À mon seul désir (My Sole Desire) is a bold and poetic film that peels back the layers of desire, performance, and feminine agency.
Set in a strip club run by women and centered on the intimacy between two dancers, the film challenges assumptions about sexuality, labor, and love through a uniquely sapphic lens. Raw, seductive, and haunting, it’s a rare piece of French queer cinema that plays with both fantasy and fear.
My Sole Desire Official Trailer
Manon, a young woman reeling from a failed academic affair and a derailed future, wanders into a strip club called À mon seul désir. Drawn to its unapologetic atmosphere—where a cunt is called a cunt, and bodies exist without pretense—she finds solace not just in performing but in meeting Mia, a charismatic Black dancer with dreams of becoming an actress.
As Manon begins dancing to support herself and escape judgment, she and Mia form a deep connection, both professional and emotional. Their bond grows through shared routines, backstage tenderness, and the unspoken tension of queer longing.
But complications arise: Mia has a boyfriend and a daughter she hides from the club world; Manon sells her belongings and dreams of living together. And when Manon chooses to go to Japan for a mysterious new job opportunity, their story takes a darker turn—one left to the viewer’s interpretation.
My Sole Desire Cast
Charactor
A former academic who finds herself on the strip club stage, Manon is both introspective and impulsive—craving meaning in a world that has denied her stability.
Louise Chevillotte
Louise Chevillotte brings complexity to a role that could’ve been reduced to stereotype. With previous roles in L’Événement and Love Affair(s), she delivers a performance full of tension, dignity, and sensuality.
A gifted dancer with a hidden personal life, Mia balances ambition with deep emotional conflict. Her desire for love, career, and family tugs her in opposing directions.
Zita Hanrot
Zita Hanrot’s performance is magnetic. She portrays Mia not as a fantasy, but as a woman with layered needs—tender, determined, and heartbreakingly real.
Director
Lucie Borleteau
Lucie Borleteau is a French director and screenwriter known for her boundary-pushing films centered on women’s agency, identity, and sexuality. With À mon seul désir, she dives deep into the world of female desire and performance, offering a rare erotic drama told through the female gaze.
Borleteau previously directed Fidelio: Alice’s Journey and episodes of Cannabis and The Opera, showing a consistent interest in complex female characters. Her style blends documentary realism with visual lyricism, making À mon seul désir one of the most sensuous and subversive entries in contemporary lesbian cinema.
MOVIE HIGHLIGHT
Feminist Strip Club Setting
A rare narrative space where women explore sensuality without the dominant male gaze.
Erotic but Not Exploitative
The film centers female desire, reframing nudity and performance as acts of self-expression and defiance.
Subtext of Migration and Disappearance
The “Japan ending” invites interpretation—fantasy, metaphor, or noir twist? You decide.
Philosophical Voiceovers
From “you won’t find love here” to “love grows like wildflowers,” the script plays like a feminist fable in a gritty setting.
My Sole Desire Review
Review
À mon seul désir is far from a conventional lesbian love story—it is both more sensual and more tragic. Writer-director Lucie Borleteau crafts a world where women reclaim the strip club space on their own terms: not to please the male gaze, but to explore and redefine their own.
Manon is no erotic cliché. A former doctoral student, she enters the world of exotic dancing not out of passion, but out of desperation and rebellion. Her emotional unraveling is gradual and believable, underlined by the raw honesty of her performances. The gaze of the camera remains largely empathetic—even when bodies are bare, it is the interior lives of these women that remain on display.
The love story between Manon and Mia burns quietly but intensely. Mia, played with sensual depth by Quita Anrao, is caught between obligations and desires. Their love is both empowering and ill-fated. Whether Mia betrays Manon or whether society betrays both is left deliberately unresolved.
Some viewers interpret the final sequence—Manon appearing to float into the dressing room years later—as a ghostly metaphor. Did she truly leave for Japan and die, as implied by some clues? Or is her reappearance a romantic projection, a final act of narrative mercy?
Either way, À mon seul désir is a cinematic contradiction: soft yet brutal, liberating yet tragic. A film that confronts feminist eroticism, economic survival, and the longing to be seen—not just stripped bare.