The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Czech mates

DIRECTED BY Philip Kaufman, 1988

STARRING Daniel Day-Lewis (Tomas), Juliette Binoche (Tereza), Lena Olin (Sabina)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex

RUN TIME 165 mins, Warner Bros

COVER QUOTE 'The most erotic serious film since Last Tango in Paris' - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT With Christmas drawing close I thought I'd indulge myself with a couple of not exactly festive films, but snowy ones (see also next week). This adaptation from the book by Milan Kundera is not explicit, but it is sexy. The sex scenes now seem coy, when the same wording is used by the BBFC for such a film as Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), which was rumoured on release to feature unsimulated intercourse.

THE PLOT Prague, 1968: Tomas, a young doctor, flirts with a nurse, telling her to take off her clothes; he visits Sabina - who is described as 'the woman who understood him best', and who complains he never stays till morning, nor does he ever allow a woman to spend the night at his ('Are you afraid of women, doctor?'). Tomas travels to a spa where he meets and flirts with the apparently innocent Tereza. She comes to visit him in Prague, unannounced, and ends up staying.

Tomas introduces the two main women in his life in the hope Sabina can help Tereza, who is starting out as a photographer. Tereza and Tomas marry, with Tomas' farmer patient Pavel and his pet pig Mephisto as witnesses, but Tomas continues to have affairs - on the night Tereza confronts him, the Russians invade: she runs out to take photographs, which she hands over to Dutch journalists. Sabina flees to Geneva, where she begins an affair with a married university professor, Frans. When Tomas and Teresa also go to Switzerland, the latter struggles to find work and returns, unannounced, to Czechoslovakia. Tomas follows.

Hounded from his work as a surgeon because of anti-Communist article he wrote before the invasion, Tomas becomes a window cleaner, with the particular perks that affords a man of his nature. Tereza decides to embark on an affair with a customer in the bar where she works (played by Stellan Skarsgard, Mamma Mia!) but it appears this may have been a trap. Sick of the suspicion lurking in Prague, Tereza insists they move again; they join Pavel on his farm.

The scene shifts to the United States, where Sabina has set up as an artist. She receives a letter saying Tomas and Tereza have died in a car accident. After a night out dancing, Tomas and Tereza drive back to the farm; he says, perhaps for the first time, that he is happy.

THE FILM When I was at university, Milan Kundera's book of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was pretty much prescribed reading for every poseur on campus. I loved it. Kundera has fallen out of fashion, as has this form of tasteful, epic cinema, to which director Kaufman added a healthy smattering of sex. It's a strange film as it seems to be linked by its almost non-stop score, from the opening spa scenes, through the comic themes of Tomas' seductions, the darkness of the Soviet invasion to bucolic countryside themes at the close.

Much of the sex in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being is played for comedy: Tomas orders a nurse to strip for him in his hopital, with fellow surgeons and a patient looking on from an adjoining room; Tereza leaps onto Tomas after a spurious check up ('Don't worry, I'm a doctor'); on another occasion, the camera pans to their dog, Karenin, looking mournful. The only time the sexual anticipation is serious is when Tereza takes nude pictures of Sabina: Tereza's eyes fill with tears at the exposure of her husband's lover before Sabina continues the seduction. The looks on Tereza's face as Sabina begins her friend's exposure preempts Maggie Gyllenhaal's similar predicament in Secretary.

Kaufman (writer/director of The Right Stuff and writer on the Indiana Jones movies) makes the most of his two women stars: Olin shows off her legs from the start, stretching her acting muscles when she moves to Geneva. Binoche rises above her silly accent to produce a startling performance: I've never warmed to her onscreen, nor is she conventionally sexy, but her defenceless portrayal rises above the innocent gamine Tereza could easily be.

The director, however, is better on the historic than the personal: his film was fêted on its release for the method (much like Woody Allen's Zelig) he inserted his characters into contemporary, often black-and-white, footage of the Prague invasion, even to the appropriation of famous images. Those scenes have lost nothing of their power more than 20 years on from the film, and 40 after the events which inspired them. The scenes of the couple's flight are particularly poignant, reenacted as they were following the fall of the Iron Curtain.

KEY SCENES Disc One, Chapter 5, 17:27 In the iconic image that is used on the DVD cover, Sabina poses in bowler hat and underwear over a mirror that has been placed on the floor by Tomas. In the following scene, Tereza visits Tomas at his flat for the first time. She sneezes and he pretends to give her a physical examination before she jumps him.

Chapter 8, 27:03 Sabina and Tomas are having sex, with her on top, when she spots him checking his watch in the mirror. She hides one of his socks in revenge.

Chapter 13, 50:47 Tereza is swimming in the public baths when she has a hallucination: the group of women exercising in front of her are suddenly naked. Among them she spots Tomas, who seems to be offering her own nude figure up. That night she tells Tomas she wants to see the women with whom he has affairs: 'Take me to them, I'll undress them for you.'

