Le cri de la soie (1996)

In early 1914, a young woman, Marie Benjamin (Marie Trintignant), steals a piece of red silk from a Paris department store. She is found lying unconscious, clutching the fabric she has used to caress herself. Arrested and taken to the Conciergerie, she is examined by Gabriel de Villemer (Sergio Castellitto), a psychiatrist and aesthete who works as a doctor at the Police Prefecture’s Infirmary. During the interview, he discovers the strange erotic passion of this seamstress, irresistibly drawn to the sensual feel of silk and needing no men to find pleasure. Troubled—he, too, is sensitive to fabrics—he is soon captivated by Marie, while she, an illiterate, is fascinated by the doctor’s handwritten notes. An ambiguous relationship develops between Marie and Gabriel, secretly bound by a shared passion even though everything divides them: their backgrounds, their education, Marie’s repeated thefts and obscene behavior in public, which lead to her imprisonment, and then the war, which sends Gabriel to Morocco. While Marie applies herself to learning to read and write in prison so she can correspond with Gabriel, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the pleating of fabrics in Arab clothing and accumulates photographic images of it. On his return from Morocco, as he begins to lose his sight, he finds Marie again, teaches courses on drapery at the École des Beaux-Arts, and begins writing The Cry of Silk, a thesis on this particular fetish.