Having never been allowed to indulge in any sort of sexual experimentation in her youth, she has instead followed convention and married a handsome doctor who keeps her dripping in Yves Saint Laurent but cannot pique her sexual interest. Séverine ( Catherine Deneuve) is a 23-year-old woman languishing in the boredom of her bourgeois marriage.
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While the film’s focus is firmly on Joan’s trial and persecution, critic Pauline Kael saw something else in Dreyer’s austere direction that combined stark close-ups and rapid editing to build the atmosphere of fervent oppression that leads to Joan’s torture and eventual death. Here is a girl who eschews the pressures of gender conformity, refusing to wear women’s clothes and vowing her faith and obedience to no earthly man – only to God – and is punished severely. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)Ĭarl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece focuses not on the unsteady steps into womanhood, but on the last moments of our 19-year-old heroine’s brief life. To mark the occasion we’ve put together a list of six French films that play with and subtly subvert this idea of female ‘sexual awakening’ in cinema, from girlhood to adulthood.
But over the years, as one transfixing newcomer after another, barely out of braces and backpacks, embarks on the vita sexualis, we have to wonder, whose sexuality is it, exactly? Is this the way they see themselves, are these their yearnings, or is this precocious sensuality a projection of the guilty desires and fears of directors old enough to be their fathers? Part child, part femme fatale, innocent and dangerous in equal proportions, these schoolgirl seductresses, born to blossom under the eye of the camera, have exerted a fatal fascination for Pygmalion auteurs who seek to capture and unveil this drama of unfolding. In her essay to mark the Criterion DVD release of the film in 2005, critic Molly Haskell posits À nos amours as settling comfortably into a collection of iconic films exploring “the teenage girl on the cusp of sexual awakening”: As Suzanne’s transformation unfolds, audiences and those closest to her are left wondering what it is that she seeks: affection, freedom, pleasure, or a man just like her father? Maurice Pialat (who himself plays in the film as Suzanne’s father) directs a fresh-faced and inscrutable Bonnaire to give us few easy answers here is a girl who seems to have the power of youth and beauty, but never quite finds what she’s looking for. Pialat’s film centres on 15-year-old Suzanne (a stunning performance by a very young Sandrine Bonnaire) who – on a mission to escape her overbearing father, histrionic mother and brutish brother – embarks on a rampage of sexual adventure, working her way through partners with apparent cool abandon. After the screening, we held a salon in the Teenage Kicks teen bedroom installation at BFI Southbank and discussed the idea of the young femme fatale in French cinema as a construct of male directors’ fantasies, and how these depictions affect the female viewer’s sense of self.
À nos amours (To Our Loves) screens on 13 and 17 August.Īs part of BFI’s Teenage Kicks season, we teamed up with I am Dora to present a special screening of Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours (To Our Loves) on Sunday 10 August. The season Teenage Kicks runs at BFI Southbank throughout August 2014.
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