My Sole Desire: Solidarity and Parting at the Edge of Desire

Human beings routinely define themselves through the gaze of the other. Yet, when do we confront the dormant desires within ourselves, rather than the reflection in the mirror?

Set against the backdrop of a strip club—the front line of capital and spectatorship—the film À mon seul désir (My Sole Desire) paradoxically targets the abyss of two women yearning for the liberation of their purest selves. This film chronicles a luminous journey of welcoming an unfamiliar identity and taking autonomous control over one’s own body amid life trajectories driven to the precipice.

🌿 Moments That Deeply Resonate

• The solidarity on the dark stage where, instead of objectifying the gaze of the other, they sublimate it into an individual art form and lock eyes.
• The catharsis achieved when overturning a space dominated by the male gaze through their own play and theatrical performance.
• Those brief, intense glances that affirmed each other’s wounds exactly as they were, while navigating conflicts between love, reality, and survival.

Perhaps we must all read to the end of this text to confront the chilling truth that we can only survive by redefining ourselves as ‘Aurore’ at the crossroads of life.

🎞 Notes Before Viewing

Due to the spatial characteristics of a strip club, physical nudity and sexual depictions occur frequently in this work. However, this is not a sensationalist direction intended to induce peripheral stimulation in the audience. Rather, it serves as a crucial device to express the psychological shifts and the formation of intimacy among women who utilize their bodies as both instruments of labor and artistic subjects. It is recommended to focus on the emotional communion and the density of the relationship between the characters while viewing.

🎬 Film Information

• Title: My Sole Desire (À mon seul désir, 2023)
• Director: Lucie Borleteau
• Screenplay: Lucie Borleteau
• Country: France
• Genre: Drama, Romance, Queer
• Running Time: 112 minutes
• Platform: Canal+, VOD France
• Cast: Louise Chevillotte (as Manon/Aurore), Zita Hanrot (as Mia)

📖 Synopsis: The Liberation and Conflict of Aurore Blooming from the Swamp of Deprivation [No Spoilers]

In Paris, Manon, a graduate student trapped on all sides by stalled research and financial destitution, accidentally knocks on the door of a strip club named ‘À mon seul désir.’ Passing an impulsively taken audition, she receives the stage name ‘Aurore’ instead of her real name and begins to learn how to manage her body on an unfamiliar stage. There, Aurore meets Mia, the club’s popular dancer who dreams of becoming an actress, and feels an intense attraction.

Mia becomes a steadfast anchor for Aurore, protecting her in the world of capital, and the two gradually develop beyond a senior-junior relationship into a deep emotional and physical love. However, Aurore chooses to make fast money to satisfy a greater economic deprivation. Stepping into the perilous territory of private entertainment, she clashes with Mia’s firm labor philosophy. As Mia’s existing family dynamics interweave, their sanctuary-like world faces a maelstrom of fierce conflict.

💃 The Subversion of ‘À mon seul désir’: A Female-Led Workspace Deconstructing the Male Gaze

The film À mon seul désir completely reinterprets the strip club—a space traditionally dominated by male sexual desire—into an alternative community of women. The director shifts the camera lens away from the voyeuristic male gaze, focusing instead on the site of autonomous labor where the dancers on stage control their own bodies and the boundaries of their expression.

Within this space, the women do not replicate clichés of mutual exploitation or jealousy. Instead, they share information about dangerous clients, serve as each other’s safety nets, and elevate eroticism into a proud professional domain for self-actualization and livelihood.

🪞 Manon and Mia: The Queer Sanctuary Formed by Mirror Images of Identity

The encounter between Manon, a shy intellectual, and Mia, a realistic and bold individual, acts as a mirror reflecting each other’s deficiencies. Through Mia’s uninhibited energy, Manon awakens a queer, lesbian desire she had not previously recognized, while Mia, within Manon’s pure gaze, rediscovers her own art and aspirations that had fallen into mannerism.

The most notable aspect of their narrative is that their intimacy stands in perfect opposition to the unilateral commercial transactions of the club. The union of these two women is a process of constructing the sole safe sanctuary to escape the oppressive, male-centered reality of the outside world.

