Ma mère: Keeping it in the family

DIRECTED BY Christophe Honoré, 2004

STARRING Isabelle Huppert (Hélène), Louis Garrel (Pierre), Emma de Caunes (Hansi), Joanna Preiss (Réa)
CLASSIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex and incest theme
RUN TIME 110 mins, Revolver
LANGUAGE French

COVERLINE 'There are no boundaries to desire.'

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Incest is best? Starring one of the world's best current actors, Isabelle Huppert.

THE PLOT When Pierre and his mother Hélène are left in a Spanish island holiday villa after his father dies in a car accident, Pierre's hatred for the latter and adoration for her is soon tempered. 'You must admit that I'm worse than him: I'm a bitch, I'm a slut,' Hélène tells Pierre, as she encourages him to recognise her true, sexual, nature. Initially she entrusts him to the care of her friend Réa, who promises him their first kiss will be on his arse; when a night on the town goes too far, Hélène and Réa leave.

Now Pierre is left with the younger Hansi, who loves him, but their relatively routine courtship also reaches a pitch when the duo beat her friend Loulou badly, and Hansi reveals her previous relationship with Hélène. When Hélène returns to the island, Pierre agrees to sleep with her; she cuts herself so badly that she dies. In the funeral parlour, Pierre is caught wanking beside her dead body.

THE FILM I went to see this with Italian actress ex and she hated it; she barely spoke to me for the rest of the evening. I tried to explain it away saying it was so tawdry that it wasn't worth worrying about, but it really upset her. I hated it, too; though it does bear further scrutiny there is a problem at its core: based on a posthumous novel by Georges Bataille, how do you adapt the notorious surrealist's work for the screen nowadays? Rather like the Marquis de Sade, any faithful rendering would be unscreenable, such is the power of the written word and the imagination. Better, I would suggest, to work in his provocative spirit (something like Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell or much of Lars von Trier's work springs to mind).

If you're determined to proceed, there's the problem of updating his themes. Perhaps, for my Italian girlfriend, the blasphemous scenes with which Bataille peppers his work bore some real feeling but they're inevitably less provocative to the rest of us. After his father's death, Pierre creates a paper cross and kneels before it; it's a parody of prayer. The viewer knows Pierre hated his father, but we're unsure whether he next begins to laugh or cry, or both; and maybe it's not even for his father, but the absurdity of the situation. (Despite his literary reputation and artistic influence, Bataille has only been adapted for cinema a handful of times.)

Nevertheless, Pierre does slump into a real grief, which his mother attempts to lift him from in unorthodox manner. At first she flirts with her son: 'I'd be proud to have you on my arm,' she tells him. 'People would take you for my lover.' (Hélène soons gets herself into a fury that she is too old for him.) In the form of this sort of nonsense, pseudo-porn she then attempts to lead him down a path to sexual liberation.

Pierre deliberately walks to a local nudist beach naked; given the key to his father's study, he wanks urgently over the porn he finds there; after an unfettered night he comes home to throw out the housekeeper and her husband who care deeply for him. It is a deliberately cruel act performed without feeling or ceremony.

Hélène decides to introduce Pierre to Réa, the 'wildest girl' she knows: 'She'll educate you.' When Pierre thinks Réa is coming onto him, she leaves; the rest of his night is a descent into a hell of drunken tourists, filmed in a documentary-like manner (Ma mère was filmed on Gran Canaria, near Sex and Lucía's Formentera).

Pierre's relationship with the apparently wholesome Hansi - Emma de Caunes looks like she's stepped fresh from an Australian daytime soap - is initially mundane; if anything, it's too bourgeois. She gazes happily as he befriends a young child on the beach but Pierre's letters to his mother reveal he's worried the couple are not 'perverse enough', he's letting Hélene down. (During the orgy with Pierre's mother and Réa, Hansi reads Don DeLillo, of all things.)

Hansi says she's prepared to do anything for for Pierre; in the evening she whips her friend Loulou half to death, something she admits she used to do with Hélène, in front of other men. Hélène is jealous she is being supplanted in her son's affections and returns to the island. In an alternate ending included on the DVD, Hélène's death is described by the police as a suicide; it's not the first time Isabelle Huppert plays a character who cuts herself, as she does in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001).

