ABSTRACT
Diane Kurys is one of a number of women directors in France who have been able to build up a coherent body of work with a recognizable style. 1 The commercial and critical success of her first film, Diabolo menthe (1977), enabled her to embark on a career as writer, director and, with Alexandre Arcady, producer of a series of personal films (seven to date) which, though fictionalized, build up a selective self-portrait which encompasses both her childhood and adult experiences. Diabolo menthe set the tone of her work, with its skilful aural and visual reconstruction of the early 1960s, its fragmented, impressionistic narrative structure centred on two schoolgirl sisters, and its well-observed, sympathetic but unsentimental exploration of the girls’ rites of passage and their relationships with their divorced parents, their schoolfriends and their teachers. Its success can be attributed in part to the impact of the women’s movement in France in the 1970s, which created an audience for films by and about girls and women. Thanks to its original subject-matter, Kurys became associated with the concept of ‘women’s films’, even though she herself strongly resisted the label. In fact, her subsequent films can be divided into those which address relationships between women sympathetically, in all their complexity, and those which do not (Tarr 1997). Significantly, the extent to which they are ‘woman-identified’ is connected to their changing representations of the mother and mother–daughter relationships. In Kurys’ second film, Cocktail Molotov (1980), the cold, distant mother embodies bourgeois hypocrisy and authoritarianism, whereas in her fourth film, Un homme amoureux (1987), the warmth and complicity of the mother inspire the daughter’s creativity. Coup de foudre, the film in between, specifically reproduces the mother’s own story, and as such invites reflection on the film-maker daughter’s interpretation of her mother’s legacy.
