A woman who gives the floor to other women is nothing new nowadays, but in 1975, young filmmaker Coline Serreau, making her first film (part-financed by Antoinette Fouque) saw it as practically utopian. In fact, Utopie (“Utopia”) was the name she had wanted to give this col­lection of interviews, released under the more provocative title Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (“But what is it that they want?”). They had names like Véro­nique, Elisabeth, Liliane. There were farmers, textile workers, a middle class housewife, a porn actress, a young an­orexic woman, a widowed concierge, a shepherdess who “loves what she does but hasn’t done what she loves”… Women talking about their daily lives and their workplaces. What do they want? To talk about their lives, to tell their own story, to be understood, if possible, even if their desires often contradict their reality.

With Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veu­lent?, Coline Serreau (a former Comédie-Française intern) made her segue from theatre to documentary-making, before moving into cinema. The transition was gentle, like trickling water, a metaphor threaded throughout the film, edited by Sophie Tatischeff and with speech at its core: talk, talk and more talk. The per­formative style of this, Serreau’s first long-form film, should not overshadow the vast range of problematic subjects it tackles.

Pauline Baduel

“I’ve had too many kids… That’s what I reproach him for.” In the same vein as Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veu­lent?, Coline Serreau put her own spin on the carte blanche that TV producer Jean Frapat had accorded to some film­makers (including Chantal Akerman and Jean Eustache). Rather than film her own grandmothers, Serreau delved into the daily life of two Muslim fam­ilies originally from Algeria, living in Gardanne (Bouches-du-Rhone). The first grandmother, Zora, had 20 children (and three grandchildren) by a husband whom she met for the first time on their wedding day. While good humour reigns in the home, the glaring inequalities at play were not lost on anyone. The second grandmother is Kheira. Conversely, she describes her long struggle to find her son, who was taken away from her by her first husband. Never again will she trust a man… Emancipation, discrimination, the role of religion and life in France. With extreme close-up shots by Jacques Bouquin (director of photography for Ed­gardo Cozarinsky, Pierre Beuchot, Sim­one Bitton, among others) the intimist device employed by Serreau works like a dream to bring out these soft, mild-man­nered voices just waiting to be heard.

Gautier Roos