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

Battle in Heaven: Flag bearer

DIRECTED BY Carlos Reygadas, 2005

STARRING Marcos Hernández (Marcos), Anapola Mushkadiz (Ana), Bertha Ruiz (Marcos' wife)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex

RUN TIME 94 mins approx, Tartan

LANGUAGE Spanish

COVER QUOTE 'Beautiful and utterly compelling. Carlos Reygadas makes films like no one else in modern cinema' - Esquire

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Director Reygadas provoked controversy with his intergenerational sex scene in debut movie Japón (2002) which featured a non-professional cast. The posters for Battle in Heaven have the very beautiful Anapola Mushkadiz lying naked to her waist on a bed, which is surrounded by clouds. Much was made of the movie's 'real' sex scenes.

THE PLOT Marcos, a chauffeur for an army general, is sent to meet his employer's daughter, Ana, at the airport and takes her to the high-class, suburban brothel where she works. She tells him to come in for sex with one of her colleagues but it emerges that he wants to have sex with Ana. She spots that he is out of sorts and he admits that he and his wife kidnapped a baby who died. His wife fears that he will give everything away but Marcos promises Ana that he will give himself up to the police. Before he does so he visits Ana at her boyfriend's flat; Marcos leaves but then returns and stabs her. He joins a religious procession on his knees and has a sack placed over his head; blood emerges and he collapses in the Basilica.

THE FILM Despite visual and structural differences, Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven shares several themes with Y tu mamá tambien, by his Mexican compatriot, Alfonso Cuarón. Both films have an interest in the urban landscape of Mexico City - plenty of shots of its streets - sexuality and class, though only Reygadas goes so far as to explicitly mix the last two themes.

In Battle in Heaven's central scene, middle-aged chauffeur Marcos sleeps with his young charge, Ana, the daughter of his boss. Their relationship doesn't just transgress class and age boundaries but, as Ana points out, Marcos has known Ana for 15 years, since she was a child.

In the manner the camera sometimes goes for a wander in Cuarón's film, it does so here, scanning across neighbourhood rooftops, showing aerial repairmen at work, the city's skyline, and a dripping tap, before returning to the bedroom and a shot of the couple's genitals. The couple are tender with each other after sex: Ana's hand inches over to take that of the older man, her servant.

Reygadas had known Marcos Hernández, who plays Marcos, as he had worked as a driver for 30 years at Mexico's ministry of culture, where Reygadas' father worked. The thickset woman playing Marcos's wife, Bertha Ruiz, is the wife of a regional police commander. Her husband's only concern was that her sex scene be simulated. Reygadas is essentially transferring Catherine Breillat's filmic philosophy to central American and, indeed, extending it, through his casting of non-professionals.

The BBFC certificate for Battle in Heaven warns that it includes 'real' sex scenes and much of the pre-release hype focused on that. But the scenes, though more explicit than most in cinema (for instance, the blow jobs that bookend the film, or the shot of Ana's genitals), are not so explicit that they are definitely real. The BBFC ends up in a strange position here, advising viewers that convincing sex scenes are authentic, though they may be simulated (there's no reason a prosthesis couldn't be used for the blow job scenes).

There is a spiritual side to Reygadas' film that's more obvious than that in Y tu mamá también. When Marcos first sees the pilgrims whose procession he later joins, he is at a petrol station where the blaring classical music seems to have sent him into a fugue state. 'What do you think?' asks the mechanic, as he checks the oil. 'They're all sheep,' Marcos says. 'I was talking about the car,' comes the succinct reply.

Slowly Marcos' attitude changes: in bed with his wife he stares at a portrait of Jesus.
His wife urges Marcos not to give himself up but, if he is determined, to at least wait one more day so they can join the pilgrimage: 'Something special is going to happen,' she says, 'Something's going to change.' As it is, the extra day is the one on which he murders Ana, provoking a police hunt. Marcos' son reveals the location of the dead body of the baby that was kidnapped while his wife is taken to the procession to help spot her husband. (The policeman in charge of the operation looks and acts like a Mexican Takeshi Kitano, if you can imagine.)

When all the celebrants have left the Basilica, Marcos' wife is given permission to enter first to find her husband. Her husband's body is kneeling in a pew, a blood-soaked bag over his head. She reaches out to touch his shoulder and his body slumps to the floor. It starts to rain, and the next scene is of men trying to ring the massive church bell, though no sound is heard on the soundtrack.