Chapter 22, 1:24:44 Tereza asks Sabina to model nude for her; they drink and Tereza takes pictures, before Sabina turns the tables on Tereza. Their assignation is interrupted by the arrival of Franz, who declares he has left his wife. Sabina asks him to come back the next day; when he returns, her studio is completely bare.

Disc Two, Chapter 31, 16:14 On his window cleaning rounds, Tomas is seduced by the wife of a high-ranking party member. At home that night, Tereza smells the woman's sex in Tomas' hair. Tereza cannot understand how he can make love to women without being in love. 'I wish I could be like you,' she says. 'Insensitive.'

Chapter 33, 22:27 Tereza decides to visit an engineer she meets in the bar where she works but she believes she is being spied upon and is initially unresponsive: she allows herself to be undressed and forces herself to go through with it.

FURTHER VIEWING Kaufman's film is steeped in the history of Czech cinema, feeling particularly close to Milos Forman's bawdy The Firemen's Ball (1967). (In the 1970s and '80s, of course, Forman was working in Hollywood on such movies as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.) There's another Czech director whose work I'd like to highlight here, however, partly because he's made a few films based on the work of another great Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal, including, most recently, I Served the King of England (2006).

Jirí Menzel's masterwork is probably Larks on a String (1969), but it's to another Hrabal adaptation I turn here: Closely Observed Trains (1966). Set in a rural railway station it manages to combine a young man's crisis over the loss of his virginity, resistance efforts to delay the Nazi invasion and the station manager's predilection for stamping the naked bottoms of young women with his official seal. Unforgettable.

KEY QUOTE 'Take off your clothes' - Tomas, repeatedly

Emmanuelle: Arsan about

DIRECTED BY Just Jaeckin, 1974

STARRING Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle), Daniel Sarky (Jean), Christine Boisson (Marie-Ange), Marika Green (Bee), Alain Cuny (Mario)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex and nudity

RUN TIME 90 mins approx, Optimum

COVERLINE 'Full uncut version: never before seen in the UK' (in capital letters, naturally)

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT The debut of a long-running film franchise, Emmanuelle is based on a purportedly autobiographical work from the 1950s published under the name Emmanuelle Arsan, real name Marayat Rollet-Andriane. (It's been said that the series of books written by her were penned by her diplomat husband, however.) The film became a more acceptable version of Deep Throat for cinema audiences around the world, running for more than 10 years at one cinema in Paris until it closed in February 1985.

Over the decades since its release, many of the cuts originally demanded by the BBFC have been reinstated. The most contentious issue is the film's gratuitous depiction of sexual violence - notably, Emmanuelle's reaction to it - but, in 2007, the full film was finally released, uncut.

THE PLOT Emmanuelle travels to Thailand to join her diplomat husband, Jean. Prior to her arrival, Jean has boasted to his colleagues of their tremendous, open, sexual relationship (and, indeed, shown them naked pictures of her). Though Emmanuelle was faithful to him at home in Paris, she sleeps with two men on the flight to Bangkok.

Arrived in Thailand, Emmanuelle has to cope with the boredom of the expat-wife lifestyle as well as the advances of at least one predatory lesbian, Ariane. Emmanuelle is drawn into the plans of gamine Marie-Ange and falls for archaeologist Bee. When she accompanies the latter on a trip, Jean is overtaken with jealousy and visits first a strip club, where he gets into a fight, and then Ariane, with whom he has violent sex.

Bee tells Emmanuelle she doesn't love her after they've had sex and Emmanuelle returns home, heartbroken. Jean, Marie-Ange and Ariane all encourage her to accept the advances of their ageing friend Mario. He takes her to an opium den, where she is raped, and then offers her as prize to the winner of a Thai boxing match.

THE FILM Emmanuelle gives me a headache. It's not just the migraine-inducing soundtrack (by Pierre Bachelet) but also the grotesque cod philosophising. Add to that dubious sexual politics and it's surprising this film has such a reputation that it is continously revisited, either in new versions or rereleases.

There is, too, the film's take on its Thai setting as the 'exotic East', reinforced by Emmanuelle's first experience of the sights and clamour of a Bangkok market. The film's view of the locals is little better: when Emmanuelle and Jean go to bed to have sex, they're watched by their houseboy and a maid. The houseboy then chases the maid into the garden and what begins playfully appears to end in rape; this is a theme revisited at the film's end.

In the meantime, there's an aspect of the movie that's less commented on, but equally troubling. Along with Bee, Emmanuelle quickly falls under the spell of the much younger Marie-Ange, whose no-nonsense sexual manner she admires; Emmanuelle wants to achieve Marie-Ange's innocence.

