Charlotte Gainsbourg

In bed with..

Charlotte Gainsbourg has been for the last few years as active as ever. Her last major film has just been released, Melancholia, of course, which followed Confession of a Child of the Century and the Antichrist and lets not forget about that beautiful musical collaboration with Beck which was received tremendously well by erm, everyone.

This softly spoken lady has the voice of a lonesome and lost child. She doesn't speak; she whispers, and when your hear her it gives you shivers down your spine, either because it scares you or turns you on. In her last film roles she proved that she is a woman who expresses her sexuality in, lets say, a different way. In a desperate and brutal way, in a rancorous and deranged way - the Antichrist.

Still from the Antichrist

Even as a child Charlotte was rather majestically raunchy, perhaps due to her being used as a sexual being/protagonist when she was as young as 12. In the song Lemon Incest she sings with her dad a song that would be attacked for glamorising paedophilia and incest by its innuendos, perhaps suggesting physical love between father and daughter? They are the Gainsbourgs, of course it was not sexual. She was also used by her uncle Andrew Birkin in the film the Cement Garden, where she plays guess what: an incestuous sister who buries her dead mother. 

Still from the Cement Garden

Open legged in the Cement Garden

Charlotte is a grown woman now but I don't think that her unorthodox ways will ever cease to make some people jump out of our seats, and make boys' toys pulse out of their pants.

Lykke Li

Utterly begging for it

"Dont pull your pants before I go down

Don't turn away this is my time

Dont make demands I dont take none

Just say a prayer that it gone get done

Dont pull your pants before I go down"

Lykke seems to have lost her innocence in her latest single but in fact she never had any. Youth Novels, her first album was an endearing and sweet album though most lyrics clearly had sexual undertones. The single Little Bit was about a girl who despite being desperate for love and affection could not let herself go in the name of her rationality and pride. Hiding therefore that sexual need that is so, so healthy.

"Hands down
I'm too proud, for love
But with eyes shut
It's you I'm thinking of

[...]

And for you I keep my legs apart
And forget about my tainted heart
And I will never ever be the first
To say it's still a, Game over
Ah ah ah
I would do it
Push a button
Pull a trigger
Climb a mountain
Jump off a cliff
Cause you know baby I love you love you
A little bit"

By listening to her songs you can pretty much figure out what women feel like when they're in love and when they seek a little comfort in the arms of someone else. Nonetheless Likke doesn't forget that intimacy is more than just a basic need but a girl's both duty and right.

Halle Berry

Halle Berry may not be a personality that you'd think belonged here but if you think further; ok, not even that further you will find a woman that can perfectly and sublimely translate into the screen a female character that holds an incredible amount of suppressed passion and want.

Such passion has rarely been represented as greatly as it has in the film Monster's Ball. It is not an obvious choice; let's not miss the point here. The most fiery scene of this film was complete art - the art of copying a reality that is deemed weak, primitive, embarrassing and profane. On the screen she was a lonesome widow who was left alone with her obese child for months after her husband was imprisoned and sentenced to death. She ends up unwittingly meeting the executor and after the attraction between them built up, together with their sexual desperation, they perform the most intense and visceral love scene of the American cinema.

Monster's Ball (2001) earned Ms Berry an Oscar and let me tell you that despite her over dramatic speech she deserved it. It was also speculated that she only won because she was not white but anyone who thinks that should quite simple watch the film. Halle Berry Grabs her character Leticia by the neck and makes her show to the world how a woman devoid of love and affection and sexual friction acts when faced with her last chance of having a piece of happiness and sexual dignity.

Also in this film you can see one of the most socio-realistic and unashamed lines of modern American cinema as Leticia tells her dying son: "you can't be fat and black in America".

Below a series of stills of the rather convincing act. Pay attention to the static body language if you can, especially those hands gripping the hair chest. "Make me feel good"

you can watch and HEAR the full clip here

Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Hupert is one of those actresses that despite being loved and adored by any and every cineast, still manages to captivate the occasional foreign film viewer. Madamme Huppert has played nearly every sort of character that you could imagine though most of the notorious characters she played have been sexually rapacious femmes in dysfunctional relationships.

Above a still from the film Ma Mere (2004),

where she plays an incestuous mother

Isabelle Huppert deserves to be the first woman begging for intimacy as she exudes subtle sensuality and hidden depravity.

Isabelle was born in Paris in 1953 and at a young age was encouraged by her mother to start acting. In 1971 she appeared in her first film and since then has acted in over 90 films, 14 of which entered official competitions at the Cannes Film Festival, where she was awarded the Best Actress Award twice. One for Violette Noziere in 1978 and La Pianiste in 2001. The latter is the film that made her an arthouse institution and made indie boys inadvertently come in their pants.

La Pianiste, directed by Michael Haneke and based on Elfriede Jelinek's novel, is about a piano teacher with no social nor emotional skills who fails to understand how the normal world spins and gets lots in a relationship with a young man. A relationship of lust, some love, sex, classical music, pain, S&M and blood. Needless say the end is tragic and powerful.

Below is a series of stills that will briefly tell you the story and capture the Isabelle Huppert stare. Just look at it.