Since 2002, French filmmaker Christophe Honoré (b. 1970) has written and directed eleven feature-length films. Besides writing many children’s books, directing theater and opera, and penning film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, Honoré works in a variety of cinematic formats—from consumer-grade video to 16mm to digital cinema—and in a variety of contexts—from art cinema to what has been called “French extreme” to intelligent, star-driven entertainment to films for children to work that investigates the border between fiction and documentary, experimental and narrative. After attracting international attention with his second feature, an audacious adaptation of Georges Bataille’s novel My Mother starring Isabelle Huppert, Honoré embarked on a trilogy of films that established him as an auteur of note, with a role in contemporary cinema as a keen observer of 21st century France.

The films of this trilogy—In Paris, Love Songs and The Beautiful Person—share a number of actors but no overlapping narrative; each is an independent film about three things (according to Honoré himself): “a look at Paris, a look at French cinema, and a look at the sentimental [i.e., ‘emotional’] portrait of youth.” Each also involves a number of original songs by Honoré’s associate, composer Alex Beaupain. The trilogy places Honoré squarely in French film history, in which the two most obvious poles are those New Wave directors fascinated by musicals: Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy.

The emphasis on youth in the trilogy, and throughout Honoré’s films before and after, allows him to investigate the malleability of human attachments, whether familial, platonic or sexual. At their core, and yet to varying degrees, his films explore the concept and transformation of family. “I invent all kinds of families,” Honoré tells us; “as a result, it can seem to be an attack on family values.” Most strikingly, the director places significant weight on the mother-child relationship as it intersects with Eros and Thanatos, sexual desire and death. In fact, like Cocteau and Demy before him (and Freud, for that matter), Honoré’s films occasionally dip their toes into the fraught emotional terrain where the familial, the platonic and the sexual blur and entangle.

This is to say that Honoré is not afraid to provoke. Two of his most recent films, Man at Bath and Metamorphoses, are filled with the kind of abundant nudity and narrative discursivity not seen since Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” in the early 1970s. His work is unapologetically that of a queer auteur, reveling not just in male nudity and gay male desire but also lesbianism, bisexuality, and good old-fashioned sexual fluidity, with the more recent films insistent on a multicultural context. At the same time, Honoré’s work brings cultural milestones from various pasts (Bataille, La princesse de Clèves, Ovid) into the present, thus insisting on history as both ballast and inspiration, proposing a provocative view of Europe’s precarious present.