Abstract
Céline Sciamma’s Naissance des pieuvres/Water Lilies (2007) and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Un amour de jeunesse/Goodbye First Love (2011), both made by young female directors, offer us insights into the heightened sensations and emotions of adolescent girlhood. Concentrating on a female protagonist who is aged around 15 at the start of the story, both films recount the bruising and painful experience of first love and its loss, and are part of a whole flurry of recent French films, from the art house to the popular, that consider girlhood and coming-of-age.1 Both films make stunning and remarkable use of music on their soundtracks, and music is as much a vector of meaning and affect as mise-en-scène or dialogue. Rather than being “unheard melodies,” to borrow Claudia Gorbman’s now canonical phrase,2 the music used by Sciamma and Hansen-Løve works to give form and expression to girls’ emotions, but through a depersonalized register. The music is outside of the girls’ worlds, usually non-diegetic, and is not the literal expression of their voice. Rather, it is a disembodied, non-identical expression of their feelings, and thus a paradox can be maintained, whereby the films simultaneously offer us insight into the heightened, disoriented sensations of the girls’ encounters with intimacy, but allow the girls to retain their opacity and privacy.
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Notes
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1987).
Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24: 2 (Winter 1998), 281–288 (281).
Emma Wilson, “‘The Sea Nymphs Tested This Miracle’: Water Lilies (2007) and the Origin of Coral,” in The Cinema of the Swimming Pool edited by Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 203–213 (212).
For a brilliant attack on this attitude, see Mona Chollet: Beauté Fatale: Les Nouveaux Visages d’une aliénation féminine (Paris: La Découverte, 2012). As Chollet points out, none of the classic crossover Anglo-American discussions of backlash and critiques of postfeminist beauty culture (Susan Bordo, Laurie Essig, Susan Faludi, Noami Wolf) has been translated into French.
Meanwhile, popular books such as Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 2007), and the fact that, internationally, French female actors are more likely to be known for selling perfume than their films, creates a transnational commodified image of beautiful French women as “a brand” for the French nation.
For further discussion of these films, see Olivier Davenas, Teen! Cinéma de l’adolescence (Paris: Moutons électriques, 2013).
Sarah Projansky, “Mass magazine cover girls: Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminism’s Daughters,” in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture edited by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 41–72, (44).
Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analysing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), pp. 165–166.
Tania Modleski, “Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film,” Cinema Journal 23:3 (Spring 1984), 21.
Carol Flinn, “The ‘Problem’ of Femininity in Theories of Film Music,” Screen 27:6 (Winter 1986), 56–73, (68).
Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 82.
Emma Wilson, “Precarious Lives: On Girls in Mia-Hansen-Løve and others,” Studies in French Cinema 12:3 (2012), 273–284, (276).
Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2008), p. 18.
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© 2016 Fiona Handyside and Kate Taylor-Jones
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Handyside, F. (2016). Emotion, Girlhood, and Music in Naissance des pieuvres (Céline Sciamma, 2007) and Un amour de jeunesse (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011). In: Handyside, F., Taylor-Jones, K. (eds) International Cinema and the Girl. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388926_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388926_10
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