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

Y tu mamá también: Mexican road trip

DIRECTED BY Alfonso Cuarón, 2001

STARRING Maribel Verdú (Luisa), Diego Luna (Tenoch), Gael García Bernal (Julio)

CERTIFICATION 18: Frequent strong bad language, some strong sex/nudity, drug use

RUN TIME 101 mins approx, Icon

LANGUAGE Spanish

COVER QUOTE 'Without doubt the sexiest movie you'll see this year' - Uncut

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Y tu mamá también was intended to be sexually provocative: a booklet included with a special DVD release in the UK explains that the president of production at Good Machine films, Ted Hope, approached Cuarón to take part in their 'Uncensored' project, to make explicit movies classified NC-17 in the States. 'In the process we wondered if we were explicit enough or if we needed to go further, something that we realised went against the nature of the characters and story,' the director notes.

THE PLOT High-school graduates Julio and Tenoch are left to their own devices when their girlfriends go travelling for the summer; at a wedding they meet Luisa, the Spanish wife of one of Tenoch's relatives, Jano. For a lark they suggest a trip to a fictional beach, 'Heaven's Mouth'; at first Luisa declines, but after a visit to her doctor and a drunken phonecall from her husband, who admits to an affair, she agrees to join the boys. The journey reveals plenty of home truths among the trio, culminating in sex between all three. The boys return to the city without Luisa.

THE FILM Despite its reputation as a beautiful, sexy, art-house film, Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también has a social conscience. Nor is death ever very far away, for that matter. A soundtrack featuring the likes of Señor Coconut and Brian Eno is brutally interrupted by a narrator who, when he is not filling in details of the central characters' backgrounds, recounts the lives of figures the trio meet on their journey: the migrant bricklayer who is killed on a motorway taking a shortcut that saves him a two-mile walk every day; the fate of the fisherman they befriend late on, whose livelihood is taken away from him by coastal hotel developments until he is reduced to working as a janitor to support his family; or the 23 pigs who escape from a ranch, 14 of whom are slaughtered within two months.

Even Emmanuel Lubezki's camera is distracted, wandering into the kitchen at a café where the characters have stopped; an elderly woman begins a jerking, shrugging dance as if she's in a David Lynch movie. It is reminiscent of Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), another feature film with Gael García Bernal and a documentary feel, though Y tu mamá is a good deal less heavyhanded, therefore way more successful.

Julio and Tenoch face a summer of smoking dope and wanking at the swimming pool. It's the sort of season where they miss their chance of participating in an orgy - a friend scores his first experience of group sex at a party - but they've gone home early. So when sensual married Spaniard Luisa takes them up on an invite to a fictitious beach, they hustle to make it happen.

While the ostensible reason for Luisa agreeing to join these boys 10 years her junior is her husband's admission that he has slept with someone else, it turns out that he is a serial adulterer and she has long tolerated his affairs in the hope he will change. Luisa has been diagnosed with terminal cancer; she decides to stay with the fisherman's family they befriend at the end of the film and dies one month later.

You might question whether writers Alfonso and Carlos Cuarón had to put a death sentence on their heroine for her to be allowed to cut loose but its revelation is truly poignant. After all, why else would she want to hang out with two boys of whom she says: 'You play with babies you end up washing diapers.'

Sharing dope initially opens up the trio's sexual histories, and it turns out they're as inexperienced as each other, including Luisa. The love of her life was killed in a motorcycle accident at the same age the boys are now; she fell for Jano, who enriches her sexual experience with tips brought back from his conquests. 'You ever wiggle your finger up the ass?' she asks, in a very different take on that refrain familiar from Jonathan Glazer's terrifying gangster flick Sexy Beast (2000). (Splitting up with Jano, Luisa leaves various advice on their formerly shared answering machine, including this priceless tip on his dry cleaner: 'Don't go there any more, they ruin your clothes.')

Nor is her role to widen the boys' experience: masters of the swift fuck, the sex she has with each of them is no better, however much she may pity their luckless girlfriends. After fucking Tenoch she feels she has upset the balance in the 'inseparable entity' that is the boys' relationship and decides it's up to her to set things right by having sex with Julio. She has misread her place in their ménage à trois: the boys have discovered that they have slept with each other's girlfriends.

