Girlhood (Band of Girls)

A case study used to illuminate the intersecting restrictions race, class and gender place on young people, and for me the gender dynamics feel the most well-observed. The film starts off with a celebration of female physical prowess and solidarity on a sports field, and then contrasts that with the way the chattering girls fall silent as they walk back to their estate and encounter the boys idling outside. As usual, Sciamma's male characters are an external source of menace which the female characters have to navigate around, while still yearning for their recognition and approval. Men are black holes of attraction that are dangerous to go near.

The film makes an exception in the love interest for the main character Vic – who is pliant enough to let himself be sexualised by her, rather than the other way around. Their relationship is sweet, but it is conducted under the shadow of patriarchal assumptions, in which Vic's brother feels able to control and punish her sexual activity. At the end of the film, the boyfriend proposes marriage as a way for Vic to escape her reputation as a 'slut' and her life as a pusher for the local drug baron, which Vic is flattered by but ultimately turns down, perhaps because she sees marriage and children as another confinement and she wants to make her own way in the world. 

The film's portrayal of the girl gang Vic falls in with after dropping out of school feels almost anthropological. Its most famous scene is the girls dancing to Rihanna's 'Diamonds' – a bonding ritual that cements their friendship. Sciamma is an acute observer of the hierarchies that structure even these tight-knit groups. Lady is the alpha, but gets humiliated in a fight with another girl gang, which Vic avenges, but that then becomes a challenge to Lady's status. Lady draws in Vic by her ability to get noticed by boys, and also by gifts of clothes and a phone – huge status symbols for Vic, whose mother works a low-paying job and whose brother refuses to share the spoils from his criminal activity. Sciamma's detached stance is typical of her style, and also probably inevitable given that her personal background is very different from that of the characters in her film.

Girlhood ends with a beautiful piece of visual storytelling, in which Vic breaks down in sobs after deciding not to return to her family, and the camera keeps pushing in leaving her out of frame. Sciamma sets up the expectation that the film will end on this downbeat, but then at the last second Vic steps back into frame, with her tears gone and a determined look on her face. Despite losing everything – friends, family, boyfriend, income – the film suggests that she is resourceful enough to survive, and that we should admire her rather than simply condescend to pity her.

Water Lilies

Céline Sciamma's debut is shot in a minimalist, realist style, but there are occasional flourishes which reveal the influence of David Lynch. At the party at the end of the film, the boys from the swimming team have their trunks on their heads and are rowdily jumping around in slow motion. They are dehumanised – the film treating them as equivalent to a brood of xenomorphs on the prowl for female flesh. Meanwhile, the beautiful Floriane dances provocatively trying to grab their attention. Her beauty means she is constantly harassed by men, and she has been conditioned to accept her fate and respond to their advances, although she doesn't actually want to sleep with any of them. Both Floriane and the boy François (the mirrored names feel significant) end up using two younger girls for their own sexual purposes. Their influence is ultimately toxic, and the film reads like a warning against becoming a victim of your own adolescent sexual desires.

Events revolve around the swimming pool, where Floriane is the captain of a synchronised swimming team. The sport is physically demanding and the routines are impressive, but there is a rigidity to the beauty ideals it embodies. It requires a lot of work and a lot of make-up. The film closes with the two younger girls rekindling their friendship in the pool – they jump in with their clothes on and float peacefully together, revealing the film's title to be a metaphor for that end-state. The swimming pool becomes not a site of conquest and competition, but serenity and companionship away from the predatory nature of patriarchal heterosexual society.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

From the opening credits a parallel is being set up between the film we are watching and the act of painting. It is about the process of composition as much as it is about the process of falling in love. In the first scene, one of Marianne's students unearths a painting of hers which shares the title of the film. It's a work of art displayed against the artist's will by a proxy for us, the audience. The film is the painting. It's an example of the art that has been buried for expressing something hidden and forbidden, produced without the sanction of the arbiters of moral and aesthetic tastes.

The story starts off like a low-key thriller. Paintings in this society serve as adverts in the patriarchal marriage market, but the male painter couldn’t finish Héloïse's portrait as she refused to sit for him. Héloïse is determined not to be complicit in the creation of art that she has no control over in the same way as she is resisting her mother's attempts to place her in a marriage she has no say over. So her mother asks Marianne to pretend to be a companion, observe her and paint her portrait in secret. The portrait we see at the beginning of the film, which is allegorical rather than representative, cannot serve that purpose. So we know already that this relationship has been the foundation for a more genuine form of art as well as a more genuine kind of romance.

In the various paintings Marianne makes of Héloïse, we see that the latter is teaching the former to abandon the conventions and constraints of the time to arrive at a truer form of self-expression. Love and artistic breakthrough are intertwined. In the final painting in the film we see that Héloïse has managed to assert some control over its creation as well, smuggling in an erotically-charged message to Marianne in what is otherwise a celebration of family values. There is a secret history of art created by women excluded from the canon by their gender, and this film is a celebration of, as well as a participant in, that history.

Sciamma is constantly prodding at the inequities of the past. Héloïse's sister committed suicide, perhaps to avoid her fate of being married off to a man she doesn't know, but that means Héloïse must take her place. Marianne questions the freedom Héloïse found in the convent, but it had a library and music, and she felt she was treated as an equal. Men are almost literally peripheral to the film, appearing taciturn and stony-faced to transport Marianne to the island at the beginning (in a scene heavily redolent of The Piano) and take her away again at the end. There are no men at the fete, and the servant relies solely on the company of women to get an abortion. The father isn't mentioned but is probably the previous painter – a failure as well as a source of obstacles and problems. Héloïse's mother is complicit in the patriarchal system (for understandable reasons – there are always trade-offs in life). She must also be removed for the romance to blossom. The radical implication is that only in supportive women-only spaces are women allowed to love and create freely. A throwaway scene in which Héloïse chops up some giant phallic-looking mushrooms for the stewpot might be the film's final word on this.