Maud Molyneux

This debut directorial effort by French actress Virginie Thevenet is a routine erotic tour through Parisien night spots and the infamous Bois du Bologne with its drag queens. A worldy-wise young woman latches onto her opposite, a shy and inexperienced young man, and leads him by hook or crook through the wild side of night life in the city of light. As she initiates him into an erotic demimonde, viewers are treated to street scenes and the special ambience that characterizes the lowest rungs of the social scale in Paris.

Tam Tam shows desire and repression through the subversion of archetypes both social (ambassadors, stars, artists) and sexual (homophiles, transvestites, transsexuals), and converting these into a most accurate account of a certain kind of unease: an identity crisis.

This black-and-white film explores the dividing line between the theatrical imagination and everyday reality in its story of a narcissistic silent movie actor who believes his screen image as a great lover but is in fact a confused bisexual. His girlfriend, also an actress, is also caught up in the fuzzy space between fantasy and reality but feels this as a loss and tries to do something about it.