Abdellatif Kechiche's Mektoub My Love (2017)

Abdellatif Kechiche's Mektoub My Love – the first of a trilogy – is the follow-up to the director's highly successful (and ultimately highly controversial) La Vie d'Adèle, and like Kechiche's previous La Graine et le mulet is set in Sète and also features Hafsia Herzi, this time as Camélia. It's not so much a narrative as a drift, a hymn to youth and young life, concentrating on (mainly female) bodies on the beach, in the sea, in restaurants, and clubbing. At almost three hours one critic said that it would have made a good ninety minute film, but this would have anchored it far too much into the artificial: Mektoub (meaning destiny) is a movie that moves slowly, and radically cutting it would have reduced its impact. This film, like Rohmer's, is never boring, and to some extent it's a sexier, more modern update of (in particular) Rohmer's beach films.

The male gaze is present from the beginning of this film set in 1994, when Amin (Shaïn Boumédine) – a former medical student in Paris who's decided to take up photography and perhaps become a film director (autobiographical hints here) – returns to Sète and spies on his friend (although he'd rather be her lover) Ophélie (Ophélie Bau, who's supposedly engaged to someone else) having sex with the local lothario Tony (Salim Kechiouche), Amin's cousin. The voyeuristic element, with Amin peeping in through the external blinds of the bedroom, has echoes later in the film, the camera dwelling on parts of the female anatomy in more social as opposed to private scenes.

Very different from his sexually adventurous cousin, the shy Amin prefers to watch, to stand on the sidelines, ideally using his camera. While Tony chats up Charlotte (Alexia Chardard) with experienced ease, in a later long dance scene Charlotte's friend Céline (an ever-vacantly smiling Lou Luttiau) is stolen from him by a local.

Whereas Amin's Tunisian parents run a restaurant, Ophélie's parents have a sheep farm, and Ophélie treats Amin to all the photographs he likes of arguably the most stunning long scene in the film: a ewe giving birth to two lambs to the musical accompaniment of Mozart. Mektoub is a feast for the eyes, but not for the brain.