Diane Kurys's Après l'amour (1992)

If we take – and there's no reason why we shouldn't – Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain (1973) as marking in cinema the end of the sixties, the end of the soixante-huitard mentality, in which sexual experimentation is staunchly called to question, then the title of Diane Kurys's Après l'amour fits into place, even if the only (incidental?) mention of the actual title 'après l'amour' applies to a whollly different period, to Pompeii.

Après l'amour was shot over twenty years after '68, more than twenty years after the sexual revolution, but what we have here is not the defeat of that revolution – paradoxically, far, far from it – but the continuation of the sexual revolution, a sexual revolution that never in fact died but florished under a very different ideology: a consumerist one: the world we witness in this film is very bourgeois, apart from the, er, romantic night in the run-down Eden (!) Hotel.

The film is in the present time, and was released in 1992. Gone are the revolutionary political posturings, but entrenched in the new ideology is an extension of the sexual mores of 1968: with mixed behaviour in terms of the male-female divide, where feminist attitudes appear to have eroded, become very confused. Lola (Isabelle Huppert) is the one who has ridden the wave, become her own self, is now financially and psychologically independent, or so it seems. But she's in relationships with two married men: architect David (Bernard Giraudeau) and (the unconvincing) rock musician Tim (Hyppolyte Girardot), whose wives are Marianne (Lio) and Elizabeth (Laure Killing) respectively, and both have children. Being a 'free spirit', Lola has no wish for children.

One problem with being free, of course, is that you are never free, and Lola's main problem, perhaps, is that as a novelist her emotional situation makes it impossible for her to write her next book: the white page predominates as the screwed-up pieces of paper accumulate around her.

So we are living in the aftermath, the heritage, of the sexual revolution, where now everyone is free to have who they like sexually, free to do as they please in theory, although there are two major problems: women haven't evolved equally, many of them are still tied financially to men, many of them don't accept the supposed new standards set over twenty years ago, but more importantly surely: men haven't evolved, they've always wanted double standards throughout history, and even especially now that, er, women are free. Of course, that's not saying anything about where children stand in this confusion, this whole shit, and oh, Lola's pregnant now and wants to keep it? This is evolution? To what?