The latter is portrayed in a very childlike manner: she's usually seen sucking on a lolly ('It makes the old guys hot for you,' she explains) and has no qualms about stripping off, even masturbating (to a magazine photograph of Paul Newman), in front of others. She says she has played with herself since she was 12, but it's never clarified how old she is; she admits to fancying Jean and, later, he says they have been spending the night together.

At the film's start, we are almost immediately given a glimpse of Sylvia Kristel's pubic hair, as she lounges in her Paris home. The big muffs of the seventies must be a great boon to filmmakers as they surely cover any number of potential arguments with censors. The only pricks on show here, however, are the men themselves.

Most of Emmanuelle's sex scenes are fairly desultory affairs: the lesbian liaisons tend to revolve around squash games, clinches in the locker room or, oddly, against a ladder propped up in the corner of the court, which would surely be a hazard to any player. Thai performers are depicted in much more explicit scenarios, not least when one is shown smoking using her vagina.

Pleasure, freedom, hypocrisy and eroticism are the film's buzz words but the dialogue becomes unpalatable with the arrival of lothario Mario. He professes that 'love between couples should be outlawed. Every act of love must include a third person.' This pseudo philosophy leads to the rape of Emmanuelle in an opium den, followed by her subjugation in front of a room full of spectators. (Ariane also tells Emmanuelle that Jean 'practically raped' her.)

Neither scene is as graphic as we've come to expect nowadays but it was only a few years ago that the BBFC allowed the film to pass uncut, because of the board's standards on the eroticisation of sexual violence, particularly when a victim is depicted enjoying a non-consensual act. Don't let the seventies fluff that fills most of this film fool you - there's a darker message here that, exceptionally, seems to have been allowed through.

KEY SCENES Chapter 3, 16:28 Emmanuelle goes for a swim, naked, with the camera following her underwater. She is joined by Marie-Ange.

Chapter 4, 25:27 Emmanuelle is shown having sex with two men, separately, on her flight to Bangkok: first in her seat then, with the other man, in the plane's surprisingly roomy bathroom.

Chapter 7, 52:11 A performer at a sex club visited by Jean smokes a cigarette with her vagina; a couple then participate in a lesbian floor show.

Chapter 8, 55:36 Bee and Emmanuelle make love; the former manages to climax with the latter apparently biting her knee.

Chapter 10, 1:18:28 Emmanuelle is raped at the opium den she attends with Mario.

Chapter 11, 1:24:11 Emmanuelle is taken from behind by the victor of a Thai boxing bout at Mario's behest, in front of a room full of spectators.

FURTHER VIEWING There are any number of further Emmanuelle adventures, many boasting different spellings of our heroine's name (IMDb lists some 70 entries). By the time of Emmanuelle IV (1984), Kristel undergoes plastic surgery and is replaced (by Mia Nygren), although she did revisit the role in the early 1990s. The series had long before reached its nadir with Carry on Emmanuelle (1978), an unhappy mingling with the camp British comedy franchise.

Fans of 1970s softcore may want to investigate the work of photographer David Hamilton. His silly, Vaseline-lensed romps feature more naked young women, including - in Premiers Désirs (1984) - Emmanuelle Béart, as well as the obligatory, irritating soundtrack. His best-known work, Bilitis (1977), is a barely palatable coming-of-age tale.

KEY QUOTE 'I didn't marry Emmanuelle to keep her to myself... I'm not jealous' - Jean

L'ennui: Adapt or die

DIRECTED BY Cédric Kahn, 1998

STARRING Sophie Guillemin (Cécilia), Charles Berling (Martin), Arielle Dombasle (Sophie)

CLASSIFICATION 18

RUN TIME117 mins, Artificial Eye

LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'A tale of enigmatic sexual obsession… dynamic and fascinating' - Time Out

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT I've always been underwhelmed by the work of writer Alberto Moravio, though much of it has been adapted for cinema, not least in The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) and Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963). What's astounding about this adaptation is how true it is to the source novel, La Noia (1960), down to the casting of the astonishing Sophie Guillemin, who stars opposite Gérard Depardieu in Jean Becker's trite My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010), which opens in UK cinemas this Friday. L'ennui was her film debut; she was nominated for the French film César awards for it and her follow up Harry, He's Here to Help (Dominik Moll, 2000) - both times in the most promising actress category.

THE PLOT Cruising a red light district, philosophy professor Martin spots an older man and a young woman fighting; the girl leaves and Martin discovers the man is a painter called Meyers. When Martin goes to visit Meyers in the latter's studio he is told Meyers died, while making love, and Martin encounters the woman, Cécilia. They begin a primarily sexual affair, exacerbated by Cécilia's infuriating calm and apparent lack of interest in anything but the most tangible experience ('I'm well so why worry about death') and Martin's jealousy, made worse when he discovers she is seeing an actor of her own age.

