Shekherezade and 1001 Night in French Manner

I hate this language! We have beautiful words for many different things but are unable to distinguish between sexes, and when in trouble, we run into French, fabulous, but still a foreign language.

Film I am talking about today is 'La Lectrice', 'Reader'. It is a story about love of literature, about sexual lust, it is a modern Shekherezade and the Stories of 1001 Night.

Constance (Miou-Miou, Sylvette Héry) is in bed with her boyfriend who asks her to read to him aloud. As she reads, she imagines a story of herself as a 'Lectrice', a professional reader gaining clients through a newspaper ad. She slowly compiles a decent set of clients and begins entering their lives.

Nicely formed, creating a totally new and amazing approach to Shekherezade Michael DeVille creates a world of characters that live through entering another worlds, another characters, becoming someone or something else. Also, as the story develops, it explains to you the process of creating involved and explains directly why it takes certain paths. It comes to a crippled boy whose birthday coincides with a birthday of a celebrity and the narration explains why should it equate the two on some levels.

Marie's clientele is a set of people, each with a different real problem and reason for wanting her services. There is a young boy, injured in an accident, fearing for his potency who falls in love with Marie and wants to listen to the passionate poetry, like Baudleaire, identifying Marie with those women from the poems. An old countess, once filled with fire and passion of revolution, once a part of October Revolution in Russia hires Marie to read the writers like Tolstoy and Marx, as to relive the glory days one more time. A busy mother wants Marie to read 'Alice in Wonderland' to her daughter, but when Marie tries to make it a bit fun she gets fired, a rich, relatively ugly investor is lonely and thinks of hiring her almost as getting an escort and she reads him nothing but erotica.

As she takes on each client, she becomes the main character of their fantasy, of their favourite book. The teenager idolizes her as a romantic, old lady as an intellectual, little girl looks as she saw her mother in Marie and for the first time in her life understood what does it mean to have one, and the investor, he wants to sleep with her, use her as a prostitute.

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