This is followed by a recurrent scene in the movie, of soldiers either raising or lowering a giant Mexican flag, a ceremony Marcos has followed religiously in the past. It is accompanied by loud military music, and other scenes have very loud music, for instance Bach at the garage or Tavener's The Protecting Veil. It serves as jolting a purpose as the voiceover in Y tu mamá también.

It's possible to think of the opening scene, where Ana fellates Marcos, as Marcos' fantasy. Its repetition at the film's end hints at something else made manifest - a meeting in heaven, or Marcos' dying dream?

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 00:40 A sweaty, middle-aged man, Marcos, with a combover and paedo glasses is shown getting a blow job from an equally naked young woman, Ana, against a grey backdrop. The camera tracks down his standing body and then round her kneeling figure till we're facing her; a tear trickles down one cheek.

Chapter 7, 37:07 Marcos is shown having sex with his hefty wife from behind. As she kneels on the bed he regards her back and an icon of the wounded Christ on their bedroom wall.

Chapter 9, 48:18 Ana is riding Marcos naked in bed; as they have sex the camera moves out the window and tacks across the skyline before returning to the couple. She gets off him and, as they lie side by side, the camera shows her pussy.

Chapter 15, 1:29:36 Ana is again shown giving Marcos a blow job in the space with the grey backdrop. Both are noticeably more relaxed and happier; they say that they love each other.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Reygadas went on to make the beautiful, mystical Silent Light (2007), set among the Mexico's Mennonite community. A fan of Carl Theodor Dreyer's work from his time as a potential film student in Brussels, Reygadas borrows the ending to the Danish director's film Ordet (1955). There are again the everyday sex scenes he likes to show, amidst another cast of non-professionals.

KEY QUOTE 'What you really want is to fuck me, right, Marcos?' - Ana

BONUS CURIO (A Brush with Nipples, Part III) Mushkadiz's hair extends wildly for the cover of the US DVD (in the UK, the film's title was emblazoned over her chest):

Anatomy of Hell: Bataille in heaven

DIRECTED BY Catherine Breillat, 2004
STARRING Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sexual detail and strobing effects
RUN TIME 77 mins approx, Tartan
LANGUAGE French

COVERLINE 'WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS SCENES WHICH MAY OFFEND' (IN CAPITAL LETTERS)

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Director Catherine Breillat started writing explicit novels at the age of 17 (L'homme facile); in 1999, she cast porn star Rocco Siffredi in his first mainstream film. Romance tells the story of a young woman teacher who, unhappy in her relationship, meets a man (Siffredi) with whom she explores ever more extreme sexual experiences. In the succeeding years Breillat directed such well-received, provocative, fare as A ma soeur (2001) and Sex is Comedy (2002). After a gap of five years, this is her return to working with Siffredi in a role she wrote specially for him, based on her novel Pornocratie.

THE PLOT A man goes down on another man outside a gay club. Inside, 'the woman', as she is referred to, is approached by a man but brushes him off; she goes to the toilet, bumping into another man on the way (Siffredi). In the toilet, 'the woman' slits her left wrist with a razor; 'the man' finds her and takes her to a pharmacy. Afterwards she goes down on him in the street; she makes him a work proposition: he is to come and visit her in her home and watch her explore herself sexually.

The proposal takes place over four nights and, from initial observer, he is soon drawn into sex with her and stays until morning. On the last day he accepts payment from her and leaves her wallowing in her own waste, he says. In a bar, he shares his woes with another drinker. When 'the man' returns to the house he finds it deserted and the bed dismantled. He pictures himself pushing the woman off the cliff into the sea.

THE FILM A stern, written notice at the beginning of Anatomy of Hell says: 'A film is an illusion, not reality-fiction or a happening. It is a true work of fiction. For the actress's most intimate scenes, a body double was used. It's not her body, it's an extension of a fictional character.' Presumably this was placed at the request of the actress, Amira Casar, but it provokes a host of questions, not least why Breillat didn't use an actress who was willing to appear without a body double.

The scenes are extremely intimate but the owner of the female genitalia shown in close-up (having a finger inserted or expelling objects; more of that later) is named: Pauline Hunt (unless this is some form of rhyming slang). These may not be Casar's bits, but they nevertheless belong to someone, and Breillat has taken a decision to show them unflinchingly.

