Actual, honest-to-goodness pornography has an unavoidable delimiting effect on transparent depictions of any kind of sex act, reducing the visceral impact of, say, an extended sequence in which an 18-year-old boy loses his virginity to a new girlfriend, which becomes perversely boring. And there are plenty of better places to go for that.Ĭo-directors Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr do all they can to make their film seem edgy, but the immediate and irresolvable problem with this strategy is that we can’t possibly, in 2012, be shocked by the mere sight of on-screen sex, however convincingly simulated or visually frank. Yet it could never do either: Its scope is too limited-conceptually, yes, but also intellectually and emotionally-for it to muster much of a response in us beyond basic titillation. The class has been upgraded to a comfortable middle, but the film still aspires to examine the sex lives of three generations of a French family with frankness and audacity, knocking down barriers and, it hopes, blowing our minds.
Now, nearly four decades after Numero Deux radicalized depictions of familial sexuality and set the bar for pretty much all works about the nature of sex, we are presented with Sexual Chronicles of a French Family, which in many ways appears to be Numero Deux part two. Equal parts political and pornographic, the film is as rigorous an interrogation of sexual agency and power relations as Foucault’s seminal A History of Sexuality, the first volume of which was written just a year after Godard’s film was released in France (to a lot of confusion and disdain, as was common for his work during this period). In 1975, Jean-Luc Godard made a difficult, progressive, and rarely seen film called Numero Deux, which explores the sex lives of a working-class French family across three generations.
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