Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Don't Believe the Hype

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Warning: This review includes spoilers! I saw the uncut version. From a straight male point of view there were indeed some scenes with lovely nude ladies who may even have been genuinely aroused by what they were participating in. But! There was a lot of emphasis on male sexuality, by comparison little emphasis on female sexuality. There was a lot of explicit male nudity (genitals), but no explicit female nudity (apart from a short dark scene at the beginning). This was extremely unbalanced. If they want to include scenes like that they should give equal attention to both sexes. Typically they didn't. In the end one male character came out of the closet. But in fact, the whole film had done that already.

'Sexual Chronicles of a French Family', to give it its English-language title, pretty much does what it says on the tin! Members of a French family - including granddad - have sex. It all kicks off when the youngest son is suspended from school for masturbating in class, and while he mopes around the house his parents have sex, his sister has sex (with her boyfriend, often al fresco), his older brother has sex (as part of a threesome) and his grandfather has sex (with his long-term prostitute, who becomes a friend of the family). There's not much of a plot; just a lot of talk, and sex. Thankfully most of the sex scenes are between people whom you actually want to see naked (father and grandfather excepted - sorry chaps!) and it is interesting that although the older brother eventually decides he is homosexual, there's no explicit man-on-man action to match the heterosexual sex scenes, even in the two-men, one-woman threesome scenes.The version of this I saw at the 2012 Edinburgh Film Festival shied away from full-frontal shots, but it's erections galore in the German cut ('Frankreich Privat Die Sexuellen Geheimnisse einer Familie', in case anyone feels like hitting Amazon.de!)

I don't want to get into a discussion whether the explicit display of sex - the term 'soft porn' comes to mind - is a good or a bad thing, or necessary or not. I don't mind. The movie starts with a good idea and promise. The teenage son of the family is caught masturbating in school. The mother takes it rather easy and doesn't make a big deal of it, but she starts to think about her own sex life and that of her widowed father in law. I thought that this would lead to the uncovering of suppressed sexual desires of the parents and grandfather, and that this could cause some frictions or maybe hurt feelings somewhere. It holds vaguely with some of the characters involved, but the only real forward going story is that of the son having his first time experiences with a girl from school.Unfortunately, there is not much left of the film when you take the heavy breathing scenes out. You can write the entire plot on the back of a postage stamp. For almost an hour and a half, the movie shows a family of three generations in which most of them have a rather fulfilled sex life. This is nice, but why do I have to watch them doing it?

A previous reviewer of this film suggests that people under the age of 35 might find this film difficult. However, i felt the opposite, that people over 45 would find this film blows away what they have previously known.To the older generations raised on the explosive challenges of the post war decades of a cinema which raged against both repressive censorship laws and out-moded social norms, their sense of history is invested in what is understood to be a participation in an iconic sexual revolution among other things.So many of the films of the 60s and 70s both punctuated a sense of historical change and ushered in a new permissiveness. Yet none could stand today against what we see in this essentially small film.Today's youth are emerging and sex is still central to the radical. Not one of the great classic works of cinema which created a chime with sexual liberation depicted the level of explicit sex which is slowly becoming the norm in new independent cinema. It is in many respects an extraordinary shift in the language of cinema.This new and overt form of sexual language is not a reaction against repressive norms as it was in the 60s, but rather reflects the effect on a generation of unbound exposure to pornography via the internet from early childhood. The younger generation are so sophisticated in their understanding of sex, that it is quite the norm to extend into the language of their cinema the digital habits which are available to them in private. To an older generation this may come as a shock. We're not used to such a sense of ease with the genitalia. The male penis has been a heavily censored object in cinema until very recently, though largely through the prudish choice of a director-base which was essentially male and heterosexual. Surprisingly, considering the militancy of the feminist movement, depiction of the clitoris was associated very much with male exploitation of women and has never previously been celebrated as such in cinema. These old types of restrictions, essentially generated through the dialogues of the cultural liberators of the 60s, 70s and 80s appear to have had their day.It is true that France, and Europe historically have been much more relaxed about the depiction of sex in cinema compared with for example the US and the UK. However this film really brings right up to date that natural licence and we move into a new territory of depicted sexual intimacy.All of the films emerging which depict graphic sex and i could name at least half a dozen off the top of my head, are not dabbling in pornography. Rather, what is emerging is a new world, a new honesty, a new openness, a new level of maturity, of truth, a language of signs and symbols well beyond the old order of the avoided, couched, suggested and coded.In this new utopia, the liberation has in some sense already been long around via the advent of the internet culture. Cinema needs to catch up. The old sexual reality are no longer contain the issues of the day. Sex now becomes a way of intensifying the present tense and claiming life through a sensuality finally contextualised by a pure kind of democracy. We can all see ourselves as sexual beings. We can all live, we can all have what we need. Because we all are anyway.Sex has always been linked in some sense to the arrival of the revolutionary. Certainly this new level of sexually explicit toleration blows away the old struggles which turn out to have only come so far in the end. In other films of this kind, the ease with the sexually explicit has usually been attributed to the emerging younger generation. This film breaks the mold by suggesting that everyone has nothing to hide, both young and old. it's a good development and a generous form of inclusion. Until now one had the impression that the younger generation were only able to celebrate their own interests. This film confirms that this is no longer the case and both the curiosity and technology of the young is capable of transforming and touching the lives of all generations.