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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Director Catherine Breillat and star Caroline Ducey follow the urge wherever it leads.
Sep 17, 1999 | Had Catherine Breillat's "Romance" been released 25 years ago, it would have caused an immense fuss in the press, and would likely have been a must-see for the stylish crowd. You'd have overheard people arguing about it in restaurants and bars. Hipsters would have competed to see who could be bored with the whole brouhaha first. These days, who knows how it'll be received? It is an art-house sex movie, and that term no longer has the allure it once did. But I found "Romance" to be one of the two or three most potent films about sex I've seen in the last few decades. And I hope to persuade you that it's something more than just some arty turn-on, though among other things it certainly is that, too.
It's quite different from "Basic Instinct," "Eyes Wide Shut" or "Nine 1/2 Weeks." No stars, no melodrama, no rock soundtrack, no flashy cutting. Instead, "Romance" is austere, even clinical. And where such gross-out date movies as "There's Something About Mary" and "American Pie" suggest food fights at the Burger King, "Romance" is like an evening spent at a four-star restaurant, lingering over the pati and snails. "Romance" is about Marie (Caroline Ducey), a sexually frustrated woman who is looking to be fulfilled, wherever that desire may take her. She's a schoolteacher, mousey but chic, whose narcissistic, male-model boyfriend (Sagamore Stevenin) will barely touch her, and he won't let her touch him. For the needy Marie, he's like a Beckettian, cosmic joke. Depressed by his sensual neglect, she seeks physical fulfillment elsewhere. She finds an Italian stud (played by the international porn star Rocco Siffredi). Her boss at school (Frangois Berleand) provides her some surprises, and other men have a go at her too. Woven throughout is Marie's voice, in an unusual kind of voice-over that's part diary, part stream-of-consciousness.
Breillat has a talent for targeting and hitting raw spots. Attracted to images and situations where the gruesome and the voluptuous are hard to disentangle, she's a specialist in unease. (When does she want us to laugh? It can be hard to tell, but the movie is occasionally very funny.) And in "Romance" she has created a landmark -- the first movie to give a convincing, feature-length account of sex from a woman's point of view.
