Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors by Todd W. Reeser (review)

Reviewed by: Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors by Todd W. Reeser Ryan K. Schroth Reeser, Todd W. Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors. Manchester UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1526141064. Pp. 330. Part of the "French Film Directors Series," Todd W. Reeser's Queer Cinema in Contemporary France examines "a cinema of productive becomings falling within the broad temporal frame of the first two decades of the twenty-first century" (23). This brief mention of "becomings" announces Reeser's Deleuzian framework early on. Conjugating Deleuze's conception of becoming with José Esteban Muñoz's thoughts on potentiality and futurity, Reeser explores representations of the horizon, movement, and light within examples of queer French cinema. Of course, Reeser's interest is not only in the representational, but rather in all the ways that queer cinema might challenge normative forms of narration while imagining new ways of seeing the queer and queering visuality. It is these questions of open-endedness that motivate Reeser's analyses. While the theoretical framework is strong, it is the depth and breadth of Reeser's book that is most impressive. Interweaving close textual analysis with social commentary, biographical details, and several important strands of queer thought, Reeser examines the work of Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, Sébastien Lifshitz, Alain Guiraudie, and Céline Sciamma. Each chapter focuses on one director (except for the chapter on the filmmaking duo of Ducastel and Martineau), covering everything from the director's short films to feature-length works, as well as other forms of artistic output (such as Guiraudie's writing or Lifshitz's work with photography). The chapters open up to include larger questions of queer theory, such as temporality, queer kinship, trans identities, and new epistemologies of the closet. For instance, in the chapter on Lifshitz, Reeser delves into the non-normative narration of Les corps ouverts (1998), issues of filiation and "conceptual queerness" (as opposed to desire-based queerness) in Les terres froides (1999), queer domesticity in Presque rien (2000), what might be called "trans temporality" in Wild Side (2004), and the intersection of queer time and space in La traversée (2001). The chapter then turns toward Lifshitz's documentaries. In the chapter on Sciamma, which focuses on "movement-centered" forms of female transformation, Reeser discusses lesbian desires in Naissance des pieuvres (2007) and Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019), trans identities in Tomboy (2011), and the intersection of race and ethnicity with queerness in Bande de filles (2014). Also of note is Reeser's analysis of Guiraudie's L'inconnu du lac (2013), which unpacks questions of queer relationality, cruising, and "awkward" affect. All in all, Reeser's manuscript covers an exceptional amount of ground. While it is written for scholars of queer cinema or French cinema, it should still be accessible to readers who have a general interest in queer cultural production. Each of the chapters, and in particular the introduction, which presents the current state of queer French cinema by contextualizing issues of queer theory within the French End Page 178 national context, could serve as stand-alone reading assignments for students in undergraduate or graduate seminars. Despite the series' seemingly restrictive limitation of only permitting the discussion of five directors, Reeser's analyses are convincing and comprehensive. It is this exhaustiveness, in the end, that is the project's greatest strength. End Page 179 Ryan K. Schroth Wake Forest University (NC) Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French