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French

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Beauties of World Cinema

Emmanuelle SeignerMarina PierroFlorence GuérinOrnella MutiMaria ValverdeNoémie MerlantAdele ExarchopoulosNastassja KinskiPaz VegaValérie KapriskySylvia KristelDéborah Révy

En moi (2016)

A blocked filmmaker wanders the Paris Opera, where every door opens onto another fantasy—and Lara Stone proves far harder to understand than to undress. Yvan Attal plays a director arriving at the Palais Garnier to shoot his next film, only to discover that the grand machinery of cinema cannot manufacture the one thing he lacks: inspiration. Nervous, lonely and terrified of failure, he drifts away from his waiting crew and into the building’s corridors, rehearsal rooms and hidden corners. Each...

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Tender Cousins (1980)

A hazy summer crush becomes a wicked country-house carousel just as Europe prepares to blow itself apart. Julien is fourteen-and-a-half, hopelessly besotted with his sixteen-year-old cousin Julia, and convinced that persistence will eventually make her notice him. Unfortunately, Julia has grown beyond childhood games and is far more interested in Charles, the handsome young officer engaged to Julien’s vain older sister Claire. Meanwhile Julia’s younger sister Poune adores Julien, creating a...

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A Summer in St. Tropez (1983)

Seven women, one ancient villa, no dialogue and barely a plot: David Hamilton turns a Saint-Tropez holiday into a sun-dazed, clothes-optional moving photo album. There is no point pretending A Summer in St. Tropez is a conventional drama. Over two lazy days, seven young women share a bedroom in a secluded country house, waking in a tangle of sheets before showering, breakfasting, dressing up and drifting into whatever amusement catches their fancy. They cycle along rural lanes, gather flowers...

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Down by Love (2016)

A respectable prison governor risks wife, child and career for Adèle Exarchopoulos—proof that some locks are easier to pick than a middle-aged man’s common sense. Jean Firmino is an able, outwardly decent governor of a women’s prison: married, settled, approaching forty and trusted to keep order without behaving like a tin-pot tyrant. Then Anna Amari arrives awaiting trial, angry, withdrawn and clearly carrying enough emotional baggage to fill an entire cell block. Her crime is deliberately...

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Emmanuelle (1974)

A bored diplomat’s wife lands in Bangkok, slips into an open marriage, and becomes the exquisite centre of a very French lesson in sex, jealousy and dangerous freedom. Emmanuelle arrives in Bangkok to rejoin Jean, her diplomat husband, and quickly discovers that married life among the wealthy French expatriates runs on cocktails, boredom and discreet adultery. Jean makes it clear that he does not expect fidelity; in fact, he encourages his wife to explore, convinced that jealousy can add heat...

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Immoral Women (1979)

Three women, three eras, and a trail of bruised male vanity: Borowczyk serves sex, revenge and black comedy with the manners of an art lover and the morals of a tomcat. Walerian Borowczyk’s 1979 erotic triptych follows three women whose names begin with M—Margherita, Marceline and Marie—and whose appetites bring trouble to every man foolish enough to underestimate them. The richest episode opens in Renaissance Rome, where Margherita Luti divides her attention between the painter Raphael and her...

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Romance (1999)

A woman starved of affection walks out in search of sex—and finds desire, humiliation and power waiting in the same cold bed. Marie is a young schoolteacher living with Paul, a handsome fashion model who enjoys being admired but has lost all sexual interest in the woman beside him. She loves him, wants him and repeatedly offers herself, yet he treats intimacy as an irritating demand and leaves her lying naked, frustrated and ashamed. Rather than end the relationship, Marie begins separating...

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Noce Blanche (1989)

A philosophy teacher tries to rescue a brilliant teenage dropout and discovers, rather too late, that he is the one being dragged into deep water. François Hainaut is a weary, middle-aged philosophy teacher whose quiet marriage has settled into comfortable routine. Mathilde Tessier, seventeen, is the pupil who rarely bothers turning up: pale, insolent, fiercely intelligent and apparently living without adult supervision. After finding her collapsed at a bus stop, François drives her home...

