Lesbian ladies undone by dastardly male alert! Between Us (Entre Nous in the original French) is a strangely not-quite-there tale of two young women and one awful man, done as a mix of cautionary thriller and soft-edged erotica.
As the action opens, fragrant, pretty and broke Elodie and Laetitia are realising that they need a third person in their apartment to cover the bills and so decide to advertise for someone. And along they come, the hopefuls, in the standard movie-montage process of interviewing the awfuls.
The film proper starts at the point when the successful candidate, Simon, emerges as the best of the bunch and moves in. The ideal guy, on paper at least, Simon has made the right cultural references during the interview. He works nights as a magician and also has a houseboat somewhere, so Elodie and Laetitia’s evenings and weekends will be pretty much their own.
It’s at the point where Elodie and Laetitia start discussing having a child, and mention is made of artificial insemination, that a plot shape starts to suggest itself. Elodie has no time for men, and considers herself the full lesbian package. Laetitia, however, has had the odd dalliance, and would probably describe herself as bisexual. That shape starts to assume solid form – Simon, somehow is going to be the father?
What plays out is a torrid tale of female emotional betrayal, break-up and reconciliation, plus male bullying, gaslighting and violence, with Simon the obvious villain, though his character is so underwritten that William Mesguich can’t really get a proper handle on him and resorts to scowling a hell of a lot.
Amandine Noworyta and Iris Jodorowsky do better as Elodie and Laetitia, neither of them very experienced as actors but both entirely plausible as young women being tossed about by their own emotions, a bad turn of the cards and a malevolent male.
They also take their clothes off a bit, which raises an interesting point. In the French movies of yore, female nudity was offered as if it were a necessary part of the package. A Gallic shrug always hovered somewhere as the potential charge of salaciousness was countered with aesthetics. No wafty colours, no soft edges, no busty girls rolling around gloriously. Instead, small breasted gamine women shot flat and stark. Naturalism the idea. Nothing to see here.
Writer/director Jude Bauman gives the finger to all that with this film. His two stars, Noworyta and Jodorowsky, aren’t just amply chested but Bauman shoots them with warmly filtered light and in soft focus. We’re in the realm of the bonkbuster. Or Blue Is the Warmest Colour done as a beach read.
Seen from another angle, Bauman is not being disingenuous at all – these are good-looking women and the nudity is honestly sexy.
It helps cover a leap, as the plot shifts from being about Elodie and Laetitia and the cuckoo in their nest, to being about Simon and Laetitia, with Elodie increasingly thrown into the orbit of Roity, an old guy who likes to photograph young woman draped over his furniture in faintly erotic poses, and who offers her a fatherly shoulder to cry on. He’d probably offer her more if he was 20 years younger (Jean-François Stévenin, who plays Roity with the creepiness turned down and the affability turned up, was dead before the film came out, aged 77).
Roity is not so much a character as a device for plugging a hole. He makes no real sense as part of the rest of the film, and the bit where Roity goes to tell Simon to back off is the film’s most unconvincing moment, not because of the acting, but because these are characters from worlds that have no business intersecting.
The actors, the direction, the lush looks, the unabashed focus on surface, even the whimsical string quartet on the soundtrack, they are all to be applauded. I liked everything about this film, in fact, except its story. Oh well.
Between Us aka Entre Nous – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