There's no such coyness about Siffredi, whose erect penis is shown several times; a seasoned porn star, his inclusion is also nonetheless initially puzzling. His character is gay so you might assume there would be little sexual activity between them that requires Siffredi's experience to come into play. 'The man's' sexuality is never referred to directly, 'the woman' uses such euphemisms as 'you people' or simply the plural 'you'.

Despite its voyeuristic premise, Anatomy of Hell is a very talky movie, perhaps predictably for a novelist. The characters speak in sweeping statements and many of them feature male stereotypes of women, as well as straight women's stereotypes of gay men ('People like you don't look at women,' she says early on). The man is horrified by women's bodies: their colour, the lips, the form, sweat; he compares shaved skin to that of a plucked chicken and, even less favourably, to a frog.

The first night he visits her, wearing a white suit, he complains about the cost - for which he will be recompensed - of visiting her isolated coastal home. The bedroom set where most of the action takes place reminds me of something from a sketch by Paula Rego or de Chirico; the raging sea outside is pure Hitchcock or Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. 'Why do you exhibit yourself this way?' he asks. 'The fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality,' she opines in (a form of) response.

Breillat provides a voice-over to the film that elides into 'the man's' point of view. There are two scenes of childhood, strongly influenced by Georges Bataille: in the first, a boy climbs a tree to feed worms to some freshly hatched birds, which later remind him of the flesh and look of a vagina in its nest. The boy carefully places one of the chicks in his shirt pocket but on the climb back down it is is killed; he throws it on the ground and stamps on it. In the second memory, a young girl strips and lies down in exactly the pose from Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnés; the boys with her insert the arm of some spectacles into her vagina and pull it out bearing her 'slime', as 'the man' sees it.

Over the course of their transaction, the couple's relationship changes: when he arrives the second night, she has dressed up, in black, from the previous white, and done her hair, though he immediately strips her and undoes her hairclip (the red of the room prefigures her menstruation; he wears a cross); on the third night he finds the house unlocked and is protective ('Anyone could have come in').

After the couple have sex for the final time, 'the man's' penis is covered in blood when he withdraws. It is so bloody, the scene is reminiscent of the male dismemberment in Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. While it seems like an emasculation, a drawing together of both of them, the couple discuss the significance of the blood: 'Man can't give life,' he says; 'He gives death and so gives eternal life,' she responds.

'The man' goes to a bar and gets drunk; he has a discussion about the relationship that is a parody of heterosexual male conversations: She's a slut, the Queen of Sluts. Hump as many as you can, replies his drinking partner, like goats. In the age-old fantasy, the right sex has seemingly set him straight. Back at the deserted house, the only trace he finds of their relationship is a folded, blood-stained sheet, as if 'the woman' knew 'the man' would be back, and has left him this memento.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6 27:31 'The man' puts his finger in 'the woman's vagina (shown in detail) before removing it and examining the traces on his digit. She gets the giggles.
Chapter 8 33:15 As 'the woman' sleeps, 'the man' parts her thighs from behind and paints first her labia (lips) and then her anus with a lipstick, creating a gaudy mouth, before applying it to her face.
Chapter 9, 35:24 Again, as she lies apparently asleep, he has sex with her from behind.
Chapter 11, 46:40 'The man' goes to the garden and chooses a three-pronged wooden rake. When he returns to the room, he inserts its handle between the legs of the sleeping woman.
Chapter 12, 52:56 'The woman' pulls a tampon out of her vagina. She dangles it like a dead mouse, then drops it into a glass of water like a teabag. The man and woman drink from the glass.
Chapter 13, 58:58 'The woman' pushes a stone dildo out from her vagina (this is shown in close up). 'The man' wanks her with it before they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Breillat's latest films are less explicit but no less powerful: The Last Mistress (2007) features the wonderful Asia Argento (and includes Casar in the cast), and there have been two fairytale adaptations, reminiscent of the work of Angela Carter, Bluebeard (2009) and Sleeping Beauty (2010). Siffredi has returned to porn, where he is prolific, notably in his own 'Animal Trainer' and 'Puppet Master' series.

KEY QUOTE 'You talk too much' - 'The man'

BONUS CURIO (or, A Brush with Nipples Pt II) As has happened elsewhere, Casar's appearance undergoes slight changes for Anatomy of Hell's DVD cover image in different territories, from having a breast exposed (below, as it is in the relevant scene in the film) to being covered with a nightdress (top). My, UK, version has her naked, but with a nipple airbrushed away, unnervingly.

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