Sexual Chronicles of a French Family (2012)
Three generations of a French family open up about their sexual experiences & desires after young boy Romain is caught masturbating in his biology class.
A teenage wank filmed on an iPhone turns one respectable French household into a three-generation census of who is shagging whom—and why.
Eighteen-year-old Romain is caught masturbating in biology class while recording himself on his phone, part of a foolish challenge his classmates have been quietly scoring. Expulsion is threatened, embarrassment spreads, but his mother Claire reacts less like a furious parent than a woman suddenly wondering why sex remains the one subject her otherwise close family never discusses. She starts asking questions, and the answers make Romain’s classroom stunt look positively quaint. Widowed grandfather Michel regularly visits the same prostitute, treating the arrangement as companionship without betraying his late wife’s memory. Older brother Pierre is bisexual, involved with florist Maxime and partial to threesomes, yet rather less enthusiastic about giving Mum a guided tour of his private life. Adopted sister Marie enjoys a vigorous relationship...
with her boyfriend Cédric, while Claire admits to Hervé that she has taken lovers and the long-married couple begin reconsidering their own cooling sex life. Meanwhile, Romain is miserably obsessed with losing his virginity and too awkward to make a convincing move on Coralie, the confident classmate who eventually takes charge—and brings her taste for filming into the bedroom. Directors Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr structure this less as a conventional drama than a series of intimate confessions and encounters, moving between dinner-table conversations, family comedy and startlingly frank sex. Their aim was to show fucking as part of ordinary emotional life rather than as an athletic performance staged for a porn camera. Sometimes it works beautifully, particularly when nervousness, affection and clumsy curiosity are allowed into the frame; sometimes the film resembles a sexual checklist attached to a rather thin screenplay. The dialogue can sound suspiciously like an educational pamphlet written by very liberal parents, and this relentlessly accepting clan may strike some viewers as charmingly honest and others as pure bourgeois fantasy. Even so, there is a disarming sincerity beneath the provocation. The film is not really saying that everybody should behave like this family; it is arguing that secrecy, shame and bad information do more damage than an awkward conversation ever could.
This is France at the turn of the 2010s: iPhones, amateur sex videos, internet exhibitionism, ecological middle-class manners and parents discovering that the digital generation has dragged private desire into public circulation. Rather than selling postcard France, the film stays close to lived-in domestic territory—school corridors, bedrooms, restaurants, a comfortable family house and its leafy garden. Jean-Marc Barr’s rough digital photography gives everything an immediate, low-budget realism, almost as if the camera has wandered into rooms where it should not be. The vibe is talky, playful and knowingly voyeuristic rather than glamorous: part coming-of-age comedy, part sexual round table, part explicit family soap opera. It can be preachy and dramatically flimsy, but it is also warmer, stranger and more human than its notorious title suggests.
Valérie Maës gives Claire the film’s mature female magnetism: attractive, composed and mischievously matter-of-fact, she plays the mother as a sexually confident woman rather than household furniture. Leïla Denio brings earthy, uninhibited heat to Marie, while Adeline Rebeillard makes Coralie a cool young seductress who knows exactly what she wants and leaves poor Romain scrambling to keep up. The level of nudity depends heavily on the cut. The censored theatrical and American versions trim or avoid the hardest material, but the longer uncut edition includes full-frontal nudity and several genuinely unsimulated sex acts. It is explicit, sweaty and intimate, though rarely shot in the mechanical, genital-obsessed style of mainstream porn; the faces, nerves and connection between the performers matter as much as the flesh on display.
Three generations of a French family open up about their sexual experiences and desires after young Romain is caught masturbating in his biology class.
Light-hearted comedy about a French family dealing with a young boy’s sexual maturity and their own desires in a wholesome healthy way, with Great acting, and authentic emotional moments.
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