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Movie Review : ' Puppy Love '

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In 2013, at the illustrious San Sebastian International Film Festival, the Belgian film director Delphine Lehericey debuted her latest French language film “Puppy Love”. It is a coming-of-age drama that tells the story of 14-year-old Diane, an enigmatic teenager and a loner. She is busy bringing up her little brother, Marc, and has an intense and inappropriate relationship with her father, Christian. She wants to break the bounds of childhood at all costs and when a young, free, wild, enigmatic English girl named Julia suddenly appears in her neighborhood her life intensifies with her sexual awakening and frustrating attraction to her father and Julia which leads to Diane’s troubling behavior. The more that Diane gets closer to Julia, the more she loses her sense of morality, giving no attention to the consequences or the limits to her desires. This film is chalk full of Freudian themes that this film could have been titled “Dora- the Movie”.
At the turn of the 20th century, Freud published his now infamous case study of Dora, a young woman he temporarily treated for hysteria. His findings and explanations for the woman’s affliction are particular and in my opinion, peculiar. He concludes that the reason that Dora has such hysteria and afflictions is ultimately caused by her psychological trauma stemming from her sexual repression. Even though Freud published this case over a hundred years before the release of “Puppy Love”, the troupe of sexual repression as the root of

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