Crónicas sexuales de una familia moderna

I'm giving this a top score (which I do extremely rarely) not because it it a great film but, because it is a much needed film that no one has been brave enough to make until now.

Reading the other reviews I get the impression that the writers watched the film as 'entertainment', it is that and has enough of a plot & deep enough characters to stand up as such.

However, I believe the films real value shows when seen as what a school biology curriculum may title as "Facts of life: Advanced Course (Sex As A Part Of Life)". It is clichéd and a little unreal, as such educational films are, but still very good.

Of course this film is never going to be shown as part of a school curriculum, or is it? Life itself is a school. Most of us are raised with a closed-minded attitude to sex, and as a result have a perverted view of it.

This film shows us that all us adult pupils of the school of life (from age 16 to the end) are sexual beings for which sex can be a very enjoyable & enriching part. This applies whether or not we have a 'good-looking' appearance, sex can be a beautiful act even when old wrinklies are involved. It also shows that it is to be treated with care & responsibility. It also drops in that sex is something to be shared, not taken or merely bought. While commercialised sex is at best empty & possibly damaging.

Someday this film will be unnecessary, in which case this would be merely entertainment. When that happens I would probably give this a mere 5 or 6, and the other reviews I see would be apposite. Until then this film is great art, given that great art is meant to challenge us & make us think.

Unfortunately most of us have a 'broken' thinking machine so most only see porn. For those can do only see it a such, try watching & understanding the expressions of the sexual participants, both pre & post coition, also during. You will see that love and care comes out much more vividly than eroticism. You will also how it can be awkward for first-time participants but then, as they learn to relax with each other, how the bond between them grows. This is not porn, this is a very worthwhile piece of art for whom I would like to praise all the participants.

Edit: I saw a pirate version of this film after it was taken from a P2P download. But having seen it I decided that it was worth buying and attempted to. However, I was only able to source worthless censored versions. So it seems that I am disallowed from financially supporting the making of such films, and that we are only allowed to learn about sex from perverts (i.e. schoolmarm types & pornography). Hmmmm, what a weird world we live in... it just emphasises the need for more stuff like this film.

'Sexual Chronicles of a French Family', to give it its English-language title, pretty much does what it says on the tin! Members of a French family - including granddad - have sex. It all kicks off when the youngest son is suspended from school for masturbating in class, and while he mopes around the house his parents have sex, his sister has sex (with her boyfriend, often al fresco), his older brother has sex (as part of a threesome) and his grandfather has sex (with his long-term prostitute, who becomes a friend of the family). There's not much of a plot; just a lot of talk, and sex. Thankfully most of the sex scenes are between people whom you actually want to see naked (father and grandfather excepted - sorry chaps!) and it is interesting that although the older brother eventually decides he is homosexual, there's no explicit man-on-man action to match the heterosexual sex scenes, even in the two-men, one-woman threesome scenes.

The version of this I saw at the 2012 Edinburgh Film Festival shied away from full-frontal shots, but it's erections galore in the German cut ('Frankreich Privat Die Sexuellen Geheimnisse einer Familie', in case anyone feels like hitting Amazon.de!)

The way the topic of sex in a modern family is done with such delicacy and openness at the same time. Very tender moments mixed with a daily reality society faces every day but does not talk about. An original way to tackle a sensitive topic. The actors are very well cast.

Trust the French to make thoughtful, explicit, ground-breaking cinema. SEXUAL CHRONICLES OF A FRENCH FAMILY is, as the title would suggest, a comic drama about the sex lives of three generations of a close-knit French family, and the various mini-dramas that arise from each. The controversial thing about it is that the sex scenes - and there are plenty of them - are real.

In fact, the sex is presented in such an ordinary, matter of fact way, that this is hardly pornographic. It's almost like a documentary in places. The actors, who have no inhibitions whatsoever, happen to be very realistic in their various parts and the way their different lives intertwine is well achieved. Watch out for THE RETURNED's Pierre Perrier, who has a last scene cameo.

A previous reviewer of this film suggests that people under the age of 35 might find this film difficult. However, i felt the opposite, that people over 45 would find this film blows away what they have previously known.

To the older generations raised on the explosive challenges of the post war decades of a cinema which raged against both repressive censorship laws and out-moded social norms, their sense of history is invested in what is understood to be a participation in an iconic sexual revolution among other things.

So many of the films of the 60s and 70s both punctuated a sense of historical change and ushered in a new permissiveness. Yet none could stand today against what we see in this essentially small film.

Today's youth are emerging and sex is still central to the radical. Not one of the great classic works of cinema which created a chime with sexual liberation depicted the level of explicit sex which is slowly becoming the norm in new independent cinema. It is in many respects an extraordinary shift in the language of cinema.

This new and overt form of sexual language is not a reaction against repressive norms as it was in the 60s, but rather reflects the effect on a generation of unbound exposure to pornography via the internet from early childhood. The younger generation are so sophisticated in their understanding of sex, that it is quite the norm to extend into the language of their cinema the digital habits which are available to them in private.

To an older generation this may come as a shock. We're not used to such a sense of ease with the genitalia. The male penis has been a heavily censored object in cinema until very recently, though largely through the prudish choice of a director-base which was essentially male and heterosexual. Surprisingly, considering the militancy of the feminist movement, depiction of the clitoris was associated very much with male exploitation of women and has never previously been celebrated as such in cinema. These old types of restrictions, essentially generated through the dialogues of the cultural liberators of the 60s, 70s and 80s appear to have had their day.

It is true that France, and Europe historically have been much more relaxed about the depiction of sex in cinema compared with for example the US and the UK. However this film really brings right up to date that natural licence and we move into a new territory of depicted sexual intimacy.

All of the films emerging which depict graphic sex and i could name at least half a dozen off the top of my head, are not dabbling in pornography. Rather, what is emerging is a new world, a new honesty, a new openness, a new level of maturity, of truth, a language of signs and symbols well beyond the old order of the avoided, couched, suggested and coded.

In this new utopia, the liberation has in some sense already been long around via the advent of the internet culture. Cinema needs to catch up. The old sexual reality are no longer contain the issues of the day. Sex now becomes a way of intensifying the present tense and claiming life through a sensuality finally contextualised by a pure kind of democracy. We can all see ourselves as sexual beings. We can all live, we can all have what we need. Because we all are anyway.

Sex has always been linked in some sense to the arrival of the revolutionary. Certainly this new level of sexually explicit toleration blows away the old struggles which turn out to have only come so far in the end. In other films of this kind, the ease with the sexually explicit has usually been attributed to the emerging younger generation. This film breaks the mold by suggesting that everyone has nothing to hide, both young and old. it's a good development and a generous form of inclusion. Until now one had the impression that the younger generation were only able to celebrate their own interests. This film confirms that this is no longer the case and both the curiosity and technology of the young is capable of transforming and touching the lives of all generations.