great Britain

The Continuum International Publishing Group Ine

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter One Growing Up 25

Chapter Six Comedies 165

Intro: 1 The Créteil International Women's Film

Intro: 2 The Créteil International Women's Film

1.1 Louise Vinsoumise. Supplied by and reproduced

1.2 Rouge Baiser. Supplied by and reproduced with

1.3 La Vie ne me fait pas peur. Supplied by and

1.4 36 fillette. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

1.5 L'Ombre du doute. Supplied by and reproduced

2.1 Les Gens normaux n'ont rien d'exceptionnel.

2.2 En avoir ou pas. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

3 L'Age des possibles. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

4 Mina Tannenbaum. Supplied by and reproduced

1 Coup de foudre. Supplied by and reproduced

2 Post co'itum animal triste. Source: BIFI.

3 Si je faime . . . prends garde à toi. Source: BIFI.

4 Romance. Supplied by and reproduced with

1 Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noel? Supplied by and

2 Circuit Carole. Supplied by and reproduced with

3 Sinon, oui. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

4 Le Jour des rois. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

1 Coute que coute. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

2 Zanzibar. Source: BIFI. (C) Gaumont 1988. 145

3 Mémoires d'immigrés: Yhéritage maghrébir.

4 Demain et encore demain. Supplied by and

6.1 Trois hommes et un couffin. Supplied by and

6.2 La Nouvelle Eve (C) LOTHER/MPA. 178

6.3 Romuald et Juliette. Supplied by and reproduced

6.4 Gazon maudit. Supplied by and reproduced with

6.5 Le Derrière. Supplied by and reproduced with

7.1 Frequence meurtre. Supplied by and reproduced

7.2 Place Vendóme. Supplied by and reproduced with

7.3 Pas très catholique. Supplied by and reproduced

7.4 La Triche. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

7.5 J'ai pas sommeil. Source: BIFI. (C) I. Weingarten/

8.1 Sac de noeuds. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

8.2 Sans toit ni hi. Source: BIFI. Reproduced with

8.3 Personne ne m'aime. Source: BIFI. Reproduced

8.4 No Sex Last Night. Supplied by and reproduced

9.1 Chocolat. Supplied by and reproduced with

2 Moi Ivan, toi Abraham. Source: BIFI. Reproduced

3 Sous les pieds des femmes. (C) Sf Raymond/MPA.

4 La Piste du télégraphe. Source: BIFI. Reproduced

5 Artemisia. Supplied by and reproduced with