Review: Romance

Watching Catherine Breillat's Romance, the question arises: what is the need? The film is an intriguing meditation on sex, love, desire, physical and emotional dependence, and the games lovers play with themselves and one another. However, the question will arise: what is the need? It is a question relevant to both the film's heroine Marie (Catherine Ducey) and the viewer.

Romance evolves from an act of denial: Marie's lover Paul (Sagamore Stévenin) loves her but has lost his desire for her. Marie, who believes that a man honors a woman by making love to her, cannot understand his reasonings and sets out to find sexual fulfillment elsewhere. It is a descent into self-degradation for Marie -- encounters include a widower who provides her with sex but not love, a school principal who steers her into bondage and a tryst with a random stranger that begins with voluntary cunnilingus and ends with a rape. But through degradation, self-discovery.

Through it all, Ducey remains impervious to the demands of her role. There is a hint of the androgyne in the actress -- her body is nearly devoid of curves but her arms and legs are possessed of a feminine grace. Among the acts she performs onscreen are masturbation, fellatio on costar Stévenin and undergoing a gynecological exam. Ducey willingly supplicates herself to Breillat's unblinking camera and extreme vision. Her performance, imbued with a defiant shame, ensures that her exposure is both physical and emotional.

As convincing as Breillat's struggle is to separate virgin from whore, l'amour philosophique from l'amour fou and the emotional from the physical, perhaps the portrait of Marie's self-negation would be more powerful had Paul been a better written character. All of the men -- from widower Paolo (portrayed by Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi) to the nameless thug-rapist -- are deliberately sketchy, they are generalizations of the different types of men that women come across. However, an underwritten Paul is a misstep. He is a vainglorious male model whose nature it is to seduce, and Paul uses his power to play mind games with her. Not that Marie is above such follies -- she purposefully arrives home one hour after he does to gain the upper hand. Stévenin, with his cruel Alain Delon eyes, wears Paul well but his character's comeuppance is perhaps Breillat's one genuinely false note. A bit of a feminist fantasy creeps in, and the whole thing seems contrived.

But to return to our original question: what is the need? What is the need in showing Marie's gynecological exam? Why have Ducey lie there, legs apart, as medical interns insert their fingers into her vagina? Why show actual penetration during a dream sequence? The European cinema is currently awash with such explicit, pornographic sequences -- I Stand Alone, Pola X; the Danish Dogma ‘95 missive which holds realism above artifice has one product, Lars Von Trier's The Idiots, displaying actual penetration. It almost seems as if one can't qualify as an auteur these days without having a hardcore sex scene.

For these are auteuristic films -- Breillat, Von Trier, Leos Carax et al are, with their films, presenting a new realism. Call it the Sexual Wave of European cinema. Certainly if the cinema could embrace social realism, then why can't it embrace sexual realism? Is it pornography? Though tumescent organs and bodily fluids, both male and female, are to be found, Romance is too heady to be pornography, which is basic and straightforward. For Marie, sex is never just sex, pure and unadulterated. There is always meaning, even if it is beyond her understanding.

Moreover, sex in European cinema, while at times gratuitous, has hardly ever felt exploitative. Betty Blue and La Belle Noiseuse contained lengthy nude scenes for actors Jean-Hugues Anglade, Béatrice Dalle and Emmanuelle Béart, but their nakedness did indubitably serve the art. In the recent Dreamlife of Angels, Grégoire Colin and Natacha Régnier engaged in a handful of lovemaking scenes that were not only graphic in their execution but in the intent and meaning they conveyed -- few sex scenes carried such existential doom.

Therein lies the general difference between sex in American and European cinema. The European sensibility is such that when the camera looks at a naked body, one can see something other than the nakedness of the body itself -- in other words, the nudity is a means of communicating a grander idea. There is no such thing as a sex scene in European cinema, at least not in the way Americans would describe a sex scene. One is almost always self-consciously aware of a sex scene in American cinema, and here are several reasons -- the sex scene is shot or edited or played out in such a manner that it interrupts the flow of the film; the sex scene almost always has a leering quality to it -- this leer perhaps is born from the Americans' puritanical genealogies; sex is hardly ever equated with intellect, philosophy and the like. In short, sex is never more than sex and it's treated as a sideshow in a freak show.

With the ongoing debacle about the ratings system in America, perhaps American auteurs and their distributors should follow the Europeans' lead. Though Warner Brothers buckled by digitally disguising 65 seconds of an orgy scene in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, they at least had the nerve to release an art film that dealt with sex and sexuality as something more than the act and body parts, and release it during a season when mindlessness is often king. Independent films often bypass the ratings system -- Todd Solondz's Happiness is one such example. The audiences may need slight educating in understanding and realizing the difference between artistically-themed sex and gratuitously-depicted sex, but they are not the only ones in need of some learning. Studios and even the directors themselves must be willing to battle the stigma that a rating like the "NC-17" could place on their film.

Romance

Directed by: Catherine Breillat

Written by: Catherine Breillat

Starring: Caroline Ducey, Sagamore Stévenin, François Berléand, Rocco Siffredi