As role of BFI'due south Teenage Kicks season, we teamed up with I am Dora to present a special screening of Maurice Pialat's À nos amours (To Our Loves) on Sunday 10 August. After the screening, we held a salon in the Teenage Kicks teen bedroom installation at BFI Southbank and discussed the idea of the young femme fatale in French picture palace as a construct of male person directors' fantasies, and how these depictions affect the female viewer's sense of self.

Pialat's pic centres on fifteen-twelvemonth-former Suzanne (a stunning operation by a very young Sandrine Bonnaire) who – on a mission to escape her overbearing father, histrionic female parent and brutish brother – embarks on a rampage of sexual adventure, working her way through partners with apparent cool abandon. As Suzanne'southward transformation unfolds, audiences and those closest to her are left wondering what it is that she seeks: affection, liberty, pleasure, or a man just like her begetter? Maurice Pialat (who himself plays in the film as Suzanne's father) directs a fresh-faced and inscrutable Bonnaire to requite us few easy answers; hither is a girl who seems to accept the power of youth and beauty, but never quite finds what she's looking for.

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In her essay to mark the Benchmark DVD release of the film in 2005, critic Molly Haskell posits À nos amours as settling comfortably into a collection of iconic films exploring "the teenage daughter on the cusp of sexual awakening":

Part child, part femme fatale, innocent and dangerous in equal proportions, these schoolgirl seductresses, built-in to flower under the eye of the camera, accept exerted a fatal fascination for Pygmalion auteurs who seek to capture and unveil this drama of unfolding. But over the years, as one transfixing newcomer after another, barely out of braces and backpacks, embarks on the vita sexualis, nosotros take to wonder, whose sexuality is it, exactly? Is this the mode they run across themselves, are these their yearnings, or is this precocious sensuality a project of the guilty desires and fears of directors old enough to exist their fathers?

To marker the occasion nosotros've put together a listing of six French films that play with and subtly subvert this thought of female 'sexual awakening' in movie theatre, from girlhood to adulthood.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent masterpiece focuses not on the unsteady steps into womanhood, but on the final moments of our nineteen-twelvemonth-old heroine's brief life. Here is a girl who eschews the pressures of gender conformity, refusing to wearable women's clothes and vowing her faith and obedience to no earthly man – only to God – and is punished severely.

While the film'southward focus is firmly on Joan's trial and persecution, critic Pauline Kael saw something else in Dreyer's austere direction that combined stark close-ups and rapid editing to build the temper of fervent oppression that leads to Joan's torture and eventual death. For her, there was a subtle double pregnant in the 'passion' of the title, referring both to its spiritual and subversively erotic dimension: "In [his] enlargement Joan and her persecutors are shockingly fleshly – isolated with their sweat, warts, spittle, and tears, and (as no one used makeup) with startlingly individual contours, features, and skin. No other film has so subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution."

Belle de Jour (1967)

Director: Luis Buñuel

Belle de Jour (1967)

Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is a 23-year-erstwhile woman languishing in the boredom of her bourgeois marriage. Having never been allowed to indulge in any sort of sexual experimentation in her youth, she has instead followed convention and married a handsome doctor who keeps her dripping in Yves Saint Laurent but cannot pique her sexual interest. Beingness unable to accept a good for you sexual relationship within her marriage, she indulges in perverse fantasies of rape and sexual domination, somewhen attempting to realise them by becoming a madame at a high-class brothel.

Luis Buñuel'southward exploration of Séverine'south sexuality is played out with feature surrealist flourish, and her true motivations remain ever obscured. Critic Melissa Anderson has observed that, for Deneuve, this ultimate mystery became a calling card and the footing of the rest of her filmic output: "Belle de Jour, more than any other film from the showtime decade of her career, defined what would become one of the actress'south most notorious personae: the exquisite blank slate lost in her own masochistic fantasies and onto whom all sorts of perversions could be projected."

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Director: Chantal Akerman

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

In Chantal Akerman's magnificent exploration of one woman'southward demand to comprise her emotions in a fortress of command, she gives us a female protagonist who is a single female parent, devoted housewife and afternoon prostitute. Steadfastly refusing to reduce Jeanne to an object that is the production of a seedy profession, Akerman lingers not on her afternoon visits with her male person clients only instead gives meticulous item to the time it takes for the dressing, the cooking and the cleaning that make up Jeanne'due south day.