⚖️ The Dilemma of Liberation and Degradation: The Cost of Desire Crossing the Line

However, the film does not indulge solely in the sweetness of hedonistic self-discovery. The firm boundary Mia constructed between ‘stripping (stage labor)’ and ‘prostitution (sex work)’ fractures due to Aurore’s dangerous choices driven by a craving for faster capital.

Aurore’s expansion into private escort services for money coldly demonstrates how a journey of self-liberation can transition into a destructive moral dilemma. This intelligent point of interpretation proves how precarious and intricate the compromises required are for a woman to maintain her agency within a capitalist structure.

🔎 Reinterpretation of the Ending: Eternal Solidarity Declared at the Boundary of Memory and Illusion

Following Aurore’s departure to Japan, the reunion of the two at the retirement party of the manager, Pablo, concludes with an open ending that blurs the boundary between reality and illusion. This ending does not provide a simple answer as to whether the two became lovers again.

The ambiguity achieved by the film represents a complete aesthetics of resonance, signifying that their relationship has transcended time and space to become etched into each other’s souls. Through Mia, Aurore gained the dignity and growth to shatter the boundaries of her complacent life; through Aurore, Mia spread her wings as the artist she dreamed of being. Moving beyond physical union in reality, the film’s conclusion declares the completion of a spiritual chronicle of women who saved each other’s lives.

❓ Key Debates in Interpreting ‘My Sole Desire’

Q. How do you view the criticism that the film excessively romanticizes or glamorizes sex work and escort labor?

The criticism remains valid that by emphasizing the internal solidarity and artistry of the club, the work portrays the physical dangers or exploitative structures of real-world sex work somewhat mildly. The risks Aurore faces when entering private parties and prostitution are also treated as part of individual choice and experience rather than a dramatic catastrophe.

However, rather than an intention to distort the reality of labor, this is closer to an aesthetic choice to avoid trapping characters within a sensationalized victim narrative. The director rejects the long-standing cinematic convention of objectifying women as victims, choosing instead to focus on the internal trajectory of a woman who does not lose her agency under any extreme circumstances. Whether to perceive this as glamorization or a choice for narrative subjectivity ultimately depends on the viewer’s perspective.

Q. How should one interpret Aurore’s choice to leave Mia for Japan, and the final reunion scene?

The journey to Japan, an unfamiliar space without Mia, can be seen as a period of independence to fully establish ‘only my own desire (À mon seul désir)’ apart from a reliance on Mia. Regarding the reunion at the final party, whether it constitutes actual reality or Aurore’s illusion is immaterial. What matters is that the influence the two women exerted on each other became a sustained engine for life, and the film concludes with an open resonance, leaving the permanence of their relationship for the audience to judge.

✨ The Right to Exist Fully as Oneself, Achieved by Manon and Mia

My Sole Desire is a work that densely depicts the process of a woman reclaiming complete sovereignty over her body and desire, using a strip club—one of the most secretive and prejudice-laden spaces—as its stage. Through Manon’s journey, the film interrogates whom the categories of normalcy and moral censorship defined by modern society truly serve.

Their love, parting, and solidarity extend beyond mere queer romance, touching upon the fundamental human struggle to retain oneself within an oppressive world. A human being who has learned to emit light from within the deepest darkness will never be refracted before any monolithic reality.

💬 Where is your desire heading?

The sole true longing faced only when all external gazes and societal rules are stripped away.

Manon confronted her forbidden desire at a dead end in life and made the choice to break through it head-on. Between a stable but oppressive life and a dangerous but autonomous life, which do you believe is the life truly true to yourself? Please share your deep thoughts in the comments.

🍇 Violet Screen’s Curated Recommendations for Added Depth

• Green Night (녹야, 2023)
  • Reason for Recommendation: An intense queer thriller where two women pushed to a dead end forge a fierce solidarity against the backdrop of a dark night, racing toward survival and liberation.
• Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
  • Reason for Recommendation: Through the delightful and audacious adventures of two women unfolding on an unpredictable journey, viewers can fully enjoy a free energy that shatters conventional molds.