In the fury that follows, the social differences between Julio and Tenoch are accentuated: Tenoch the son of a government minister, given his Aztec-inspired name to curry electoral favour; Julio labelled a social climber who, it turns out, has never got over seeing his mother in the arms of his godfather.

Once such truths have been spoken, and the boys kiss in the heady climactic scene, things cannot return to how they were: Julio and Tenoch are no longer in touch. Their girlfriends come back from Europe and dump them; the pair prepare for university. One day they bump into each other, with Julio tellingly dressed like a preppy, and agree to go for a coffee because it's easier than making an excuse not to; it is here Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa is dead. The best friends never see each other again.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 0:22 The film sets out its stall immediately: Tenoch and his grifriend Ana are having frenzied sex in her bedroom, beneath a giant poster for Harold and Maude; Julio isn't so welcome in girlfriend Cecilia's home, but when he's called to help her look for her passport, she frantically tugs down her tracksuit bottoms and again sex is very quick.

Chapter 11, 50:39 Tenoch goes to Luisa's bedroom to borrow shampoo. She asks him to take off the towel he's wearing and to go down on her; sex is very quick.

Chapter 12 1:01:50 Luisa joins Julio in the back of the car and they start to have sex; Tenoch pulls over but tries to watch. Sex is very quick.

Chapter 17, 1:28:07 After a drunken evening at an outdoor bar, the three go back to their hut together: Luisa strips and fellates Julio and Tenoch; the boys kiss. I've often wondered if the crucial moment in this scene, when she goes down on them, is panned and scanned as the shot doesn't seem as balanced as the rest of the film.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT To the surprise of many, Alfonso Cuarón was chosen to direct the third instalment in the hugely popular boy-wizard franchise - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - and a great success the decision proved. Notably, he created an unnerving atmosphere, which helped pushed the series in a more adult direction. Alfonso also executive produced his son Jonás Cuarón's directorial debut, Año Uña (2007).

Año Uña is remarkable in that it's told in still photographs; very loosely it shares themes of a (slightly) older woman attracted to a younger boy, and vice versa, and also social reflections of the relationship, here between the United States and Mexico. A young American girl, Molly (Eireann Harper), flirts with the even younger Diego while on holiday in Mexico; he takes her up on an only half-intended invitation to visit her in New York.

KEY QUOTE 'What you really want is to fuck each other' - Luisa

Sex and Lucía: Club Medem

DIRECTED BY Julio Medem, 2001
STARRING Paz Vega (Lucía), Tristán Ulloa (Lorenzo), Najwa Nimri (Elena), Elena Anaya (Belén), Daniel Freire (Carlos)
CERTIFICATION 18
RUN TIME 123 mins approx, Metro Tartan
LANGUAGE Spanish

COVER QUOTE 'Daring, sexy… intensely erotic' - Sundance Film Festival

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Worth seeing for its three very beautiful Spanish actress leads, as well its playful, sometimes dark, take on sex.

THE PLOT Lucía, a waitress, calls her writer boyfriend, Lorenzo, from the restaurant where she works. He is depressed and she promises to help him; she wonders whether his problems relate to a trip, shrouded in secrecy, he once made to to an island. She gets home to their shared flat to discover Lorenzo is gone and has left a suicide note; when a policeman rings to say her boyfriend has been hit by a car she hangs up and packs her bags.

Six years earlier: Lorenzo has sex with a woman at the unnamed island; he only tells her that he is from Madrid and it is his birthday. Returning to Valencia, Elena discovers she is pregnant; she decides to head for Madrid to find the baby's father.

Meanwhile, Lorenzo starts seeing Lucía, who is obsessed with his first novel. On another birthday, Lorenzo learns he has a daughter, Luna; he befriends her and her nanny, Belén, at a playground. When Belén is babysitting for Luna one night, she invites Lorenzo to join her at Elena's home; Lorenzo and Belén start to have sex but Luna is attacked and killed by Elena's boyfriend's dog.

The film moves between these scenes and Lucía's current life on the island, where her only companions are the owner of the guesthouse where she is staying - Elena - and another guest, Carlos. Finally, the two women uncover the links between them; Lorenzo recovers from his accident and decides to travel to the island where first he meets Elena and then Lucía. The final scene shows Elena taking a photo of Luna in front of Lorenzo's apartment block; Lucía is in a window, singing.