In the grip of breakdown, Martin takes sick leave from his job, and to dumping his news and emotions on his ex wife, Sophie. Finally, Martin starts giving Cécilia large amounts of money and asks her to marry him in an effort to preserve the relationship. She decides to leave on holiday with her boyfriend; Martin picks up a prostitute, imagining she is Cécilia, and crashes the car he is driving, with her in it. He wakes in hospital and asks the nurse to help him write a letter to Sophie in which he says he no longer has suicidal thoughts.

THE FILM Whole chunks of dialogue are lifted verbatim from the book La noia for the film L'ennui, and much more besides. Director Cédric Kahn does make a few tweaks, which I'll come to, but Sophie Guillemin, who was barely out of her teens when the film was made, is the absolute embodiment of Moravia's source novel.

In the book (I'll refer to Angus Davidson's translation for the New York Review Books version), the physique of her character, Cécilia, when first encountered, is described thus: 'She had a round face like a child; but it was a child that had grown too hastily and been initiated too soon into the experiences of womanhood. She was pale, with a slight shadow underneath her cheekbones which made her cheeks look hollow, and a mass thick, brown, curly hair all around her face. Her small mouth, childish both in shape and expression, reminded one of a bud that had withered prematurely on the bough without opening, and its corners were marked by two thin furrows... Finally her eyes, her best feature, were large and dark...'

The male narrator - Dino in the book, Martin onscreen - thinks she is no more than 15 years old (in the film she states explicitly that she is 17, though she has been in an affair for two years already) but is fooled by her figure, which he takes to be slender and childish but proves to be voluptuous. 'She had in fact a magnificent bosom, full, firm and brown, which did not, however seem in harmony with her torso - the slender, thin torso of an adolescent girl...' Guillemin mimics her walk, bosom thrust forward and belly pulled back, and the voice 'strangely expressionless, dry, precise'; she undresses, tramps on her skirt, even wipes herself vigorously with a towel after pissing, precisely as described by Moravia.

Martin's manner is immediately insistent with Cécilia, asking her extremely intimate questions, usually about her relationship with the painter Meyers. Martin is blunt: 'You don't seem to be the kind of woman to inspire a grand passion... to destroy a man.' Little does he know. Cécilia is impulsive in her attraction towards Martin: 'You're offering yourself as an object,' he tells her.

Cécilia is always ready for sex; she begins undressing the moment she enters his flat. 'Her only means of expression is sexual,' Martin complains to his ex wife. 'Sometimes, when she's lying there, legs apart, I find her cunt more expressive than her mouth.'

It is at the moment he decides to break with Cécilia that Martin becomes more interested in her: she misses an appointment for the first time, and it emerges she's seeing someone else. (There's a very strange scene where he follows Cécilia and her new boyfriend, Momo, almost under their noses; later he complains she didn't see him.) There is something of a dialectician manqué about Cécilia: when Martin asks her if she would continue to see him if he didn't have money she says she has already done so; she's not religious - 'If someone doesn't consider something then it doesn't exist.' Religion is, like so many other things, including aspects of her relationship with Meyers, dull, boring.

There are oddities in their romance: their last interaction is the first time we see them kiss passionately, otherwise Cécilia tends to just give Martin a peck on the cheek; they are only shown having straight sexual intercourse - when Martin picks up a prostitute who reminds him of Cécilia at the end of the film he demands a blow job. When he rings a man with whom he believes Cécilia is having an affair he demands: 'Does she give good head?' Her secrecy and infidelity are clearly not the only issues for Martin.

Kahn changes his central male character's profession from painter to philosophy professor - an alteration that gives some scenes the feel of Arnaud Desplechin's excellent Ma vie sexuelle (1996), including a very funny rant about Freud - and Dino's mother is replaced by an ex wife for Martin. As in Kahn's Red Lights (2004), adapted from the novel by Georges Simenon, it is the new scenes that sit least well in L'ennui, which is imbued with some of the thriller aspects of the other, later, film.

Finally it is Cécilia's apparent passivity that sends Martin mad: as they go to bed one afternoon he, deliberately, cruelly, asks her to first close the curtains, then a door, then to fetch his cigarettes, to check whether he's turned the gas off in the kitchen... It is played in the film exactly as described on paper. Sexually, Dino decides in the book, she 'had no feeling, and possibly even, no real sensuality, but merely a sexual appetite of which she herself was not entirely conscious although she submitted passively to its urgency.'

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 27:21 Cécilia and Martin are seen having sex for the first time: she is shown in bed naked from behind, on top of Martin.

Chapter 9, 47:02 The couple have furious sex on the edge of the bed, this time with Martin on top. 'It was wonderful today,' says Cécilia, holding up three fingers to show the number of orgasms she had. Afterwards he ahs her again, standing up in the hallway.