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Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)

A blue-haired art student walks into Adèle’s life, and first love becomes a three-hour feast of desire, class friction and bruising heartbreak. Adèle is a shy Lille schoolgirl doing what everyone expects: reading novels, gossiping with friends and half-heartedly dating Thomas, a handsome boy who leaves her cold. Then she passes Emma in the street—a slightly older art student with cropped blue hair—and one exchanged glance knocks her carefully ordinary life sideways. Adèle follows that desire...

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Love Rites (1987)

A smug Paris fashion buyer follows a dark-haired beauty off the Métro expecting an easy afternoon in bed—and walks straight into an erotic trap designed to strip more than his trousers. Hugo Arnold is a polished, self-satisfied ladies’ man who spots Myriam Gwen applying her makeup on a Paris train and decides that she is his for the taking. She is gorgeous, amused by his confidence and just elusive enough to keep him trotting behind her. Their flirtation continues across platforms and through...

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Nuit d’été en ville (1990)

They have sex first and ask questions later: one hot French night turns two naked strangers into lovers, liars, philosophers and possibly fools. Émilie and Louis have barely finished making love when the real seduction begins. She is a schoolteacher, he works with plants, and this is their first night together in her spacious apartment. Émilie initially expects him to dress and leave, but Louis lingers, and soon the usual awkward post-coital small talk becomes a teasing battle of curiosity...

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The Last Mistress (2007)

A penniless pretty-boy libertine vows to quit his ferocious mistress for a virginal heiress. Unfortunately, ten years of sex, blood and obsession refuse to stay buried. Paris, 1835. Ryno de Marigny is about to marry Hermangarde de Polastron, a wealthy, sheltered aristocrat he appears to love sincerely, but society knows there is another woman smouldering behind the engagement: La Vellini, his Spanish-born mistress of ten years. Before approving the match, Hermangarde’s wonderfully broad-minded...

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The Story of O (1975)

A Paris photographer enters a velvet-lined world of whips, vows and ownership, where surrender becomes less a bedroom game than a dangerous proof of love. O is a beautiful, independent fashion photographer whose lover René asks for a rather extreme demonstration of devotion. He takes her to the secluded Château de Roissy, a private club where masked gentlemen rule and women are trained to obey. O agrees to stay, accepting ritual nudity, bondage, flogging and the loss of nearly every ordinary...

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Island of the Sirens – Private Collections (1979)

A solitary sailor washes up on a tropical isle of nearly naked sirens who play, please and persuade him to forget rescue forever. In this 1979 erotic anthology Private Collections (Collections privées), three distinct tales unfold. The standout Island of the Sirens segment follows Benoît, a lone yachtsman who tumbles overboard and beaches on a lush paradisiacal shore. Spotting a playfully compliant beauty named Malinka amid the waves and palms, he scrapes away his SOS signals and surrenders to...

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L’ennui (1998)

A bored philosopher meets a young model who is easy to bed, impossible to read and perfectly equipped to turn his clever mind into jealous mush. Martin is a middle-aged philosophy lecturer adrift after the collapse of his marriage, prowling Paris in his car and pretending that detachment is the same thing as freedom. One night he notices Cécilia, a placid young artist’s model, with the much older painter Meyers. Curiosity leads Martin to the painter’s studio, but when he returns, Meyers has...

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Bilitis (1977)

A schoolgirl’s summer crush drifts into a soft-focus tangle of desire, damaged marriage and heartbreak—beautifully photographed, morally queasy and in no hurry whatsoever. Bilitis leaves her girls’ boarding school for a summer with Melissa, an older married friend whose handsome home and apparently grown-up life soon reveal some ugly cracks. Melissa’s husband Pierre is unfaithful, domineering and sexually aggressive, and witnessing their poisonous marriage shakes Bilitis’s romantic ideas about...

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