Two of the most prominent contemporary French filmmakers are Céline Sciamma, director of the universally admired Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) (2019), and Abdellatif Kechiche, director of Cannes Palme d’Or winner La Vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour) (2013). In some ways, the two filmmakers are diametrically opposed. Sciamma’s films typically feature girls and young women as they explore their gender identity and sexuality. They could be seen as systematic attempts to institute a female and often lesbian gaze. Kechiche’s films give prominent roles to young women but could be cited as examples of an increasingly problematic male gaze. Yet, there are points of convergence between the two directors that are of particular interest to the current study with its focus on cinema’s capacity to detect possibilities stirring in even the most hostile contexts. Put simply, both directors film characters who are driven to remake themselves, even though the social, economic or institutional contexts, or their own acquired dispositions, work to impede them. By so doing, they achieve two important and interconnected things. Firstly, they suggest that, beneath the apparent permanence of the socio-economic or institutional order, there is an instability constantly bubbling under, bodies whose capacities remain to be found and identities ripe for remaking or deconstructing. Secondly, through an attention to the very real constraints that limit these protean possibilities, they confront obstacles and refuse a politics based on the empty celebration of becoming. I use the term ‘materialist deconstruction’ to encapsulate this combination of qualities, its deconstructive component pointing to the films’ refusal of fixity and essentialism, its materialist one underlining their attention to desiring bodies and the contexts that constrain them.

I will begin with an account of the chapter’s theoretical grounding, drawing especially on a remarkable late essay by Louis Althusser, ‘The underground current of the materialism of the encounter’, and discussion of it by Catherine Malabou, the important contemporary thinker of ‘plasticity’, a concept which, in its mutable materiality, combines insights from materialism and deconstruction. I will then turn to the films. In Kechiche’s case, I focus on three works, La Graine et le mulet (Couscous) (2007), Vénus Noire (Black Venus) (2010) and La Vie d’Adèle, that speak particularly eloquently to the concerns of this chapter.