Céline Sciamma's films consistently display stories of girls’ and women's experience in ways that implicitly challenge historical myths and social scripts relative to the erasure of women and their experiences from history. Where filmmakers like Cavani, Denis, Martel and Ramsay engage with ambiguity in a predominantly darker sense, Sciamma's filmmaking appears closer to Granik’s, expressing a gentler, but no less powerful, statement on the importance of emotional turbulence within ambiguous lived experience suggestive of future ethical freedoms.

In this regard, Sciamma reflects an ‘erotic generosity’ (Bergoffen 1997: 2) in her filmmaking, describing the intersubjective connections between eroticism, freedom, ethics and joy. Beauvoir's evolving notion of ambiguity was the key ‘way of acknowledging the body; her [Beauvoir’s] unique contribution to the phenomenological-existential tradition's insistence that as humans we are situated subjects whose first, primordial and most crucial situation is the body’ (Bergoffen 1997: 4). In Chapter 5, I discussed Bergoffen's concept of erotic generosity, which she explains through the inherent power of Beauvoir's muted voice, as typifying an ethics that involves recognition of the other's ambiguity that enables acceptance of one's own. As Bergoffen describes, Beauvoir's muted voice as erotic generosity ‘provides us with the beginnings of a feminist ethic’ (1997: 7) and we see it demonstrated in Sciamma's films consistently via the female bond, as a way of being with women that is not always effortless but nevertheless shown as a highly valued pathway to freedom.

The ambiguity expressed in and through the female body in Sciamma's films is most evidently exercised through what she describes as the ‘female gaze’, here argued as ‘the reciprocal gaze’ given its emphasis on recognising the subjectivity of the other and the intermeshedness of power, ethics, freedom and desire in our relationships with others. The bond between girls or women that is created within each of Sciamma's film diegeses is further established between screen and audience. As discussed in previous chapters, Beauvoir rejects the solipsistic position in her existentialist philosophy of freedom, which is arguably a view shared by Sciamma and one which instructs her cinematic aesthetic. In an interview with Maria Garcia for Cineaste (2019), Sciamma speaks of the difference between a conventional (male) and revolutionary (female) gaze, where the latter is a withdrawal from a heteronormative framing of the female body, its sexuality and erasure of agency.