Beloved
(Les bien-aimés)
With Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Ludivine Sagnier.
France, 2011, 35mm, color, 135 min.
French and Czech with English subtitles.
Print source: IFC
With its Alex Beaupain songs and ensemble cast, some consider this film to be the fourth installment in the queer trilogy. Produced with Gaumont’s resources, Beloved brings together Catherine Deneuve with her daughter Chiara Mastroianni. The film is indeed a vehicle for strong performances that showcase Beaupain’s lively score. Yet it is also a film that delves further into Honoré’s examination of mothers and daughters and the place they hold in contemporary Europe. Hopping back and forth between the 1960s and today, and thus paralleling the love lives of mother and daughter as young women, Beloved queries, beneath its bright surface, the troubled and troubling space that mothers occupy in late capitalism, wherein they are ideologically forced into constraining Madonna/whore dichotomies.