A beautifully engaging film, which is very much aimed at celebrating feminism in seventies France, amidst a backdrop of constricting bourgeois beliefs.The movie gives us an insight into the struggles for equal rights faced by women at the time, and is very much aimed at celebrating female empowerment centered around a beautifully engaging love story between the two main characters. There is undeniably a strong chemistry between both the central characters which engrosses the audience, from the moment they meet.Although rural girl Delphine (Izia Higelin) has known she is gay from a young age, traditional conformist views have kept her sexuality a secret, knowing it would tear her family apart, she is very much expected to follow the traditional path of working on the family farm, and marrying a local boy. This is contrasted with the free spirit of city dweller Carole (Cecile De France), who is very much fighting for female empowerment and equal rights.Delphine takes time away from the farm, after the break-up of yet another secret relationship with a local girl and moves to Paris. The two meet after Delphine saves Carole from a scuffle with a man on the streets, all in the name of women's rights, and so commences their beautiful, yet tragic love story.We get to glimmer into this beautiful relationship whilst they are in Paris, where for the first time in her life, Delphine can be open about who she really is. Delphine is mesmerized by Carole's free spirit, never imagining that women could have so much freedom and can be so outspoken, as she joins Carole and other women protesting for equality in a women's rights group. Carole is drawn in by the go-getting, determined charisma of Delphine, which we see when she leads the way on a group mission to set free a young man who has been put in a mental asylum by his parents for treatment for being gay.However, tragedy strikes, and just as their love affair begins it is quickly turned into turmoil. Under tragic circumstances Delphine is forced back to her farm due to her father's ill health. Carole realizes she cannot be without Delphine, and leaves everything behind, including a long-term relationship with her boyfriend to join her on the farm.On arrival to Delphine's village, Carole finds a contradictory life to what she has been so passionately fighting for in Paris. She finds herself constrained by traditional village views, and their love affair is forced underground, behind Delphine's mothers back, whilst she takes up a job helping her "friend" run the family farm.Much of the story is set in rural France surrounded by stunning landscapes, which director Catherine Corsini has captured beautifully. In the midst of this spectacular scenery there is a rather tragic undertone with the characters struggling to come to terms with who they really are thanks to conservative and conventional society views at the time. You can really sense Carole's frustration, as she tries to conform with the rural way of life, yet internally she is screaming to expose their relationship to the world.The heart-breaking fact is Delphine has always known who she is really is, and whilst she helped open Carole's eyes, she cannot break the constraints and judgments of her own family and therefore these very constrictions end up costing her, her relationship with Carole.The film ends with Delphine not willing to leave behind her family and farm and go with Carole after their love affair becomes public knowledge, and Delphine's mother throws her out the house. She cannot break free from the constraints of family tradition and is left with a heart-rending internal battle.This is an extremely thought provoking film, and after willing Delphine to take the leap with Carole, despite knowing her mother would be left unable to cope with the family farm; we are left in a somewhat state of anguish as the film is drawing to a close. We are left with the realization that this beautiful love story has succumbed to conformist beliefs.Fast forward five years and Carole goes on eventually to meet another woman and settles back into Parisian life, whilst Delphine eventually musters up the courage to acquire her own farm and leave her family.

'La Belle Saison' is set in 1971 when women were asserting their rights – as indeed a lot of folk were doing the same to a world that was not really ready. This is set against the lives of Delphine from a rural farming family. She escapes to Paris where she happens to cross paths with the fiery Carole (Cécile de France – 'Meserine').Then amidst the heady cocktail of feminism, liberation and radical politics they expressed themselves sexually – which of course was revolutionary. Yes they set about challenging the heterosexual orthodoxy - and found more than just a political statement in that they fell for each other.Now there is tons more to this inspiringly brilliant film. It is made in such a way that the characters come alive and are completely believable. All the performances are outstanding and the period detail is really good too. The hair and fashions as well as the vehicles are spot on – and some nice Janis Joplin songs on the soundtrack too. There is so much here to like that it is a very easy job to recommend.