Chapter 19 1:42:40 In a gaudy hotel room, the couple have sex for the last time in a variety of positions.

FURTHER VIEWING L'ennui is so fruitful due to the many other avenues of investigation it opens, not least those other adaptations of Moravia I mention at the beginning of this post, by Bertolucci and Godard. There are, too, those films featuring the remarkable Guillemin; Harry... is a very enjoyable film, German director Moll's best so far. Guillemin stands out as the best thing by far in My Afternoons... (originally titled La tête en friche), although there is a sense she may have been cast - as Depardieu's young lover - purely because of the sexual resonance with her character in L'ennui (it's very difficult to understand their relationship on any other terms).

There is, too, Red Lights, another dramatic depiction of male frustration, starring Jean-Pierre Darroussin and the icy Carole Bouquet. And, if you want to delve further into recent Simenon adaptations in a similar vein, you could check out Pierre Jolivet's In All Innocence (1998), starring Bouquet, again, alongside Gérard Lanvin, new favourite Guillaume Canet and the stunning Virginie Ledoyen (the last two going on to appear together in The Beach, 2000).

KEY QUOTE 'You're lying, that girl [Cécilia] doesn't exist!' - Sophie

Secretary: Assuming the position

DIRECTED BY Steven Shainberg, 2002

STARRING Maggie Gyllenhall (Lee Holloway), James Spader (E Edward Grey)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sexual theme, sex and language

RUN TIME 107 mins approx, Tartan

COVERLINE 'A comedy for everybody's who's been tied up at work'

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Hanky spanky with Jake's sister Maggie, who is reported to be about to star in film Hysteria about the invention of the vibrator.

THE PLOT Lee Holloway is discharged from a psychiatric clinic and enrols in a typing course, where she excels. Her first job interview is with lawyer E Edward Grey; when she arrives his previous secretary is walking out and the office is in disarray. Grey immediately treats Lee as if she's always worked there and she gets the job. There is a connection between them and he soon notices that Lee cuts herself. Lee's father is an alcoholic, her boyfriend, Peter, ineffectual, and her mother sits in her parked car all day waiting to take Lee home again.

After a particularly charged telling off from Grey over her typing mistakes, he calls Lee into his office where he spanks her for the first time. She comes to crave his discipline - he specifies what she can eat at home, she crawls around the office and eats from his hand - but he is frightened by his own needs. He fires her - 'You have to go or I won't stop' - in a scene that mirrors her arrival at his office.

Lee accepts Peter's marriage proposal but, when trying on the wedding dress, leaves Peter's family home and runs to Grey's office. She stages what is portrayed by local media as a hunger strike at his desk; a priest and her father are among those who visit to try and persuade her to come to her senses. Grey finally succumbs after three days and rescues her from her protest; they have sex.

THE FILM All the films I've included here so far feature sexual intercourse but Secretary tackles an area of sexuality, S&M, in a relatively mainstream movie. Mary Gaitskill's short story is the starting-off point for an indie romcom, albeit with a twist, in the hands of director Steven Shainberg.

Lee is reluctant to leave the institution at the film's start, life inside is simple and she misses the structure it affords. It is the day of her sister's wedding, and the mores of smalltown life, which Lee and Mr Grey break, loom large. At the reception, however, Lee is forced to confront her father's alcoholism and it is not long before she breaks out her kit of sharp implements and starts cutting herself (and, even, burning herself on her thigh with a hot metal kettle).

There's an immediate passion between them; Grey doesn't act on it straight away but he does tell Lee to stop cutting herself: 'You're over that now.' He begins to question her about her private life and Lee throws away her kit but when Grey spots her with her fiancé his feelings are expressed in anger: he criticises her typing, the way she dresses, plays with her hair or taps a foot. The aggression leads to the first occasion he calls her into his office and spanks her; they both realise they have crossed a boundary (not for the first time, in his case).

Maggie Gyllenhall's expression throughout the scene is a lesson: there's pain, of course, emotional hurt, disbelief. As the beating becomes harder both are panting with effort and arousal; they're left in a daze at its conclusion and Lee takes Mr Grey's hand momentarily in hers in affirmation. Gyllenhall's performance begins as wonderfully ungainly, she's all legs and no grace, while James Spader overplays the simpering, nervous Grey at first but soon moves to confidence.

Lee embraces their new relationship but Grey is humiliated by it; he exercises relentlessly in an effort to overcome his urges. When they split up, Lee contacts other dominant/submissives but is unsatisfied by their often jokey demands. Sex with Peter is no better: the first time they sleep together she insists it must be in the dark and she keeps her clothes on. 'I didn't hurt you, did I?' Peter asks, when he's come. 'No,' she answers, disappointed.

