Movie-A-Day: A Ma Soeur

Starring: Anais Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero De Rienzo, Arsinee Khanjian Director: Catherine Breillat Year Of Release: 2001 Plot: 15-year-old Elena and her slightly pudgy 12-year-old sister Anais are on holiday and thinking about the best way to lose their virginity. Elena meets dashing Italian student, Fernando, who pressures her for sex while Anais watches, however Elena resists, leading to an awkward and painful compromise. However Fernando persists, which eventually leads to a terrible tragedy. But will it cause Anais to rethink her idea that it’s best to just lose your virginity to anybody, in order to get it over with?

If it were my job to convince teenage girls not to have sex, I’d probably show them A Ma Soeur, as it doesn’t exactly paint losing your virginity as a joyful experience. Actually it’d also probably be a good film if it was my job to convince men they were evil assholes (although the fact the BBFC butchered the end by cutting a pivotal moment does rather blunt the film’s point in the UK). However that’s not my job. What I do is review films, a vocation that has some odd challenges, including having to watch and write about films that contain real sex. Now you might think that sounds like an added bonus – watching sex and getting paid for it – but in reality it’s a much stranger and more awkward job requirement than you’d expect.

A Ma Soeur is one such movie. Although there’s not a huge amount of real humping on screen, you do see the man looking far more excited than is usual for cinema (although his hardened bits are actually a prosthetic appliance), and it’s part of a wave of recent films, including other movies by Catherine Breillat like Romance and Anatomy Of Hell, that have tried to bring more ‘real’ sex onto the screen. Luckily by the time I had to review A Ma Soeur in 2002, I’d already had a bit of experience of arty films with realistic sex, but it’s always a weird thing to have to deal with as part of your working life.

Just after I finished university, I was lucky enough to get a job reviewing DVDs for a magazine. It seemed like a dream job, so off I trotted to watch discs and write my thoughts on them. For the first couple of weeks it was fine, until the deputy editor of the magazine called me across, handed me some discs and told me to review them. One of the DVDs was a movie called Intimacy, so I went back to my desk, plugged the headphones in and began to watch.

It all started off okay, but about 20 minutes into the film, I suddenly realised I was two weeks into my very first job, and now I was watching Kerry Fox giving Mark Rylance a real blowjob and that I was then supposed to write about it. Not only that, but whatever I said would be published for the entire nation to read. Now, I’d be willing to bet that didn’t happen to you when you started your first job.

I have to say it was one of the most awkward moments of my life. I was brand new to working life, I wanted to seem like a professional, but like most people, I’d never had to watch anyone having sex while I was in an office surrounded by other people. My response was to adopt the ultimate poker face, with the plan being that if anyone looked over, they would see someone who looked like they were being very serious and purely considering the artistic resonances of Rylance and Fox getting their rocks off (in fact Intimacy is probably one of the few movies that uses real sex and you can genuinely see what it adds to the movie).

I was determined that no one would think I was taking any pleasure in seeing this graphic display, or that I was shocked or embarrassed (which I wasn’t really, but I suspect that’s why the disc was handed to me so in the first place, just so they could see how I’d react). Inside however, I was feeling very self-conscious and wondering how my life had got to the point where I watching someone getting a blowjob in a room full of people that I’m hoping will one day respect me.

I think this conflict over how you’re meant to view these films containing real sex comes through in the reviews of them. If you ever read a write-up of a movie that contains erections or any other form of realistic sexual activity, nearly every review comments on how the use of sex in the film isn’t erotic. Sometimes that’s true, but much of the time it isn’t. However I think that male reviewers in particular feel the need to say how un-erotic is all it, because they don’t want anyone to think they watched a serious arty movie and got a boner. It’s as if they think nobody could ever take their opinion seriously again if they admitted they’re alive below the waist.

However it is an awkward thing to write about. You can’t just ignore it, and so you have to talk about the sex and intellectually engage with it, when most of the time what you’re really thinking you should write is, ‘The film’s crap, but at least you get to see some things that are normally the preserve of sex shops and the saucier parts of the internet, which means it isn’t a total waste of time’.

