Turmoil ensues when a hotheaded woman named Marion finds herself involved in a passionate game of seduction with her godson's friend Clement.

In many ways, Emmanuelle Bercot is a model of the successful multi-tasking that is increasingly characteristic of French cinema's younger talents. Born in Paris in 1967, Bercot acts, directs and writes. She trained as a dancer, studied drama and worked as an actress in theatre and, since 1987, in cinema where she has acted for Claude Miller (La Classe de la neige, 1998) and Bertrand Tavernier (Ca Commence Aujourd'hui, 2000). In 1984 she entered the Film Directing Department of the FEMIS (the French national film school). There she made three short films including Les Vacances, which won the Jury Award in the Short Film Section at the 1997 Cannes festival, and La Puce which took second prize in the Cinefondation Award at the 1999 Cannes festival.

Clément is Bercot's first feature and promises to further explore the subjects and characters evident in her short films: adolescence, family traumas and the unbridled nature of sexual desire. Whereas in La Puce, Bercot explored the story of 14-year-old girl's first sexual experiences with an older man, in Clément she reverses the gender equation. Bercot herself plays Marion, a hot-headed, free-spirited woman in her thirties. When Marion goes to her godson's birthday party she meets the teenage Clément (Olivier Gueritee) by whom she is totally captivated. The older woman and the boy-child become embroiled in a game of seduction that spins out of control and into the realms of desire and passionate love.

The idea for Clément first saw the light of day as part of the initiative by the French TV Channel La Sept Arte, under the series title Petites Cameras, to encourage filmmakers to shoot films on digital video for television. In certain cases ­ La chambre des magiciennes by Claude Miller and Nationale 7 by Jean-Pierre Sinapi for example ­ the works transcended their televisual origins and were able to find lives as feature films.

Bercot's film is evidently one of this series of productions deemed cinematically strong enough to travel from the small to the large screen. Given the crisis of conscience that many in French film have regarding the financial power that TV has over the national cinema, this appears to be a valuable cross-media experiment that looks set to answer that perennially loaded question ­ can TV make cinema?

Chris Darke

Emmanuelle Bercot was born in Paris, France in 1967. Her short film Les Vacances (1997) tied for a Jury Prize with Leonie at Cannes that year. This is her third film.