Where the film itself perhaps disappoints is in its ending: Mr Grey and Lee become part of small town life. Oddly, Lee doesn't go back to work for him but the real cop out is in their sex life: they start having one. On the occasion when Grey beats her bare bottom and wanks over her back in his office, he assures Lee he won't fuck her; 'I'm not into fucking.' The cementing of their relationship, however, arrives when they have intercourse.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 46:50 After a moment of indecision, Mr Grey makes Lee bend over his desk, palms flat on the table, a misspelled letter in front of her. He begins to spank her, hard, slowly at first, and then more quickly.

Chapter 8, 1:09:42 Grey again orders Lee to bend over his desk, and this time to pull up her skirt and pull down her tights and pants. He masturbates over her back; Lee then goes to play with herself in the bathroom and makes herself come.

Chapter 11, 1:37:23 Grey bathes a naked Lee and they begin to make love.

FURTHER VIEWING When Edward Grey and his new bride go on honeymoon, one of their acts is tellingly familiar to a scene in Belle de Jour (1967). Lee is tied to a tree and they have sex; in Luis Buñuel's film, Belle (Catherine Deneuve) is famously taken into the woods and beaten while tied to a tree.

KEY QUOTE 'Miss Holloway: good letter' - E Edward Grey

BONUS CURIO Prior to the film's release in Britain, critic Tom Charity suggested to Gyllenhall in an interview in Time Out that her character should have had a shaven pubis. She agreed.

Lie with Me: Girls just wanna have fun

DIRECTED BY Clement Virgo, 2006

STARRING Lauren Lee Smith (Leila), Eric Balfour (David)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex, nudity and language
RUN TIME 89 mins approx, Metrodome

COVER QUOTE 'The continuing evolution of art porn' - Hollywood Reporter

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT In the last decade or so, hardcore porn has tried to extend its market by being more female friendly. In a mirroring of that situation, the artcore movie market is trying something similar with films like this.

THE PLOT At a party, Leila shares a bathroom with a guy, David, but ends up pulling someone else, with whom she has sex while David and his on-off girlfriend, Victoria, watch from a parked car, where they, in turn, have sex. Leila becomes obsessed with David; she exposes herself to him and then goes to his flat, where they have sex. They start to date but Leila's anxiety over the break-up of her parents' marriage, and the presence of Victoria, cause problems.

Leila flirts with other men at a club provoking David's jealousy; when they get home he sodomises her. David is then affected by the death of his father, for whom he acted as carer. David and Leila's relationship deteriorates; she has sex with someone else but is unfulfilled. When David sees Leila going to her cousin's wedding, he follows her and is invited to join the party.

THE FILM Lie with Me opens with a close-up of a woman's mouth; as the camera pulls further and further back, the main woman character, Leila, is revealed, pointing a TV remote control and only dressed in a short jean skirt, under which she's wanking herself. It's an absorbing image that doesn't quite succeed in its execution, much like this whole film.

Everyone in Lie with Me is annoying; it looks like a fashion spread, too, filmed in accentuated colours. Sex takes place on artfully arranged rugs; David's room has prints hanging on lines from the ceiling and a L'Atalante film poster on the wall (perhaps a visual pun on the respective directors' names?); when Leila comes to his place, she finds David posed on his bed in the middle of the room, reading Steppenwolf, as drapes blow in the sunlight behind him. If Cosmo did porn films, the result would be something like this (there are lots of condoms everywhere, too).

Scarlet magazine is quoted on the DVD cover saying that Lie with Me is 'everything 9 Songs wanted to be', a dreadful slur on the latter film, which is braver and more interesting in every way. The only area where this film goes further is that the couple at its centre have anal sex but, considering the detail in 9 Songs, you'd hardly expect it to go that far. For all Lie with Me's bluster about a woman trying to act like a man to get what she wants sexually, the anal sex scene is one of subjugation.

This DVD proudly proclaims that it is the 'full uncut UK version' - in BLOCK CAPITALS - but I can't find any record of it having been threatened with cuts in the UK, nor is the BBFC warning as explicit as some (no mention of 'real sex', for instance). The implication is that you're seeing something not afforded to cinemagoers (elsewhere in the world), though I don't think it had a full theatrical release here.

Leila's cousin, who's about to get married, wonders whether it's worth giving up great sex - with an ex - for love, with her fiancé; when David asks Leila whether they should go on a date, Leila replies that she's never been on one. Unfairly, she also asks David whether he has a girlfriend when she has his cock in his mouth, which may explain some of the confusion that ensues over their relationship status.

Lauren Lee Smith is very attractive as redhead Leila, even though the character's banal thoughts and fantasies, presented in voiceover, may want to make you kill yourself: 'Men can do whatever they want... they're not afraid'; 'How do you have sex with someone you're in love with?' Another mantra is 'Don't come'; I don't know how sexy that is.

