Film

Phaedra

A fever dream of a film transplanting the Phaedra myth into the world of Greek shipping wealth. Melina Mercouri burns through the screen as a young woman trapped between desire and social obligation, Anthony Perkins as her stepson a study in dangerous vulnerability. It's operatic, sensual, and morally queasy in ways that feel less about judgement and more about the inescapability of desire itself.

TMDb rating2.9

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The Servant1963

A masterwork of class tension and psychological manipulation set in a London townhouse. Like Phaedra, it's about the corruption of a household from within, shot in gorgeous black and white by Dirk Bogarde and James Fox that crackles with suppressed eroticism.

But Slow-burn plotting and a deliberately ambiguous ending frustrate viewers looking for clear moral clarity or satisfying resolution.

The Servant poster

Lola1961

Jacques Demy's seductive portrait of a woman who enchants everyone around her in a port town. The same stylized, heightened reality as Phaedra—sensuality and fatalism as visual language, Anouk Aimée luminous in impossible situations.

But Its dreamy logic and refusal to explain character motivation can feel indulgent if you prefer stories that explain themselves.

Lola poster

The Lovers1958

Louis Malle's film of a woman torn between security and passion. The infidelity, the shipboard scenes, the way bourgeois life contains explosive desire—it's the same erotic pressure cooker, just as European and feverish.

But The sex scenes, radical then, now read as relatively chaste. And the film's sympathies can feel frustratingly ambiguous about its heroine.

The Lovers poster

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The wildcard

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The Gospel According to St. Matthew1965

Both films treat their central conflict as cosmically inevitable—not a failure of character but a collision of irreconcilable forces. Both use the body as the language of that conflict.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's radical, sacred rendering of Matthew's account. Like Phaedra, it's a story about desire, law, and the impossible place of the body within social order—but Pasolini's lens is incandescent, spiritual, treating the material world as transcendent rather than doomed. The passion here is salvation rather than ruin.

But Experimental form, austere black and white, long stretches without dialogue. Its sacredness demands patience that secular viewers may not grant.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew poster
More like this (7)

All That Jazz1979

Fosse's semi-autobiographical nightmare about obsession and self-destruction. Like Phaedra, it's an immoral person you can't stop watching, opera-scale emotions, the inevitability of catastrophe treated as erotic.

But Punishingly long at 123 minutes, deliberately ugly at moments, and its main character is a genuine asshole without redemption.

All That Jazz poster

La Dolce Vita1960

Fellini's glittering, grotesque Rome where morality dissolves in pleasure and spectacle. Carries the same intoxicated atmosphere, the sense of watching people caught in currents they can't resist or even name.

But Three hours of episodic narrative without forward momentum. Beautiful to look at but exhausting if you need a traditional story.

La Dolce Vita poster

Hiroshima Mon Amour1959

Resnais and Duras: a forbidden affair between a French actress and Japanese architect in postwar Hiroshima. Forbidden desire, the past that won't release you, language that refuses clarity—it's Phaedra's cousin made even more abstract and devastating.

But Deliberately fragmentary, poetic structure. The narrative is almost impressionistic; plot-driven viewers will find it maddening.

Hiroshima Mon Amour poster

La Strada1954

Fellini's tragic love story between a brutish carnival strongman and an innocent girl. The same sense of doom, of love as degradation, performed under circus lights. Anthony Quinn as the cruelty at the heart of desire.

But Relentlessly bleak. The relationship is abusive and the film offers no comfort, just pity.

La Strada poster

The Lovers2015

One final look at the middle-aged affair: married couple, unexpected passion, the lie that unravels. It's Les Amants remade for the 2010s, quieter but hitting the same notes about the hunger that won't accept nice domesticity.

But Quiet, conversational, deliberately unglamorous. Lacks the visual and dramatic intensity that might make infidelity feel operatic.

The Lovers poster

Contempt1963

Both dissect the marriage and the stepson/stepmother relationship as structures designed to fail. Both films refuse to let you feel superior to their characters—you're trapped with them.

Godard's acid dissection of a marriage in crisis, shot in stunning Technicolor on the island of Capri. Where Phaedra buries its doubts in sensuality, Contempt exposes them with brutal precision. Yet both films are about the impossibility of knowing anyone—love as a system of beautiful lies that collapse.

But Deliberately fractured editing, Godard's essayistic interruptions, Michel Piccoli as a hollow cynic. It's anti-cinema, determined to frustrate narrative pleasure.

Contempt poster

Muriel, or the Time of Return1963

Both treat family bonds not as sanctuary but as pressure cookers. Both are ultimately about how we lie to survive proximity to people we love.

Alain Resnais' film about a widow, her son, an old flame—and an unspeakable act in Algeria that haunts everything. Where Phaedra speaks in myth and passion, Muriel speaks in fractured time and repression. But both are about how the past colonizes the present, how family is the space where desire and violence live alongside each other.

But Genuinely difficult: fractured chronology, Resnais' puzzle-box structure, political weight. It's a film that requires active assembly by the viewer.

Muriel, or the Time of Return poster

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