It turned out I was quite good at finding vaguely intelligent sounding things to say about real sex in films, and so whenever one of these movies came through the door, it was always handed to me. I think I was chosen because I was the only one who’d studied film at university and so I could therefore always find something poncy to say, which made it sound like sex was merely some sort of intellectual exercise. As a result I ended up having to find something to say about the likes of A Ma Soeur, Baise Moi, The Idiots and Sex & Lucia, that went beyond, ‘Gee, you’d never believe how many willies and fannies there are in this film, and you’ll never guess who puts what where!’

Thinking about it, maybe my co-workers did just think I was the office perv. Either that or that I was asexual, because it does seem that I had to deal with everything at work that involved sex. Not only did I have to review every movie with even the vaguest hint of an erection, but it was also my job to check every advert than came into the magazine before it went to print.

That may sound harmless enough, but as the magazine included adverts for porno movies, it actually involved me minutely studying pictures of the covers of porn DVDs to make sure there was nothing on show that might upset anyone browsing in WHSmith. This led to some rather bizarre situations where I was phoning up advertisers to ask them whether they could cover up the rather excited looking man or be a bit coyer about how adults ocassionally like to use their body parts. Sometimes there’d be two or three of us gathered round my computer, discussing whether you really could see the ding dong entering the hoo-hah. There was also an utterly surreal discussion with my boss about whether a picture of a Russian woman squatting over a dog bowl was too extreme to print, as it was undoubtedly rather disgusting but you couldn’t actually see anything rude. That really was a ‘how the hell did this become my life?’ moment.

And while I’m on the subject of how sex became a far larger part of my career than I ever expected, I might as well tell you how I once accidentally became a hardcore pornographer (but thankfully only briefly). I’d worked my way up to become the editor of the DVD magazine, and one of the things we did each issue at the time was to have a cover DVD stuck on the front, containing trailers, episodes of TV shows, special features and various other bits and pieces. 

Not long after I became the editor, I was a bit shocked when a day or so after one of our new issues went on sale, we started getting phone calls from people telling us that they’d put the cover disc in the player and instead of getting an episode of CSI: Miami, they were greeted with hardcore Eastern European pornography. There wasn’t any warning for people either, as when you put the DVD on, almost immediately you got the menu screen, which was, as one reader described it to us, a woman “bent over, showing us her breakfast”.

I hadn’t realised until that moment how many people bought the magazine and then immediately watched the cover disc with their children, because it seemed that every phone call we got was from some irate person who’d had the shock of their lives and now didn’t know what to say to some innocent, bright-eyed child. We also got calls from both the police and trading standards, wanting to know what the hell was going on, and whether I was some sort of evil, mac-wearing pervert, trying to corrupt the nation.

What had happened is that when a DVD replication plant is getting ready to print the text and pictures that go on the top of a DVD, they often put a few blank discs through first to check everything’s working properly. Unfortunately the Polish plant we were using decided to do the print test using a batch of leftover hardcore porn discs, and then rather than discarding them, they packed them up and sent them off along with all the proper cover DVDs.

While thankfully it only affected relatively few of our cover discs and we quickly got them off the shelves – and also rectified the situation with those who’d bought the incorrect disc and phoned up to complain – we worked out that there must have been a couple more ‘faulty’ discs out there somewhere that had been bought but which no one had ever complained about. The only way we could figure it was that a couple of people had paid £3.99 for a magazine, and then when they put the disc in the player had thought all their Christmases had come early.

So that’s how I accidentally became a hardcore pornographer, although I have to say it’s not a career I’ve ever really thought about taking up full time (but if I did, I hope I’d do better than that Eastern European movie, as it featured some impressively ugly people screwing).

What I hope you take from this is that while you may think reviewing films is all fun and games, sometimes it’s a lot weirder and more awkward than you’d expect, and if you’ve ever thought it’d be cool if your job involved more sex, it really isn’t. After all, you don’t want to end up like me, trying to explain to the police why some old biddy is having to talk to her doe-eyed grandson about why the lady on the DVD issn’t wearing any panties, and exactly what those splayed bits of her anatomy are.

TIM ISAAC

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