If that doesn't do it for you, Eric Balfour will, and not in a good way. A desperately drippy presence, it's a relief that he doesn't voice his thoughts in his hopeless, girly voice. One sex scene is dominated by his ridiculous moustache, which is as neatly trimmed as Leila's pubic hair in another. David is supposed to have some depth, presumably, because he cares for his coarse father, though he could simply be under his thumb (David's girlfriend warns Leila, however: 'He has intimacy issues, he needs a mummy'). When Leila flirts and dances with two other men at a club, they appear even gayer than David.

Leila seems to find David as annoying as we do and it's something of a relief when they split up, when his father has died. The couple's superficial beauty is contrasted with the frail flesh of the father, who we see as much of naked as his son. (Leila only speaks with her own father on the phone when she's naked having a bath, which suggests she has issues all of her own.) She fails to deal with the idea that her parents are splitting up and selling the family home.

Lie with Me, which is based on a book by Tamara Berger, believes there is a desperate sexual connection at the heart of David and Leila's relationship, but Henry Miller or Anais Nin they ain't. If we relied on this level of heat in tempestuous couples, the world of art and literature would be a very sorry place. At the end of the film, David makes up with Leila. He admits, rather like 9 Songs' Matt, that he doesn't know where she lives, and perhaps they should get to know each other better. Considering he doesn't seem to have any personality, that would surely be the nail in the coffin for any prospective relationship.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 6:21 Leila blows a geeky guy outside a party; David and his girlfriend watch from a parked car. David's girlfriend goes down on him while Leila turns to face the car to have sex. David's girlfriend gets on top of him and Leila and David mimic each other's gestures while having sex with their respective partners.

Chapter 1, 14:25 Leila and David hide in a playground where he crawls into a large concrete tube. Leila follows him and undoes her dress to expose her left breast. When she touches herself, David puts his hand on his crotch but then leaves.

Chapter 2, 21:01 Leila goes to David's flat and starts to suck him off, then they have sex on the floor.

Chapter 7, 1:08:59 Leila picks up the geeky guy and goes back to his place; she forces his face into her crotch, then mounts him on the sofa.

Chapter 7, 1:11:28 Leila desperately tries to wank herself to orgasm while watching a porn film at home.

FURTHER VIEWING Lauren Lee Smith's performance stands alongside those of a couple of other strong women leads in two other recent movies: Kelly Reilly in Puffball (2007) and Elisabeth Röhm in Bernard Rose's The Kreutzer Sonata.

Puffball is the ageing Nicolas Roeg's perhaps valedictory piece, based on a Fay Weldon novel and scripted by her son, Dan. It features some extraordinary sex scenes - not necessarily in a good way, as they include internal shots of ejaculation. The Kreutzer Sonata (2008) shares with Lie with Me the belief that its central characters - Röhm plays alongside the mealy mouthed Danny Huston - are bound in a ferocious sexual tie. Reilly and Röhm are very watchable, though neither film does them any favours.

KEY QUOTE 'I know how to fuck and get what I want' - Leila

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

Baise-Moi: Grrls with guns

DIRECTED BY Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000
STARRING Karen Lancaume as Karen Bach (Nadine), Raffaëla Anderson (Manu)
CERTIFICATION 18: Frequent/very strong language, sex/nudity and violence. Some hard drugs use
RUN TIME 73 mins approx, Universal
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'The most extreme thriller you'll ever see legally' - Uncut

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT A censor's worst nightmare: sex and violence. Based on a 1994 novel by Virginie Despentes, who worked as a prostitute after she was raped aged 17; co-director Coralie Trinh Thi was a porn actress, as were the film's two stars.

THE PLOT Manu and a friend are picked up by three men and raped in a warehouse; later she fights with her brother and shoots him dead. Nadine, a prostitute, falls out with her flatmate and apparently kills her; Nadine goes to join her fixer friend Vincent but sees him shot and killed. Manu and Nadine run into each other by chance and agree to drive to Paris together; Manu forces Nadine at gunpoint to take them to the coast.

In the morning they agree to join forces and embark on an unpremeditated killing spree. Their targets include: a woman at a cash till who they mug; a man (who they kick to death) who picks them up but refuses to have sex without a condom; two policemen, and the entire clientele of a 'fuck club'. They stay in hotels and pull random men for sex while a major hunt is underway for them. At a roadside café, Manu is killed; Nadine rescues her body and sets fire to it. The next morning Nadine intends to kill herself but is caught by the police.

THE FILM The theft by a boiler repairman (that's not a euphemism) of a few of my DVDs more than a year ago was the partial inspiration for this blog. I immediately spotted that one of the films he had taken was Julio Medem's excellent Sex and Lucía, but it was only recently that I realised another of the DVDs he lifted was Baise-Moi, and this became the catalyst for me to finally get writing.