THE FILM While cinema has shown writers struggling with writer's block - mainly by concentrating on other symptoms, such as alcoholism - it's less successful at depicting the process of writing. In some measure, this is director Julio Medem's attempt to redress that, providing a very sexy portrait of the creative process.

There's a great deal of other things going on here, too: the film constantly juxtaposes the two most obvious planets in our sky, the sun and the moon; there are the holes that run through Lorenzo's mysterious island, played here by Formentera, and there's a lot of water - in showers, from a hose pipe and in the sea. Then there's food, dreams and death.

The film is notable as the inclusion of two erect penises seemed to go largely unremarked. It features sexually confident women, including one who watches porn on her own, a trope visited in films as dissimilar as Lie with Me and Baise-Moi. Medem adds virtual lesbian incest to the mix, however, as Belén is turned on by watching her porn star mum's films. She fantasises that her mother's boyfriend watches her playing with herself in this way. Or does she?

These scenes could also be the imaginings of blocked writer Lorenzo, to whom Belén lends her mother's videos and with whom she shares some of her fantasies. He uses material from his own life and the meeting with Belén for a new book but, as the relationship between Belén, her mother and the mother's boyfriend degenerates, he creates his own material; when Lorenzo says he must sort their situation out, finally, it is as if he is threatening to kill real people, and his decision has real implications for the film's (fictional) characters.

There's lightness here, too, when Lucía and Lorenzo perform a mutual striptease; in a scene that could be from 9 Songs, they also take dirty pictures of each other. There's further wish-fulfilment: as Lorenzo notes, 'Girls like you never fall for guys like me.' It doesn't just happen once, either, but three times.

KEY SCENES Chapter 4, 24:56 Lucía is too drunk to have sex on her first night with Lorenzo but the next morning morning she takes a shower and wakes him up to take up where they left: 'Slowly,' she says as she wanks him, 'We're just starting out.' The scene elides into another:

Chapter 5, 27:59 'I have a camera,' Lorenzo announces. The couple proceed to take pictures with his Polaroid of each other nude, and having sex.
Chapter 8, 57:13 Lorenzo imagines bringing Belén off in the shower using the showerhead. In the consecutive scene she is shown copying her porn actress mother's poses in a porn video using a dildo taken from her mother's bedroom.
Chapter 9, 1:08:17 Belén borrows some underwear from her boss, Elena, and undresses for Lorenzo. She proceeds to seduce him in Elena's bedroom.
Chapter 12, 1:28:25 On the island, Lucía strips and is surprised to discover a naked, mud-covered Carlos lying on the beach. He rubs mud on her and starts to get an erection - Elena has already told Lucía that Carlos has the biggest cock she's ever seen - but Lucía says she isn't ready to have sex.

FURTHER VIEWING Sex and Lucía marked the close of an extremely productive decade for director Medem, starting with historical family drama Vacas in 1992. The quartet of films he produced in that time share many favourite themes - coincidence, wordplay (especially with names, notably in The Lovers of the Arctic Circle, 1998) - and visual tics, such as the fish-eye lens he uses to represent the view from inside a cow's eye (Vacas) or inside a jukebox, in The Red Squirrel.

In that 1993 film, Emma Suárez plays a woman rescued from a car accident by faded rock star Jota (Nancho Novo); when he discovers she has lost her memory he tells her she is his girlfriend. It's a gripping, if amoral, premise that naturally has repercussions for Jota, and it makes for a more taut film than Sex and Lucía, which is perhaps overburdened with themes and plot strands. The films share an earthy sensuality, plenty of underwater shots and even the leads, Suárez and Anaya, bear a physical resemblance.

The Red Squirrel, with its twisted take on memory and relationships, could serve as a precursor for Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes (1997), the film which was remade as Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz. (Open Your Eyes also featured Sex and Lucía's Najwa Nimri.) A surprisingly fascinating sports documentary, The Basque Ball, followed for Medem in 2003, while his latest, Room in Rome (2010), which reunites Anaya and Nimri briefly, hints at a rediscovery of Medem's sensual heart.

KEY QUOTE 'Put lots of sex in it, that's always nice' - Lorenzo's agent, Pepe

BONUS CURIO Spot the difference between the continental European (top) and UK/US (below) cover pictures, colour treatment notwithstanding.

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'.)

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.