With its Spanish holiday-island setting, the nudists, Pierre's alienation and irreconcilable sex, Ma mère is reminiscent of professional French provocateur Michel Houellebecq's Lanzarote novella. One of Houellebecq's protagonists, a holidaying Belgian policeman, joins a cult on the island; Pierre, too, acts as if he is replacing one religion with another.

Christophe Honoré went on to direct musical film Les chansons d'amour (2007), so it's surprising how sparse Ma mère's soundtrack is. Barber's Agnus Dei accompanies many shots of the island's dunes; there is Cyndi Lauper covering Edith Piaf, oddly, (Hymn to Love) and, finally, there's the Turtles' Happy Together. Pierre is slumped beside his mother's casket, fist working frenetically in his lap as it plays. You won't know whether to laugh or cry.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 44:14 After deserting him on a night out in town, Hélène and Réa find Pierre passed out in a shopping arcade. Hélène decides to strip him while Réa imparts the promised kiss on his arse. She takes her top off and mounts him on the pavement, laughing at a passerby.
Chapter 7, 52:17 Waking up back at the house with another couple they have brought back, which includes Hansi, Pierre starts to have sex with Réa while kissing his mother's body.
Chapter 9, 1:11:50 Hansi and Pierre have sex in her room. Though naked, she is still wearing her riding boots, which she calls Loulou in to remove.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Garrel, who spends much of this film naked, acting in a hang-dog and whiney manner, is something of a muse for Honoré. This was their first film together, but they've since gone on to make others, including Dans Paris (2006) and Making Plans for Lena (2010). In Les chansons d'amour, Garrel plays a character involved with Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme. In bed together, the three read books about other ménages à trois, including Adam Thirlwell's racy and very funny Politics. The film is a brave attempt to revive the musical; the tunes aren't bad and Honoré pulls off the transitions into song deftly, it's the bits in between that aren't great, unfortunately. Dans Paris, on the other hand, is almost entirely successful, and also stars the feted Romain Duris.

KEY QUOTE 'Do you know your mother is nuts?' - Hélène

9 Songs: The Iceman Cometh

DIRECTED BY Michael Winterbottom, 2004

STARRING Kieran O'Brien (Matt), Margo Stilley (Lisa)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains frequent strong real sex

RUN TIME 70 mins approx, Optimum Releasing

COVERLINE 'Two lovers. One year'

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Real sex, and an erect penis, shown in all their big-screen glory. Pre-release revelations that star Margo Stilley, a former model, came from a terrifically religious family added to the furore. Hailed by the Guardian as 'the most sexually explicit film in the history of British cinema' - a quote proudly plastered across the DVD cover - Stilley's initial request to remain anonymous in any coverage of the film (she wanted director Michael Winterbottom to refer to her in interview by the name of her character, Lisa) only added fuel to the fire.

THE PLOT Lisa, a 21-year-old American, meets Antarctic geologist Matt at a gig at the Brixton Academy. Over a year they have sex and attend a series of rock concerts. On Matt's birthday, Lisa tells him she is returning to the States, in time for Christmas. The artists they, and we, see performing live are: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (at the beginning and end), the Von Bondies, Elbow, Primal Scream, the Dandy Warhols, Super Furry Animals, Franz Ferdinand and Michael Nyman.

THE FILM I was once lucky enough to go out with a really hot Italian actress. A director she knew had come to London (to direct an opera) and they met for lunch. After the meal it turned out he didn't know anyone else in the city and was free for the afternoon, so she volunteered to keep him company. What would he like to do? There's this highly recommended new film I'd like to see, he answered. OK, what is it? 9 Songs. When they got to the cinema he claimed that he didn't understand English so could she please translate for him? When she kept quiet in the sex scenes, he turned to her and complained, what are they saying? I saw it with another ex, not even at my suggestion.

At the beginning of Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood, the 37-year-old chief protagonist lands in a plane at Hamburg airport when an ersatz version of the Beatles' song sweeps him up in memories of an 18-year-old affair. In 9 Songs, Matt is flying over Antarctica, where he has gone to collect samples of the ice, and remembers his love affair with a young American woman (his character provides the film's voiceover). Through nine sex scenes, and as many clips from live gigs, Winterbottom traces the arc of their year-long relationship. It's an audacious conceit, my favourite of the British director's films and my favourite sex film.

