A Teenage Girl Trying To Find Love... In An Orgy

When Eva Husson first heard the story of a group of kids in Biarritz, France, staging regular orgies in 1996, it stuck in her mind. Two decades later, the 38-year-old filmmaker — who's directed videos for Florence & The Machine, The Presets and M83, and made the mid-length 2013 feature Those For Whom It's Always Complicated — has drawn from that story for her debut film, Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story).

"The story was so insane that I wanted to understand how it could happen; small town, middle-class kids doing this," says Husson. "And secondly, I was just really, really interested in telling the story of adolescence as I had lived it. Not having orgies, but wanting to belong to a group, wanting desperately to find love, being a girl exploring her sexuality, but always making the wrong choices. I hadn't seen it depicted the way that I had felt it when I was a teenager."

"The story was so insane that I wanted to understand how it could happen; small town, middle-class kids doing this."

Featuring a cast of actual teenagers (the lead, Marilyn Lima, was discovered from a photo of her on a friend's Tumblr by casting agent Bahijja El Amrani), plentiful lithe flesh, and endless fucking, Bang Gang is a kids-gone-wild classic. Husson takes an often impressionist approach to storytelling, story passed from character to character. She does that in an attempt to "understand how each character's mind was working, how they had all come to arrive at the same place", exploring adolescent motivations with no adult moralising or judgment.

Taking the story from the '90s to the contemporary day also completely changes its nature. Here, the after-school orgies are constantly videotaped and uploaded online, this 'bang gang' equal parts sexual social club and social media performance. The film's key drama hangs on when the videos leak out into the broader school community, and Lima's character is effectively singled out for slut-shaming, permanently branded with a digital reputation.

"The accessibility to pornography by the internet, the rise of social media and digital culture, that's changed things, what it means to be a teenager," Husson says. "But adolescence is about finding your own limits. And when you don't have those limits imposed in your immediate environment — say by your parents — the only thing you can do is explore by yourself. It's much harder for a teenager in 2015 than it was in 1995. There's a generation who're having their first ever interactions between boys and girls mediated via social media, it creates this whole other layer, this added grammar that you have to master."

Yet, while Husson can see the stark differences between her own adolescence in the '90s — "I'm so happy that all the stuff I did as a teenager was not recorded," she says, "that you got to make your mistakes, and move on from them, rather than be forever reminded of them" — and the contemporary climate, she also feels that Bang Gang's story isn't just a parable for the digital now.

"Teenage girl wants to find love, is pushed into something by a teenage boy: it's a classic story!" she laughs. "It could be 18th century, 19th century, 20th century. The sex makes it really striking, really contemporary, but the emotional, human story is something classical."