Bilitis (1977)

and attentive man, and her attempts to play matchmaker pull Lucas and others into an increasingly messy emotional knot. What begins as a gauzy sexual awakening becomes a melancholy lesson in jealousy, rejection and the fact that desire rarely behaves as tidily as poetry. David Hamilton directs like a photographer arranging an expensive erotic calendar: every curtain glows, every body is posed and every morning arrives through misted glass. That gives the film its unmistakable beauty, but also its biggest weakness. Scenes often resemble disconnected still photographs, the pacing can be glacial and Catherine Breillat’s potentially sharp drama is repeatedly smothered beneath all that tasteful haze. Still, Patti D’Arbanville gives Bilitis a vulnerable inner life, while Francis Lai’s wistful score supplies much of the feeling that Hamilton’s direction struggles to express.

This is pure late-1970s European softcore, born in the post-Emmanuelle era when filmmakers could sell an erotic picture as respectable art by adding literary credentials, melancholy music and enough diffusion to make daylight look mildly drunk. Loosely inspired by Pierre Louÿs’s The Songs of Bilitis, the ancient Greek setting of the poems is replaced by a strangely timeless modern South of France. Boarding-school dormitories, elegant country interiors, open fields and bright coastal stretches create the atmosphere of a summer suspended outside ordinary life. Hamilton and cinematographer Bernard Daillencourt favour backlight, pastel colour, gauze, mirrors and natural scenery; even the sharper seaside compositions resemble sun-faded postcards. The vibe is languid rather than hot-blooded—less a conventional drama than a perfume advert that has wandered into a sad love quadrangle. Viewers wanting brisk plotting may start checking the clock, but anyone susceptible to dreamy imagery, lonely romanticism and Lai’s hypnotic theme may find the film lingering in the head long after its thin dialogue has evaporated.

D’Arbanville, an adult actress in her mid-twenties playing considerably younger, is the film’s saving grace: wide-eyed, graceful and quietly sensual, she conveys curiosity and hurt without turning Bilitis into nothing more than Hamilton’s decorative fantasy. Mona Kristensen brings a cooler, more womanly allure to Melissa, making their central encounter tender and visually polished rather than wild or graphic. The film offers frequent female nudity, communal bathing, soft lesbian intimacy and simulated heterosexual activity, but no hardcore penetration; by modern adult-film standards it is teasingly restrained. Its erotic framing of school-age characters is nevertheless impossible to ignore and will feel deeply uncomfortable to many viewers today. Taken strictly as softcore, it is more interested in naked skin glowing through gauze than in explicit mechanics—a seductive picture book with a troubled gaze, plenty of bare flesh and surprisingly little actual heat.

Another David Hamilton Classic, A coming of age story centering on the exploits of a young girl during summer vacation.

Bilitis (Patti d’Arbanville) attends an all-girl school that is about to break for summer… Once on vacation, Bilitis comes to hold with her developing sexuality and strikes up a romantic liaison with a local boy… While another stronger & intimate affair develops with her guardian woman who had adopted her.

David Hamilton (15 April 1933 – 25 November 2016) was a British photographer and film director known for his distinctively soft-focus, romantic, and often controversial depictions of young women and girls, often in nude or semi-nude states, Known for a hazy, dreamlike, and impressionistic photographic style.