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“French Beauty”: Make that beauties, plural

I was on vacation in New York a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed a film due to screen that evening on the Sundance Channel. Titled French Beauty, it was a documentary on Gallic actresses that took as its premise that “As essential to France’s mystique as its wines, haute couture and cuisine is its place as the defining home of female beauty.”

Well, no disagreement here. I’ve often wondered what it is that they are putting in the water to make French actresses so consistently, yet uniquely, ravishing. While the documentary didn’t succeed in answering this question, it did get me thinking over some of my favorite French actresses and also reflecting on how many of them seem to have featured in films with either an overtly lesbian or a homoerotic theme.

First there was Catherine Deneuve in 1983’s The Hunger. Deneuve would also go on to star in the 2002 musical mystery 8 Women/8 Femmes, where she has a sexually charged relationship not only with her sister-in-law, played by Fanny Ardant, but also her maid, played by Emmanuelle Béart.

And that wasn’t the first time Béart had played queer. In 2001, she starred in La Répétition, a drama where she played the object of obsession for her best female friend (Pascale Bussières, star of When Night Is Falling).

Julie Delpy had a lesbian cameo in the 1999 film But I’m a Cheerleader. The peachy-looking Ludivine Sagnier is not well-known in the States, except perhaps for her role as Tink in the 2003 movie Peter Pan. But British audiences may remember her in the French/U.K. co-production Swimming Pool, released that same year. Sagnier played Julie, a young woman who becomes the object of a strange, irritated fascination for an older writer, Sarah (played by Charlotte Rampling). Julie seems to embody youth, beauty and sexuality, in contrast to Sarah’s tension and repression – a role which Sagnier was eminently suited to fill.

Some reviewers didn’t think much of the 2001 lesbian-themed drama Amour de Femme. But personally, I found it difficult to resist this tale of beautiful 35-year-old osteopath Jeanne, played by Hélène Fillières… … falling in love with equally beautiful dancer Marie, played by Raffaëla Anderson. One of the most internationally successful French actresses, of course, is the Audrey Hepburn—like Audrey Tautou. While Tautou has never played gay herself, she does appear in two ensemble dramas with a strong lesbian character: L’Auberge Espagnole and its follow-up Les Poupées Russes.

And finally, there is Juliette Binoche, who had an early, lesbian-inflected scene with Lena Olin in 1988’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being – although since then, as far as I’m aware, she has never played gay. Luckily, I came across this picture, which allows me to pretend that the 2006 drama Breaking and Entering, instead of being a film about a love triangle between her, Jude Law and Robin Wright Penn, was actually just a straight-up romance between Wright Penn and Binoche: Which are your favorite French actresses? Who have I missed? And what exactly is it that makes French women so damned gorgeous?

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