French actress, screenwriter and director Catherine Corsini's ninth feature film which she wrote with French screenwriter and director Laurette Polmanss, premiered in the Piazza Grande section at the 68th Locarno International Film Festival in 2015, was shot on locations in France and is a France-Belgium co-production which was produced by producer Elisabeth Perez. It tells the story about a French agrarian from the region of Limousin, Haute-Vienne in the commune of Limoges, France named Delphine who lives with her father named Maurice and her mother named Monique during the presidency of a French educator named Georges Pompidou (1911-1974), discovers that her friend is to marry and decides to go to Paris, France.Distinctly and subtly directed by French filmmaker Catherine Corsini, this quietly paced fictional tale which is narrated from multiple viewpoints, draws a perspicacious portrayal of a daughter who is as aware of her own identity as she is of how it is perceived by society and her transcending encounter with a French teacher named Carole whom is in agency for the advancement of women's rights. While notable for its atmospheric milieu depictions and distinct cinematography by cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie and production design by production designer Anna Falguères, this narrative-driven story about the concealments of obscurantism and the importance of feminization of agriculture where a character asks: "Aren't there things you feel like you can't do because you're a woman?" and declares: "My body is not a car!" was made six centuries after the Black Death claimed the life of an English 14th century Princess, born in the Tower of London, named Joan of England (1348) and the Strasbourg massacre (1349), five centuries after a law called Ewiger Landfriede or Perpetual Public Peace was ratified in the Roman Empire, more than two centuries after the French Penal Code of (1791) and the inauguration of the autocratic monarchy called the First French Empire (1804-1815) where the motto was liberty, equality, fraternity or death, and more than a century after the Treaty of London (1839), a fourteen-year-old French daughter forenamed Bernadette reported the Marian Apparitions in Lourdes (1858), the French Women's Union (1871) was calling for equal salaries, the beatification of the child of a Frenchman named Jacques and a Frenchwoman named Isabelle and an English-French 19th century poet pen named Renée Vivien (1877-1909) who was sculpted by Rodin, painted by Colette, born in London, England and lived in Paris, France wrote: "Yield up all your chagrin to eternal delight. Exhale in profound cry of suffering blight. All those events of the past, so cruel and senseless. Leave them to death, to the distance and to silence …" and ninety-five years after the decree of a decoration called the Medal of the French Family (1920).Made seventy-one years after a French Chevalier of the Legion of Honour named Cécile Brunschvicg (1877-1946) witnessed the introduction of Women's Suffrage in the French Republic (1944), seventy years after a French resistance fighter named Germaine Tilion (1907-2008) escaped from Ravensbrück, Germany, forty-seven years after the University of Limoges (1968) and someone had written "Vive De Gaulle" on the University of Lyon (1968), forty-four years after a French author named Françoise d'Eubonne (1920-2005) who befriended a French mystic named Violette Leduc founded a group (1971) who held their meetings at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (1648) in Paris, France and a Swiss filmmaker named Carole Roussopoulos (1945-2009) made a documentary regarding FHAR, thirty-eight years after a Canadian singer forenamed Pauline sang a song written in 1974 by a French singer forenamed Anne-Marie called "You have no name", thirty-seven years after a French physicist and chemist named Annie Sugier started the first refuge for battered women in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France, thirty-two years after the Court of Cassation (1790) in France changed an article in the French criminal code which made any intervention or operation, for no medical reason, on the external female reproductive organs a crime, fourteen-years after the About-Picard Law (2001), twelve years after a street in Paris, France was named Place de Olympe-de-Gouges (2003), nine years after a bridge in Paris, France was named Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir (2006), five years after an English songwriter in a song called "Cosmic Love" (2010) at the Bataclan theatre, Boulevard Voltaire, sang: "… in this twilight … so darkness I became …" a year after a Spanish-French civil servant named Anne Hidalgo became the first woman Major of Paris, Île-de-France, the same year as Transport for London made a video called "Report it to stop it" (2015), the Paris Métro a video called "Stop - It's enough" (2015) and a nineteen-year-old sister from the city of seven mountains named Aurora held a concert in Paris, France, this Sapphic interplay depicts some interrelated studies of character and contains a great and timely score by composer Grégoire Hetzel.This gracefully romantic love-story which is set in France in the early 1970s the same year as a French citizen sealed a wire between the two towers of Notre-Dame and during the conception of the French women's liberation movement, and where the internal consummation of a human connexion rests on a being's preoccupation with other peoples' views, is impelled and reinforced by its cogent narrative structure, substantial character development, rhythmic continuity, comment by Delphine: "… I've often thought of you while following the struggle. It's amazing what you've accomplished ..." and the existing acting performances by Belgian actress Cécile de France and French singer and actress Izïa Higelin. A sustainable narrative feature.

When you watch this feature, you think of LA VIE D'ADELE, speaking of the same scheme, female homosexuality. This film is gripping at the most, telling us the story of two Young women who met in Paris during the early seventies, when the feminist movements spread all over the world. And don't forget that two years ago, in France, the marriage for everyone laws were on every lip. So it remains in the line of actuality. Cecile de France is terrific here, so is Noémie Chowsky, as the mother of one of the two women in love for each other. A human drama that grabs you from the start to the end. I highly recommend it. Catherine Corsini made here an outstanding piece of work.