Developing earlier research by the author that had sought to trace the specificity of the current wave of socio-politically engaged film, this article focuses in on the body, suggesting that it has become a core vector of ‘raw’ expressivity in recent French cinema due to the withdrawal of the discourse of the organised left as mediating instance. Brooks’ celebrated analysis of melodrama and the political philosophy of Rancière and Laclau and Mouffe are drawn upon to examine the political work done by Cabrera’s Retiens la nuit and Devers’ La Voleuse de St Lubin. Engaging with the objectified, embodied and isolated social suffering that runs through current cinema, the two films’ significance lies in their exploration of the possibilities of and obstacles to its articulation within an oppositional politics
