Je Tu Il Elle: Kiss Who You Please

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Je Tu Il Elle: Kiss Whom You Please

by Melanie Iredale, Reclaim The Frame

This piece has been edited from an introduction first delivered at BFI Southbank on 25 February.

Je Tu Il Elle (1974) marks Chantal Akerman’s second feature, her first fiction/narrative feature. Born in 1950, in Brussels, Belgium, to a mother who encouraged her to pursue a career rather than to marry young, Akerman was only 24 years old when she made it. In fact, she wrote the story a few years prior, back in 1968/69, when she was 18 or 19, based on her own experiences of hitchhiking from Paris to Brussels to visit an ex-girlfriend.

At around this time, Akerman had studied at a Belgian film school. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film Saute ma ville, meaning Blow Up My Town, allegedly funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. Clearly it paid off when the film premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1971.

From there, Akerman moved to New York City, where she would stay for a year and made her first feature film, the documentary Hotel Monterey. Hotel Monterey consists of a series of silent long takes shot in a hotel in New York City. Something you’ll see similarly, not in a hotel but in a domestic space in Je Tu Il Elle.

Je Tu Il Elle, ‘a film in three parts’

That Akerman has just returned from the US to Europe can be seen in the film. Je Tu Il Elle fuses the experiments she’d seen in New York (inspired by the likes of the dancer-choreographer-filmmaker Yvonne Rainer) with the cool of the French New Wave, but without the budget. The film was made on a shoe-string, and shot in a week.

Over 50 years later it continues to be considered an important work in its study of human connection, sexual identity, and for the refreshing lens through which it explores sexual desire – all themes explored in Akerman’s later work.

Akerman has described Je Tu Il Elle as “a film in three parts.” It’s a triptych – three acts, but also three characters. And it’s all there in the title:

Je, or the first-person “I” representing Akerman the director and her on-screen avatar, Julie.

Il, or “he,” representing the driver who picks up Julie.

Elle, or “she” representing Julie’s ex-lover.

And the “tu” or “you,” then by implication is us, the viewer.

Start with “I” – Chantal Akerman herself, credited as “Julie”, and here Akerman has relayed the importance of the fact that she considers her character to be a teenager, the age at which she wrote the film, around 18/19.

As in her early short, Saute ma ville, and perhaps as a precursor to the central character in Jeanne Dielman, Je Tu Il Elle starts with Akerman alone, confined to self-imposed isolation, within her home. She’s bored, pushes furniture around, paints walls, plays with her breathing, writes letters, lounges naked, and eats sugar out of a paper bag. She’s waiting. We know not for what. And recovering from a break up, we know not from whom.

She eventually leaves her room to hitch a ride, and here we join her on her quest for human connection.

Act 2 introduces us to the “he” in the form of a lorry driver, who remains nameless, and who picks up Julie.

And Act 3, the “she”, Julie’s ex lover, whom she visits. And this is where we see the first smile in the film, and the first laugh.

Akerman has said of Je Tu Il Elle “it’s very personal. It is not autobiographical, because it is very structured; but it has some elements that I really experienced when I was younger.”

Both acts two and three feature scenes of sexual intimacy, or at least sex or intimacy, both very different in the way they are filmed and the perspective we’re given.

“That” Scene

The sex scene between Julie and her ex-lover is considered, and well known for, being the first graphic lesbian sex scene in cinema, and – at 12 minutes – uninterrupted - one of the longest lesbian sex scenes in film.

The two women are naked, in bed, rolling around, limbs intertwined. We mostly see their bodies in full, and the scene is wordless, even moan-less. Though we are right there in the room, there feels to be a distancing effect through the lack of close ups, and focus on climaxing that we’re used to seeing. A 12-minute sex scene with little sense of performing for the camera, or wanting to arouse. Dispassionate, expressionist, and yet extraordinary, we might feel privileged to be “allowed in”.

A far cry then, from a much more recent, and frequently compared, 13-minute lesbian sex scene, in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a scissoring scene widely criticised from the perspective of performing to a straight male audience whilst also being a reportedly exploitative experience for the young actors in it. One described by the writer of the original graphic novel, Jul Maroh as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, made me feel very ill at ease.” “As a lesbian” she says, “It appears to me that something was missing from that set: lesbians.”

Not something missing from the film we’re about to see. Though Akerman resisted labels of any kind – “lesbian”, “Jewish”, “feminist” – for fear of being “ghettoized” she was an openly gay woman whose queerness would continue to be a hallmark of her films.

The character of the ex-lover with whom she shares the love scene in Je Tu Il Elle is played by French actress Claire Wauthion, believed to be her real life lover at the time. Wauthion starred in another short film by Akerman (The Beloved Child or I Play at Being a Married Woman) four years earlier, which remains unfinished. Chantal Akerman’s Volume 1 DVD of films from 1967-1978 includes a dedication to Wauthion.

It’s worth also considering how unused to sex scenes audiences might have been at the time – never mind of this nature, length, and sexuality.

