Family life, death and les femmes de nuit

C’est la vie en France:

French cinema always offers that element of surprise and this year’s offering at the French Film Festival was no exception.

As always, there was sex aplenty whatever the storyline… whether titillating erotica or subtle innuendo as used in Et Si On Vivait Tous Ensemble (And If we All Lived Together) a fuzzy rhythmic background movement to alert the viewer that sex was happening between ageing baby boomers.

However, in the three films that I chose to see, there was an unlikely marriage of Sex and that other social taboo, Death, which made for emotionally satisfying viewing.

Un Baiser Papillon (Butterfly Kiss), the first movie by Karine Silla-Perez, captures how terminal illness and the dying process strains family life and friendship when main character Billie dies of cancer. In Et Si On Vivait Tous Ensemble (And If we All Lived Together), evergreen actress Jane Fonda also has cancer and even plans her own funeral. However, in La Delicatesse (Delicacy), all had vastly different story lines, but the three films I saw in the French Film Festival reveal certain script qualities for success.

Sex, for instance, is the pepper and salt of French cinema whatever the life issues, family conflict, friendship, affairs and/or humorous happenings played out by the films’ main characters.

There was one other popular sub-plot adding an element of erotica. Un Baiser Papillon (Butterfly Kiss), Et Si On Vivait Tous Ensemble (And If we All Lived Together) and La Delicatesse (Delicacy), all included an element of erotica and a bit-part for a prostitute. In Butterfly Kiss, for instance, the prostitute formed a minor story-line alluding to trafficking of Eastern European women as sex workers and in If We All Lived Together, senior single, Claude had always been sexual voracious and in his twilight years reached for Viagra, happily paying for sex.

In this story of five ageing baby boomers, who through failing health and life circumstance, decide to live together, sex is filtered through the story line as strongly as percolated coffee. Jane Fonda’s character Jeanne, for instance, talks a tad too intimately about sexual matters to the young anthropologist “Dirk’’ who is studying their twilight lifestyles for his thesis.

The French are a highly sexualised society anyway and these titillating side-lines not only reflect Gallic culture, they add to the emotional depth of each story.

Then there is that other societal taboo – death and in these three films, French film-makers have embraced the “D” word with the same passion as sex, with the impact of dying and death on family members forming the major story-line or catalyst for change. Which probably explains why I left the cinema each time, not only fulfilled as a viewer, but with damp eyes for the emotional outlet the movie allowed.

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