There's a lot in Baise-Moi to get worked up about: the rape, the mindless violence, the close-up shots of genitalia... But it's not as offensive as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, say, and in its madcap, freewheeling way, is almost likeable. Widely portrayed as Thelma and Louise with guns - and full-on sex, and drink, and drugs, and no morality, and little sense of its own structure - it's hard to be truly offended by this film. That's not to say you won't be shocked.

Baise-Moi isn't the first time hardcore actors have been cast in a 'mainstream' (in the sense that dsitributors hoped it would be shown in general city-centre or, at least, art-house, cinemas) film: Catherine Breillat cast Rocco Siffredi in Romance (1999), for instance, and has used him since; Steven Soderbergh had Sasha Grey as the lead in his strangely asexual 2009 movie, The Girlfriend Experience. But here, the main artistic core of the movie seems to have been taken over by practioners from the porn industry: Trinh Thi, Lancaume, Anderson... What seemed to inflame matters further was that they were all women. These girls were doing it for themselves.

One neat little gag (the only one) comes when Nadine recognises Manu from porn films. Manu assumes that Nadine must have been forced to watch them with a boyfriend but, as we're shown early in the film, Nadine is happy to enjoy them on her own. (The glimpse we see implies that she watches violent porn.)

When Nadine visits a client, the film playing in his room, which she's more interested in than his promise to make her come, is Gaspar Noé's Seul Contre Tous (1998). Noé is thanked at the end of the film and his filmic philosophy serves as some sort of inspiration for Baise-Moi: his is an almost nihilist cinema of style over substance, despair over hope, degradation over ambition and shock over awe. One clip Despentes and Trinh Thi show from Seul Contre Tous exemplifies the level all three directors, including Noé, are working at: his butcher hero slicing a sausage.

At one moment in Baise-Moi, Manu kills a man who crudely tries to pick her up in the street but the violence is not simply meted out to men who cross the line. Women are dispatched with even less care as there is no reason to kill them; 'Where are the lines?' complains Manu, mourning the James Bond aspect of murder we've all become inured to in big-screen action movies. 'People are dying, the dialogue has to be up to it.'

In one scene Nadine poses like Luc Besson's Nikita with the latest addition to her artillery, CD Walkman incongruously hooked in her pants. (Nor do the men always get what's coming to them: a man who they've brought back for a foursome with his friend is simply told to leave their room, and does so. Another man, though, who tries to chat Nadine up with a gun to his head, may think he's worked his charm but is in for a surprise.)

Baise-Moi is not a very good film (Anderson tries too hard, though Lancaume is a strong, natural presence) but, you'll have gathered, I have a soft spot for it. When it was attacked as pornography, its directors and stars defended it by saying it was not meant to turn viewers on, a naturally reductive argument that's often used with deeply sexual material.

While the two leads of 9 Songs are actors and were hired for that reason, there's an emotional honesty there that lifts it above pornography; Baise-Moi is adrenalised caper, which its creators likened to comics, so the inclusion of graphic sex is questionable, if defensible. Whether any of its scenes work on the level of arousal, is up to you.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 33:50 Nadine and Manu decide to get wasted and pull two men in a bar. They go up to their room for sex; the women watch each other critically, admiringly. When one of the men says he'd like to see the women go down each other he's thrown out.

Chapter 8, 50:42 At a seaside hotel, Nadine pulls the desk clerk, they masturbate in front of each other before she gives him a blow job. Meanwhile, Manu heads out on the town and meets a man in a bar; in what's a favourite move, she pulls out the crotch of her tights and they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Baise-Moi was given a 16 rating in France on its release but the courts overthrew this, following a campaign largely instigated by right-wing pressure group Promouvoir. An initial ban, the first of its kind for 28 years in the country, was rescinded and replaced with an X certificate, restricting the film to being screened in porn cinemas. A campaign that included Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard saw the 18 certificate reintroduced and the film could finally be shown in salles.

Elsewhere in the world, its route to public screening was even more fraught: the film was pulled from screens in Australia after it had been showing for a month provoking a run on art-house cinemas (police were even called to one venue in Sydney) and banned in some 22 other countries. In Britain, Baise-Moi was awarded an 18 certificate following 10 seconds of cuts in the rape scene; a further 12 seconds were cut for the video release of a gun being inserted into a man's anus before being fired.

Lancaume killed herself in 2005, a week after her 32nd birthday.

KEY QUOTE 'Weird we should meet like that, huh?' - Manu

BONUS CURIO Advertising posters for the film were banned by London Underground for fear of upsetting French tourists: the title, Baise-Moi, translates as 'Fuck me'. (Some territories have it as the extremely unpleasant, 'Rape Me'.)