Though only directly implemented in Hollywood, the Hays Code, which was adopted in 1930 and was enforced in 1934 did have an impact on production in Europe, meaning that there were so called moral restrictions on representation of sex and nudity, and also violence in a film, as well as the depiction of sexualities, interracial relationships and “suggestive dances”.

Prior to this, in the early 1900s, sex on screen was more similar to what you would expect to see today: a diversity of relationship statuses, and women with sexual lives. The Kiss from 1896 contained what was regarded as the very first sex scene on film, triggering general outrage. The Hays Code was lifted in 1968, and within months, The Killing of Sister George was released and featured the first lesbian sex scene.

Je Tu Il Elle’s influence: “what is possible in terms of depiction of intimacy in the movies?”

More interesting is to look at how Je Tu Il Elle influenced queer narratives going from 1975 on, as while the ability to show sex on film and TV steadily increased from The Killing of Sister George onward, it’s worth noting that we didn’t see a lesbian sex scene on TV until Tipping the Velvet in 2002.

The catalyst for the BFI season Adventures in Perception, in which Je Tu Il Elle is being presented, came into being as a result of Jeanne Dielman being voted into the number one spot in Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Times Poll. And among those voting for it were openly LGBTQI film directors Cheryl Dunye, of The Watermelon Woman, Luca Guadagnino, who made Queer, Phyllis Nagy, who wrote Carol, and Isobel Sandoval, who wrote, directed and starred in Lingua Franca. Je Tu Il Elle came in at number 225, voted for by Georgia Oakley, director of British Section 28 drama from 2022, Blue Jean.

Among those most openly influenced by Akerman is Ira Sachs, director of Passages, a deliciously queer relationship drama that features extended sex scenes between multiple configurations of its three equally deliciously messy characters, and whose Peter Hujar’s Day, also starring Ben Wishaw, will come to cinemas sometime this year. Speaking on his earlier feature, the semi-autobiographical Keep The Lights On from 2012, and specifically on the influence of Je Tu Il Elle on the film’s steamy and elongated sex scenes, Sachs said “Chantal’s work and particularly that film gives me permission to create images that, in the culture that I live in, might otherwise be forbidden. I hope that my film reminds people of what is possible in terms of depiction of intimacy in the movies.”

Two years later, in 2014, bisexual women found themselves seen in Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour – another fan of Akerman’s work and an exercise in what happens when the inevitable gracelessness of real life sex is explored through the lens of a filmmaker who relishes in self consciousness, self confessional and performative self-centredness. That same awkwardness being something else we might find in the sex scene in Je Tu Il Elle.

And a year later, in 2015, lesbians were treated to Carol – our favourite Christmas movie! – written by Phyllis Nagy, who, again, voted for Akerman in the Sight & Sound poll, and directed by Todd Haynes who has openly expressed Akerman’s work as "a real inspiration." Set during Christmas in 1952, and based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith from the same year, it tells the story of a forbidden affair between a young woman (Rooney Mara) who falls in love with an older woman (Cate Blanchett). The film – that took decades to make - includes three minutes of sex scenes between the two. Blanchett has described the scene, saying: “The consummation of their relationship was very important and it was done in a way that was not gratuitous,” and which she considers “very erotic, tender and beautiful. That is very true to the relationship the two women had.”

Haynes dedicated a screening of Carol to Akerman. He has said that watching Akerman's films is "one of those experiences that change your way of thinking.”

Akerman’s legacy does and will continue, but speaking of changing your way of thinking, and also of looking, let’s finish with Akerman’s effect on the 2019 Valentine’s Day release of Portrait of a Lady On Fire. The historical drama from Queen Celine Sciamma is a film about looking and being looked at, and one which holds such power in its depiction of the returning of the gaze. Portrait of a Lady on Fire's exploration of sex, sexuality, and the gaze broke new grounds in 2019, with what Sciamma calls “The Eroticism of Consent.” Sciamma too has referenced Akerman’s work as an influence, citing her work as “radical” and adding that being “radical is also being generous.”

“The cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality”

Finally, to close with Je Tu Il Elle’s release at the time: the film premiered at Venice Film Festival in its official selection 1975, and though made prior to Jeanne Dielman, wasn’t released until afterwards. It was received with critical acclaim. Renowned feminist and queer cinema scholar B. Ruby Rich called regarded it as the "cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality".

50 years later, the film continues to be considered an important work. Writer, organiser, and co-founder of the feminist film collective Club des femmes, So Mayer, said in the F-Word in 2015 that the film “gives viewers and filmmakers alike permission to be the heroines of our own stories: appetitive, desiring, lovelorn, naked, mobile, ecstatic. The girls with the most sugar.”

Though Akerman herself had a contentious relationship to the pigeonholing of her own work, and once denied an LGBTQ festival permission to show Je Tu Il Elle, the closing score of the film itself could be considered an indicator of her own sexuality – and a message for us all - as the credits roll to a French song with a line that translates in English to “kiss whom you please.” Words to live by. In my opinion.

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