First scene: Anne, a juvenile lawyer subjects an obviously troubled girl to a series of intimate, intrusive, pressing questions; the defense will subject her to fierce questioning, reports her, and she must be prepared for them. They will try hard to turn the tables and turn her from a victim to an "easy" girl who drinks, does drugs, has had many boyfriends; seven to be exact...

Anne is married to a man older than her, they have adopted two Asian girls, they all live in a beautiful house in the middle of the countryside. Here for the summer will arrive Théo, the teenage son from Pierre's first marriage, who detests his father by whom he has been neglected.

The impact on family tranquility will be significant: Théo is repulsive to everyone except the girls, has a criminal record, and engages in trouble-making while Anne tries to cover for him.

Days spent at the beach with the girls bring the young man closer to the lawyer especially when he begins to interview her with a small tape recorder.

Thus begins to emerge the woman's past, a child of a generation that made the sexual revolution, while she experienced her youth during the AIDS explosion.

When Théo asks her what her first sexual experience had been like, Anne does not want to answer and is greatly disturbed at the very thought. The girls were adopted because an abortion compromised her procreative possibilities.

The first scene of the film along with this one are the convergence point of the trace of this woman's relationship with her own body.

One evening, when Pierre returns manifestly tired and dissatisfied with his work, he initiates a sexual approach while she asks him if it is not better to sleep; he goes on and she tells a significant anecdote from her youth when she was in love with a 33-year-old man whom she saw as an old man: moreover, Anne ironically confirms that she is a gerontophile.

However, the rediscovery of her body with the 17-year-old young man is apparently drawing her away from the "normopathy" of bourgeois life.

Themes dear to Breillat's heart about the centrality of desire and murky, disturbing sexuality especially when a woman's body becomes a manifesto of political castration/liberation.

The relentless pace of the forbidden makes the film provocative and voyeuristic, fueling tension and mystery.

Truth appears and disappears, point of view crosses endless possibilities: yet the banality artfully moves away from the most conventional interpretation.

Théo inflicts and confesses, Anne denies and accuses with coldness, cynicism, detachment.

The polluting fluids of risk dissipate in each in extreme and different ways: accuse, defend, suffer.

The familiar, bourgeois, normopathic corner turns into a scalene triangle poised between disturbance and conflict.

A film that raises without ever resolving question marks and food for thought: Théo remains stuck in his own quest for provocation and freedom; Anne at times the perpetrator, the victim, the simple result of a past that does not pass; of a body that claims, of an offense that demands justice.

Anne defends by profession the victims of rape and abuse, but faced with her own pleasure, her own hidden desires, personal, intimate, unresolved by virtue of a trauma that has produced an irreversibly offended and scarred body, she seems helpless.

Between being, thinking, choosing, having, interpreting, becoming, there is always something uncontrollable that defies convention, the unpredictability of occasions, compromise with the past, the necessity of the present, the fear of the future, and disillusionment becomes inevitable.

... we always take happiness late

...this life that lasts the space of a cry

...and for the rest we imagine

...when it's bad we get used to it

...we have spring reserves

that we will throw away like bread crumbs

...who speaks sometimes when we are alone

this is what we call the voice of the inside

sometimes it makes one of those noises

there is no way to turn the knob

...we go to the midnight exam

and when we cry we say we laugh

...who lives for the space of a sigh

and who stings you before dying

when we love it's all or nothing

it's never everything, it's never nothing

this nothing that makes life ring

like an alarm clock at the corner of the bed

... in front of the mirror when you're alone

whether we were good or dishonest

with the years everything is ruined

so we mask the problem

( Leo Ferré)

18-Sep-2023 by Beatrice