These complexities are given their most significant exploration in the central scene of 36 fillette: the hotel room encounter between Lili and Maurice. She vacillates between desire and dread throughout the scene. As they approach his hotel room, Lili takes the key from him and opens the door herself, but then lags behind him in the entryway. When they are seated on the sofa, she turns away from him and covers her face with her hand, but then coyly peeks out at him through her fingers. His attempt to pull her close is thwarted when she turns to crouch on the sofa with her back to him, yet she does look over fetchingly at him from behind her shoulder. Maurice sums up these mixed messages by saying (when he is finally lying next to her on the sofa and touching her) that her head doesn't want to, but her sex is dripping with desire. Lili's retort — “”56 — marks her protest against having her mind overruled by her body and against having a man put his finger on one side of this mind/body seesaw to get the body he wants. Most importantly, Lili's remark shows that she does57 (Sineux 1991: 16). Lili does not want to become like Julie in the Borowczyk film, a virgin turned into a whore, a soul discarded so that only a body remains. She wants her body and soul to be united in love. But suspicion of Maurice's motives and an inability to acknowledge herself as a desiring body prevent Lili from accepting his advances or approving of her own physical responses.
