Sex-ed with the French
When Juliette Binoche gives you romantic advice, it’s probably a good idea to listen, says Kylie Klein Nixon.
It’s the last day of Rendezvous A Paris – an annual showcase of French Cinema – and I’m jammed into a sweltering hotel room near l’Opera with about 20 other film reviewers and one of France’s most celebrated leading ladies.
She’s here to talk about her film Let Sunshine In.
We’re here to bask in the glory of France’s 10-time nominated, one-time Cesar Award-winning goddess. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
‘‘I always love talking about love and the difficulty of it,’’ says Binoche about what made her choose to star in Claire Denis’ strange, confronting cinematic version of a self help guide for losers. ‘‘It feels like reality.’’
Difficulty in love is my reality, so she’s not wrong there. But when she says she loves talking about it? Binoche could be describing most of this year’s crop of French cinema.
Of the 20 or so movies I screened in preparation for this event, all but two of them of them are about love, sex and how to navigate a world where they are top currency.
At least one of them was more sexually explicit than anything you would ever see in a mainstream, English-language film (the passionate, heart-breaking 120 BPM) and almost none of them took the standard ‘‘boy meets girl’’ line on the topic.
While most mainstream films have a love story embedded in them somewhere, the average cineplex offering isn’t big on deep philosophical musings.
In France it seems to be the other way around. In 2018’s crop, there’s only one big-budget, CGI heavy film – World War I fantasy See You Up There
– and that one has been criticised by French reviewers for not being ‘‘French’’ enough.
Juliette Binoche and Let Sunshine In are French enough for anyone.
A difficult film to describe, with all of wailing and gnashing of teeth, graphic sex scenes and long monologues about orgasms, Let Sunshine In is, if you can believe it, a comedy.
Binoche plays Isabelle, a hot mess of a certain age who stalks the Parisian streets, desperately hunting (and being hunted) for love, in a pair of thigh-high leather boots and tear-smudged smokey eye. She is radiant and a crushing reminder that if she can’t get a bloke to stay for breakfast, the rest of us shouldn’t bother trying.
Her talk of reality prompts someone to ask her if
Sunshine is about finding ‘‘real love... the one that stays forever’’.
‘‘The one that stays forever is in you,’’ Binoche snaps back. ‘‘It is you. You know, you are not finding the forever love outside of yourself, it doesn’t exist.’’
Real talk, Gallic style. You can hear a pin drop. ‘‘If you are trying to hang on to solutions outside of yourself, it’s not going to work.’’
I feel like Binoche has just strolled into my head, prised open a locked door marked ‘‘How To Do Adult Relationships’’, and switched on a 1000-watt bulb.
It occurs to me that French film cinema has a lot to teach this Kiwi about love (and maybe sex. Did I mention the sex? Man there’s a lot of sex in French movies).
The day before, I had interviewed Noee Abita, the upand-coming star of Ava, a film about a 13-year-old girl discovering love and a glimpse of adult freedom during a summer holiday.
Abita spends a lot of the film naked. It’s a challenging watch – Ava’s a minor (although Abita was 17 when she made the film), and the sense we’re creeping on a child’s sexual awakening feels invasive.
‘‘It was my first film so that was the first time I could see myself on a screen,’’ says Abita. ‘‘It’s a different way of discovering your body, because you’re not seeing your body either in the minute or in photographs. It’s a body that you see on all the possible angles, sideways, from the top, from below. So obviously you see faults, flaws, so its not always nice.’’
We can all relate to that, right? But Abita says that feeling of vulnerability seemed to wear off the more she looked at herself. My puritanical squeamishness did too, the more I was engrossed in Ava’s story .
Ava is a reminder not to be shallow, to
‘‘If you are trying to hang on to solutions outside of yourself, it’s not going to work.’’ Juliette Binoche
remember that surface things aren’t what make a person interesting or worthy. Boobs, it says, are nothing to be scared of.
‘‘Making this film was a way to mature, to exit, in a way, all the ideas you get from your family,’’ she says. ‘‘For instance, going swimming naked is not something you do with your family, but it is something that I [discovered I] really enjoy, so the film was very important to find myself.’’
Abita says if the audience reins in their shock at the nudity, they can tap into a little of Ava’s experience, too.
‘‘They will get out and realise that, God, it’s beautiful, the way she opens up to the world,’’ says Abita.
‘‘In 50 or a thousand years you always stand the chance of a [film about] girl who will fall in love with a boy at the a beach. But more importantly, I think, is the idea of freedom and her determination to live, a real need to live.’’
Back in that sweltering hotel room, Binoche says it takes ‘‘quite a while to understand’’ the benefits of authenticity, of connecting with yourself and finding love there.
‘‘That’s why you suffer so much, it’s because you think, ‘oh, this one is impossible, he doesn’t understand this, he doesn’t do this’. But if you are not expecting everything from the other person, I think things can happen in a different way.’’
A better way. The French way, perhaps.