Akerman's management is virtually reverent in its distanced respect for her heroine; she chose not to use close-ups or point-of-view shots, stating that she refused to cut "this woman in pieces". Over three days (three hours and 21 minutes for the viewer), things start to unravel: a push is lost, the potatoes are over cooked and the coffee doesn't sense of taste right. As each small disaster disturbs the frail equilibrium of 23, quai du Commerce, the film'southward structure changes and the viewer is led for the get-go time into an come across with a paying client during which Jeanne unexpectedly experiences an orgasm. In Jeanne's world though, this sexual 'awakening' is not proof of a long dormant longing, but an unwelcome intrusion that induces a coolly murderous impulse.

À ma sœur! (2001)

Director: Catherine Breillat

À ma soeur! (2001)

In what could exist a scene out of whatever teen motion picture, Catherine Breillat'due south À ma sœur! begins with two girls walking arm-in-arm talking virtually losing their virginity, but information technology soon becomes credible that this is no American Pie. The girls could non be more different. Elena is the very epitome of youth and French beauty; her immature, slim body is a site of reverence and she longs for the chase of romantic love. Anais'due south torso is a fortress, overweight and unkempt, and she has no such fantasies most this rite of passage. "My offset time should be with nobody," she says, "Guys are sick".

Directing her film more similar a horror than a coming-of-age drama, Breillat concerns herself with the trigger-happy and ofttimes humiliating reality of a girl's loss of virginity. Employing real-fourth dimension direction (the first scene in which Elena's vacation love interest convinces her to have sex is 25 minutes long), she dethrones the idea that sexual enkindling as a teenager is any sort of liberation. As the fallout from Elena'due south loss of virginity plays out inside their family, the pic'southward ferocious climax reveals Breillat's preoccupation with the idea that any the 'shame' associated with a immature woman'south sexual activity is not inherent in the act itself, but a result of the constructed lie of romantic dear.

The Pianoforte Teacher (2001)

Director: Michael Haneke

The Pianoforte Teacher (2001)

Michael Haneke's Erika, the protagonist of The Piano Teacher, is inappreciably a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Instead she is a woman who has masochistically resisted the painful transition from girlhood. In her 40s, Erika (Isabelle Huppert) lives at dwelling with her domineering mother, a relationship marked with dysfunctional co-dependence and embattled suffocation. From the outside she is a picture of bourgeois respectability, a well-paid and well-respected classical music instructor, whose every movement demonstrates precision and subject. In private, Erika indulges in seedy voyeurism, visiting pornographic bookshops, spying on people having sex at bulldoze-ins and and then indulging in masochistic self-impairment.

But this is non a tale of a kinky schoolteacher. Setting his pic in Vienna, the birthplace of Freud, Haneke is as much interested in our fascination with Erika'southward sexual deviations as he is in the deviations themselves. As Erika's pursuit of control through sexual domination gains momentum, Haneke'south orchestration of his grim denouement leaves no i left unscathed.

Girlhood (Bande de filles, 2014)

Manager: Céline Sciamma

Girlhood (2014)

Céline Sciamma'south first two films (Water Lilies, 2007; Tomboy, 2011) explored the myriad furnishings that societal conventions take on delicately forming female identities. In her third moving-picture show, which opened the Director's Fortnight at Cannes this year, 16-year-erstwhile Marieme (Karidja Touré) must navigate not only the disruptive onset of womanhood, only also the inequalities, prejudices and disadvantages of being black and living in the underprivileged 'banlieues' of north-western Paris. Marieme lives in a man'south globe, with an abusive blood brother governing her unhappy dwelling life. Her developing sexual autonomy is compromised by this patriarchal concord, as her love involvement, Ishmael, initially rebuffs her advances for fear of reprisal from her blood brother. Taking refuge in a girl gang transforms Marieme, and her new group identity helps her to express a kind of bad girl sexuality that empowers her to consummate and then dominate her eventual relationship with Ishamel.

Dividing her moving picture into 4 clearly marked sections in which Marieme changes her physical advent to conform the different worlds (school, street, home) she must navigate, Sciamma shows the viewer how Marieme's developing sexuality is both empowering and treacherous, potentially obscuring her emergence equally an individual. A rare exploration of the black female psyche, Sciamma's work with cinematographer Crystel Fournier is particularly sensitive, stunningly photographing Marieme in a distinctive blue palette, and ensuring she remains vibrant and vital on screen even while it seems she may be disappearing from society.

The flavour Teenage Kicks ran at BFI Southbank throughout August 2014.