All the emotional ups and downs are here, from the first flush of love, through defining the boundaries of the relationship, discussing exes, boredom, petty arguments to alienation. Sexually the couple pass from the excitement of initial attraction, a weekend away, discussing exes, the condom conversation (do we need one, will we always use it?) through experimentation (a little light bondage, fantasising) to familiarity and frustration. Oh and, never having seen my own on a cinema screen, Kieran O'Brien looks to have a pretty big cock.

It could also be about going out in London, or urban relationships: they meet at a gig and, perhaps fatally for Matt and Lisa, concert-going remains the mainstay of their relationship, they never break out from it (most London couples would do more cinema-, theatre- or exhibition-going but, in the parameters of the film, that wouldn't work as well). It's almost as if they have a loyalty card for slightly dull rock gigs; you can hardly blame Lisa for ducking out of Super Furry Animals one evening.

This leads to another puzzle: filling in the backgrounds of the characters. It is assumed Lisa is a student but she only refers to her shiftwork. Though we never meet any of their friends - this is an entirely hermetic relationship - we are shown Matt's work, examining the frozen cores he brings back from Antarctica. They only have sex in his flat, a fact which is made explicit at the end: he visits her digs for the first time when she leaves London. (The Notting Hill-ish setting of her apartment could serve as confirmation of the implication that she's a trustafarian type slumming it for a year.)

The ice Matt examines can be 4km deep and half-a-million years old; it is, he tells us, the 'planet's memory'. Antarctica is a void: 'claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place, like two people in a bed.' She only gives him a week's notice that she is returning to the USA (to complete her studies?) but urges: 'Sometimes you have to have faith in people.'

KEY SCENES Chapter 2, 7:48mins O'Brien goes down on Stilley in the kitchen; the three-minute scene outlines their domesticity but also Lisa's demanding (sexual) nature. She's not shy to say what she wants and is willing to take the lead in their (again, sexual) relationship. The music on the soundtrack is by Michael Nyman, foregrounding the ending of the film and setting 9 Song's elegiac tone.

Chapter 5, 26:37 The film's high point arrives when the couple are lounging in bed together. Stilley reads aloud an extract from Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform, which was also something of a cause célèbre at the time. O'Brien ties Stilley's hands above her head to the bed frame and blindfolds her before playing with her and having sex. At nearly six minutes, it's probably the film's longest single scene; it's followed by the Dandy Warhols performing You Were the Last High and it's pretty much downhill for the couple's relationship from here on.

Chapter 6, 38:00 To the plaintive sound of Goldfrapp's Horse Tears the couple visit a strip club. Lisa gets a nude dance (from a woman) and Matt walks out; at home, Lisa uses a vibrator on herself. She is, we're told, 'egotistical, crazy'.

Chapter 8, 57:54 The final sex scene is the most exposing of the whole film as Stilley rides O'Brien. That night they see Michael Nyman performing his 60th birthday concert at the Hackney Empire.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Stilley had a period where she seemed to mainly hang around in popular London nightclubs, including Maya. She found it difficult to overcome the notoriety of her role but has been cast in other films; she was reported to have left WE, a film about Wallis Simpson, following differences with director Madonna. O'Brien, who had largely been a TV actor before being cast by Winterbottom, returned in the main to the small screen, including a role in hospital spin-off series Holby Blue.

The hugely eclectic Winterbottom went on to direct Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me, among others. The film again courted controversy by pushing the boundaries of sexual violence on screen; the beatings meted out by central character Lou Ford (excellent Casey Affleck) on his paramours (Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson) are unpalatable. While Winterbottom seems to be saying, 'Look, this is the sort of violence depicted in these genre movies you enjoy', much still has to be implied.

KEY QUOTE 'Don't wave that belt in my face. You know I got hurt once - by waving a belt in my face' - Lisa, laughing

BONUS CURIO The trailer seems to have takes not included in the film; it also states the action takes place over a single summer, not a year.