Alright then, episodes 7 and 8 have been added to the folder (they were added on Monday as some likely saw, but I forgot to announce it here). Similar mixture of surprise and met expectation to last week: surprised that we got more sex scene type stuff at all and that they seem to pay disproportionate attention to Ophélie's character's romantic/sex life (and arguably also even to her body in general with the gym stuff) in giving us even more scenes, though not surprised that they're keeping them fairly tame. I mentioned the mixed signals with regards to the show's reception in my last post, so I don't know what the future holds for it.
I also figured that I'd take this opportunity to kind of sum things up as to where things stand now like I did with the Mektoub situation as things will likely get fairly quiet here for a while given the pace of Ophélie's career. As with the Mektoub post, it's just a combination of public knowledge and some reasoning and speculation of my own that I make no claims of any great insight or originality for. Also like with the Mektoub post, it's primarily of use to people who are in the dark because they've just discovered Ophélie or have never paid much attention to her beyond her stuff in the content thread, though I suppose that it's also just useful to compile some (mostly fairly common) thoughts and commit them to writing so that they can be more easily assessed and/or discussed. Needless to say, as with the Mektoub post, I'm aware of how autistic this behemoth of a post looks too, but that can't be helped.
First of all, with regards to news of upcoming projects, there's not a whole lot. She has yet another short film (half of her listed projects on IMDb are short films, to which her music video appearance could arguably be added making it more) awaiting a release, along with a role in a (mini?)series adaptation of a famous series of historical novels called Fortune de France. The only description that I've read of Fortune de France (the adaptation) doesn't make out that her role is huge (though it's big enough to mention in promotional material, I guess), but it does mention "love stories" briefly (hooray...). It's meant to air on France 2 if that means anything to anyone here more in the know about French TV than I am. This has me interested (concerned) as to whether this marks a turn of her looking towards (potentially regular) television roles and whether French television is less sexualised than French cinema given what we've seen of BRI. While not quite directly Ophélie related, Kechiche is meant to be filming a new film that's unrelated to Mektoub this (French) summer. I believe that there were rumours of it last year and Kechiche has mentioned wanting to work on other stuff (alongside talking about wanting to finish and release Mektoub), but it's now more concrete and confirmed. It could mean more money to help with the editing and release of the rest of Mektoub, or it could mean that in spite of what he's said, he's just moving on. Let's pray that it's the former.
Now, to the elephant in the room: after all this time, and her career going the way that it has, can we expect her to do any serious nudity or even something approaching her performance in Mektoub again? Well, the situation obviously looks pretty grim for a number of reasons, but it's not totally hopeless yet. Make no mistake: I'm not trying to spread false hope or telling you to be optimistic (I remain quite pessimistic in spite of all the qualification that will follow), all I'm saying is don't give up just yet. I'll present the three strongest points against us getting anything serious from her again, along with a bit of evaluation of them. To cut a long story short, they're all concerning, but not at all conclusive.
First and most obvious of all is that the situation with Intermezzo has been followed by what amounts to a more or less total reversal of her on-screen habits of sexualisation, going from borderline pornographic to basically nonexistent. The inference that she is consciously declining to be sexualised any further as a result of her bad experience with Kechiche is plausible, but not ironclad. To begin with, there's the fact that her career (like most of the Mektoub cast's) hasn't been that long or busy as she's been in fewer than twenty projects (and as was mentioned, about half of them are short films) since her first role in Canto Uno which does seriously limit any opportunities. Second of all, coming closer to the issue, while there is admittedly a language barrier, the emphasis in everything that I've read from her (and her agent writing on her behalf in the immediate aftermath of the incident in response to Kechiche's claims) has been on Kechiche breaking his promise of letting her see the scene before it was screened. Obviously this implies some anxiety around that especially intense scene (she also talks about not agreeing with what was shown in its entirety, but not being wholly opposed her role in the film), but it does not in itself indicate a problem with sexualisation per se. In addition, she's just remained remarkably quiet about it in general and has outright said that she wants to leave the incident behind her. Perhaps the most alarming thing on this front is her mentioning in an interview that she was partly responsible for the (unbelievably tame) sex scene in Vaurien (the director who didn't want to be a dictator to his cast invited her to co-direct it, choose camera angles and costume) and that she thought that it was nice for her to be considered and for her not to be forced (again, not mentioning anything about sexualisation or nudity directly). This is probably the worst piece of information on this front and while it was a case of a director offering her something, and can be further qualified by noting that this talk of the scene was tied to the sex scene serving a particular purpose as the display of love and tenderness (as opposed to a more passionate lust) from the murderer protagonist, who knows if that experience gave her some ideas. While that obviously doesn't look too good, it should be kept in mind that the French don't necessarily view nudity and sex on film in the same way as Anglos and that she defended her depiction in the first Mektoub film when it came out and was called misogynistic. On that note, you can look at actresses like Léa Seydoux (who had a somewhat similar experience working with Kechiche which she's publicly complained about a fair bit) who gets naked on camera very often, or even Adèle Haenel (who is a pretty vocal, radical feminist) who got naked fairly often (before quitting acting). It's also probably worth noting to wrap up on this point that while she's an admitted tomboy (with her long love of boxing, mentioning preferring to hang out with boys in school, etc.), and thus likely not super keen on just being some kind of sex symbol, she was a beauty queen before starting acting and seems to continue to model to this day (and they're more conventionally sexy photos instead of weird arty stuff: see some of her most recent IG pics for examples as well as some of the pics in the main thread), which seems to indicate that she's still happy to profit off her looks to some extent even if she has greater ambitions.
