A Ma Soeur

Another feminist diatribe from the maker of Romance will not please the politically correct liberals who dictate the taste of the chattering classes. Breillat at her b... more >

Another feminist diatribe from the maker of Romance will not please the politically correct liberals who dictate the taste of the chattering classes. Breillat at her best is always perverse. And some critics have appreciated that A Ma Soeur's nasty ending is not so much a willful deus ex machina as a logical and liberating trope which completes the thesis that even in these enlightened days love in the experience of women is too often indistinguishable from rape. In the long cinema verite sequences of sexual activity we as spectators (or voyeurs) are forced to be complicit in the utterly realistic `love﷓making' between the 15 year﷓old Elena and the 20 year﷓old Fernando. Our own sexual desires and behaviour are graphically called into question, aided and abetted by the critical eye of Elena's 12 year﷓old sister Anais (the eponymous `fat girl'). Breillat comments: `Elena asks Fernando to lie to her, then she actually lies to herself. That need for a myth of love is a mental rape. At 15 there's no loss of dignity in having had sex, but there is a loss of dignity in having to lie.' Whether you accept Breillat's thesis or not, this film is always thought﷓provoking and is guaranteed to shatter the received ideas and illusions of all who have struggled theoretically and practically with that strange conflation of brutality and liberation which characterises sexual politics in our epoch.

< less

View all 8 of John Hoyles’s reviews

DVD Extras

• Widescreen. Filmographies, Tom Dawson film notes, trailers. Region 0.

Film Details

Cast

Arsinee Khanjian, Anais Reboux, Roxanne Mesquida, Libero De Rienzo, Romain Goupil

Technical Details