Gay movie french

The Best French LQBTQ+ Movies

June is here! To kick off Pride month, we turn our attention to the realm of French cinema and explore a captivating selection of the best LGBTQ-themed films. From enchanting love stories to thought-provoking narratives, these movies beautifully depict the myriad of experiences within the queer community.

By Sophia Millman

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE(2019)

Céline Sciamma’s exploration of friendship, affectionate , and art is an absolute masterpiece. Portrait of a Lady on Fire won the Lgbtq+ Palm at Cannes and was venerated for its historical accuracy, fantastic screenplay, and breathtaking cinematography. And let’s not forget the music: if you haven’t watched the film yet, prepare to get chills during the bonfire chanting scene. Set in the 18th century, the movie’s about a young female artist (Noémie Merlant) who is commissioned to paint a portrait on a remote island. Adv, she gets to know the unfriendly subject of her portrait (Adèle Haenel) and eventually begins to tutoyer her (as in, deal with her with the informal pronoun “tu” – see if you notice this critical moment while watching!). Le regard féminin–the female gaze–has

‘A Prince’ Review: A Literate Gay French Drama That Remains Much Too Oblique in the End

The society of Pierre Creton’s “A Prince” is lush and verdant. His protagonist is a gardener’s apprentice whose penchant for taming and nurturing the wilderness around him is only matched by the latent eroticism he finds in various older men he comes to be involved with. Mostly driven by voiceover narration meant to ground and disorient you in equivalent measure, “A Prince” is a learn in the stories we keep from one another and the ones we tell ourselves. Creton’s vision of unruly desires in the French countryside is literate and oblique perhaps to a fault, its erotic sensibility feeling more intellectual than visceral.

The first line in Creton’s film, delivered in voiceover as images of gardening receive up the screen, feels like a deferred promise: “The story really began when Kutta arrived,” we’re told by Françoise (who’ll be played by Manon Schaap but whose narration is voiced by Françoise Lebrun). You’d imagine then that this most “delicate child,” who’s been

10 great French gay films

Traditionally France has been seen as one of the most liberal countries in the world, and it boasts an enviable log on gay rights, despite the occasional rantings from Brigitte Bardot. But has this homofriendly attitude translated to its cinema?

We’ve kept the list to films that are easily available to watch in the UK, but honourable mention should go to The Ostrich Has Two Eggs (1957), a dated farce that at least has a sympathetic homosexual son, albeit one who never appears on screen, and Les Amitiés particulières (1964), fix in a boys’ boarding school. Les Nuits fauves (1992) is one of the finest films to deal with the AIDS crisis, while the best work of the recently deceased Patrice Chéreau (especially 1983’s L’Homme blessé) narrowly missed the cut.

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Where are the lesbians? Good doubt, as French cinema is particularly strong on sapphic cinema. Alas, pioneering films such as Club de femmes (1936) and Olivia (1950) aren’t easily accessible in the UK, b

FéLIX KYSYL, JACQUES DEVELAY IN MISERIICORDIA

Guiraudie's best film since 'Stranger by the Lake'

TRAILER

This is a tale of murder, but not a traditional one. It is infused with a new variation of the spicy gay sensibility that Giraudie most effectively utilized in his most celebrated previous film.

After he returns to Saint-Martial for his former boss's funeral and stays with widow Martine, Jérémie becomes entangled with a disappearance, a threatening neighbor, and an abbot's shady intentions.

"Misericordia" means forgiveness, and the tangled plotline and ironic picture of French village life is fraught with God's unexpectedly and cunningly forgiving ways. This is also a picture of how a traditiional rural community can fold in upon itself to guard its own, and those it wants to accept.

But can we accept this? Mores and manners may differ, as we've seen with Guiraudie (though this is still only my fourth, and he has made before, such as in his 2009 movie The King of Escape. Misericordiais closer to the messiness of that than to the secure construction of the director's biggest success, the sexy, neatly shaped 2013 thriller, Stranger by the Lake,which wo