ROMANCE (director/writer: Catherine Breillat; cinematographer: Yorgos Arvanitis; editor: Agnes Guillemot; cast: Caroline Ducey (Marie), Sagamore Stevenin (Paul), Francois Berleand (Robert), Rocco Siffredi (Paolo), 1999)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette/Perfect Love!) has made a sexually graphic French film showing a woman's needs in a relationship. Her seventh feature film has become her only European box office success, though it has not received the same response in America. It is told from the point of view of the slender, well-dressed, and attractive elementary-school teacher, Marie (Ducey), who is married to the handsome male model, Paul (Stevenin), in what has become a self-destructive relationship for her. She loves him very much and early on in their relationship there was much passion, but there is one major problem for Marie now: Paul hasn't made love to her for months. We watch them in bed in their modern but sterile all-white apartment and see that he has lost interest in her even though she is dying to be made love to.
The film wavers between being a philosophical treatise on women and being about a woman's passions without resolving what any contemporary woman's magazine currently does (this unresolvement can be seen in both a positive and a negative sense). The effort here is to push the film along shock value lines, of pushing it more into the lines of what a porno film does as routine. What the film does very well, even if it kills any dramatic spirit there might have been in the film, is that it voices the private sexual fantasy thoughts of Marie and peeks into her head as she thinks to herself what she wants a guy to do to her sexually and what attracts her about a man. Some of her revelations might surprise the opposite sex, as this film is helpful like a self-help book is meant to be.
After a distasteful night of sexual frustration, Marie leaves Paul in bed and heads for the nearest bar, where she meets an actual Italian porno star Rocco Siffredi. He is Paolo in the movie, whose girlfriend died in an auto accident and is more than willing to f*ck Marie any way she wants to. Because of the enormous size of his penis, he pleases one part of her greatly. She makes no bones about it that she loves the carnal act. She confides that kissing is intimate and means more to her than the sex act, since she doesn't care who "stuffs her below." She only ends this one-night stand when she begins to feel that she is starting to like Paolo as a person.
At work, she strikes up a relationship with an older, obese, ugly man, Robert (Berleand). He is the principal of her school and when he takes her to his bachelor pad designed to attract a wide-assortment of women, as it is fit with a Jacuzzi as well as bondage equipment, and the apartment is sensually colored in dark bordello hues of reds. He tells her he is a great lover, having made love to over 10,000 women, despite not being rich, handsome, well-built, young, or a celebrity. He tells her that what he has going for him, is that he knows how to please a woman sexually and how to listen to her. He tells her that even though women want to be respected, they want to be taken by a man who desires them and a stranger usually gets to her first, as a friend is too polite to act on his impulses. Marie's best comment to this is, "Why do men who disgust us, understand us best." A sadomasochistic relationship develops, with limits being established, as she gets off while he ties her up and gags her. She seems to enjoy this perverse relationship, of being degraded, better than all her others, as we see her with Robert in this situation twice.
There are some more sexual fantasies for her: of masturbating with her legs closed to prove that she doesn't need a man to enjoy herself, and of meeting with a vulgar stranger who wants to give her $20 just to taste her vagina, who when she accepts the offer then takes her by force from behind. A group of gynecologists "invade" her vagina, which allows her to freely fantasize about this experience. She goes to them after getting pregnant by Paul, who realizes that she is slipping away from him and thereby awkwardly makes love to her while she sits atop of him. She considers it ironical that she makes love to him when she is cheating on him and that when she was faithful to him he ignored her. She also has a weird dream of a guillotine-like contraption without blades dangling over some women's legs. The film ends on a reassuring note for those who take a more traditional view on what a woman is, as Ducey says, "They say a woman isn't a woman until she's a mother; it's true."
Despite the film's coldness, lack of humor, bleak conceptions about relationships, unappetizing sexual scenes, lack of dramatic tension, and pretentious philosophizing by Caroline Ducey, it still had something disturbing to say about relationships that was worth listening to. For the director, sex is shown to be what fantasies are made of: that it is all in one's head. To show this, Breillat her heroine be nude for many scenes and therefore symbolically stripped her of all the illusions she has about sex, as we watch her act out these fantasies. Though the film might not always be appealing, it is still not a work of trash; it does have something to say of what goes on in the marital bedroom. How much you like what it says might depend on what you thought it was digging at and if its romantic notions rang a bell in your head. My thoughts are that the film's presentation didn't particularly excite me, but afterwards it left me thinking about what it had to say about relationships, which are still just as great a mystery as God is, and I began to warm to the film more than while I was watching it. It, somehow, made me think more about the dark side of a relationship and for that reason alone, I wouldn't entirely dismiss this film, though I wonder at what it really was trying to get at.
The body of the film's works is quite different than its ending, which shows Ducey giving birth to a son and her womanhood supposedly being fulfilled. Robert is at her bedside as her drunken husband remains in the apartment, where she opened all the gas jets in the kitchen to cause an explosion, which kills him.
Breillat is trying to provoke the male viewer to think further about what a woman craves for in a relationship and calling out for a woman to seriously think about what she wants in a man and what she is capable of doing in a relationship. I think this is a film women might be more appreciative than men.
REVIEWED ON 5/18/1999 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
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