Second and perhaps less obvious ties into the aforementioned slow pace of her career. It's something that I've personally given surprisingly little thought to until recently: her age. Ophélie turns thirty-one in July and this is a bit of a worry with the possibility of her wanting to have kids/get married or even (God forbid) hitting the wall, and how these and the constraints around them tie into her career. While nine years seems like a long time (taking forty as a kind of cutoff, as in it's both pretty likely that she'll be at least a fair bit less attractive at forty than she is now and that if she wants to have a kid, she'll probably feel that she has to do so before forty which would both greatly limit her ability to work for a while and likely pretty negatively impact her body), when you consider how little she's really done in six years in addition to these extra constraints around her age, it's a bit of a worry, and one that was certainly not needed given all the other ones. True, to my knowledge, she's not given any indication of wanting kids and/or a husband yet, and whenever her personality comes up in interviews she mentions her tomboyishness and freespiritedness, but it's not hard to find examples of women claiming to never want any of that having serious changes of heart and consider the assumption fairly reasonable until proven otherwise. In keeping with my aversion to spreading false hope, I'd like to address how the career thing also presents something of a problem in that, in my humble opinion, the defense that it could be that she's done so little sexy stuff because she's had so few opportunities to do anything at all is, while not incredibly persuasive, nonetheless likely partly true and difficult to dispose of. Obviously this isn't any kind of science, but I would like to try to limit it by fixing a certain point in her career that once reached with no more nudity can be taken as an indicator that there'll be no more that's comparable to a direct admission from Ophélie that there won't be any more nudity because she refuses to do any more or that there won't be any more because she's retiring from acting, or simply the fact that there won't be any more (good stuff) because she's no longer attractive for whatever reason, etc. I'm leaning towards going by a certain number of projects without sexy stuff as that indicator more than a time deadline given the pace of her career, but it's arguably somewhat complicated a bit by the amount of short films she does and the question of the size of her roles and how reflective of her career trajectory they can be taken to be, so how all that would factor in presents a bit of a problem. I'm personally thinking of something like 6 - 10 more projects (with a higher number meant to account for the aforementioned factors) without any good stuff as the indicator that you should give up hope, but it is of course highly arbitrary, so make of it what you will.
Finally, we have the fact that Kechiche's highly-sexualised style of filming women's bodies, which is to a large degree responsible for Ophélie's fame is not at all common nowadays in France or anywhere else. Ophélie's obviously very pretty and she has the kind of curves that show quite easily through most kinds of clothing, and all of this would have likely brought her some attention even if she'd never been in Mektoub, but Kechiche emphasized her beauty in a way that few filmmakers would and this is almost as big a part of the phenomenon as her looks and cannot as such avoid greatly influencing our hopes and expectations. Ultimately, given that she has no intention of working with Kechiche again (not that he has any kind of stable recurring cast anyway), it's highly likely that even if she does get naked again for someone else, it will simply be a disappointment. Going back to Léa Seydoux, while she does indeed get naked very often, none of it really holds a candle to what she did with Kechiche, with most of it basically amounting to her boobs being in view when she's engaging in some pillow talk or something. Comparing those kinds of scenes (cosy and intimate, talking face emphasized, with naked breasts merely being visible for authenticity) with Kechiche's clear obsession with the beauty of Ophélie's body (most obviously shots where there is no dialogue at all and the emphasis is on her arse for basically no other reason than to show her arse) or even just the ease and justifiability of visible boobs vs visible arses in a scene does makes one's heart sink a bit and makes the stakes with the future of the Mektoub series that much higher. Still, even if we take that anything sexy from now on will be less than what we'd get with Kechiche, we can't simply conclude that it'll necessarily be outright bad (Vaurien), a bit underwhelming (BRI) or nonexistent (seemingly everything else after Mektoub that's not mentioned). As the abundance of celebrity threads and the very active "Movie and TV scenes" thread on this very site show, as arguably supreme as Kechiche is with regards to cinematic eroticism, it's not as if he's the only person ever to shoot a good sexy scene.
So, to sum up, I'd say that for now, while we should manage our expectations and certainly not hold our breath, we shouldn't give up quite yet. As with the Mektoub post, I welcome any contributions and am happy to answer any questions with regards to what you think I've missed. As I said, it'll likely be quiet here for a while (though I hope that it won't be), but I'll be sure to post about anything significant here like Mektoub news or seriously promising new Ophélie projects ASAP and, I'll be sure to keep an eye out for any info about BRI's future or Fortune de France though they're arguably less pressing matters.
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