Themes: Self-Destructive Romance, Sexual Awakening
Main Cast: Caroline Ducey, Sagamore Stévenin, François Berléand, Rocco Siffredi
Release Year: 1999
Country: FR
Run Time: 97 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Like Nagisa Oshima's erotic masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses (1976), this film's shockingly graphic depiction of sex blurs the line between art and pornography. Marie (Caroline Ducey) is unfulfilled by her relationship with Paul (Sagamore Stévenin), her narcissistic male model boyfriend, who refuses to show her any kind of physical affection, much less make love to her. Frustrated, she decides to take matters into her own hands, and she finds one night of tenderness and passion in the arms of Paolo, a man she met in a bar, played by Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi. Later, she is seduced by an older man, Robert (François Berléand), who introduces her to bondage and sadomasochism. As she allows herself to be bound, gagged, and forced into bizarre contortions, her flirtation with the wild side pushes her into increasingly frightening and degrading situations. Yet, like Catherine Deneuve's Sévérine in Belle de jour (1967), after each tryst she returns to her emotionally remote boyfriend as if nothing happened. One night, taken by Marie's renewed vitality, Paul holds her and begins to make love to her. Although he selfishly withdraws halfway through and casts her aside, he manages to impregnate her; after he proposes, Marie begins to feel society's constraints on her newly liberated sexuality, and she eventually decides to take violent action to salvage it. Unlike most sexually explicit works, the film is expressed from the female perspective. Director Catherine Breillat places the viewer inside Marie's mind through the camera's point-of-view, which in one scene lingers lovingly on Siffredi's camera-friendly anatomy, and through Marie's voice-overs, which provide access to her private thoughts. Brought to life by Ducey's tour-de-force performance, Romance is a confrontational yet emotional work that is not easy to forget. The film premiered at the 1999 Rotterdam Film Festival and was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
If ever a film de-eroticized romance, Catherine Breilliat's Romance is the one. A stark, austere portrait of one woman's masochistic sexual journeys, this bizarre drama is best interpreted as a kind of cerebral fantasy. To acknowledge that the events occur in a dream state of philosophical inquiry refuses any kind of literal analysis based on realism. The fact that Marie (Caroline Ducey) is a mere schoolteacher with a bourgeois lifestyle is just one example of the many improbabilities. However, when viewed as a kind of exposed secret diary, Romance becomes a frighteningly honest look inside the mind of a woman questioning her own sexual experiences. Far removed from the posturing and posing of a macho sexual adventurer (male or female), Marie's experiences are emotionally raw and uniquely personal. The explicit nudity and sex scenes are consistently interpreted from Marie's confused perspective, culminating in a fantastic visual construction of the mother/whore paradox. This brutal vulnerability naturally lends itself to unevenness in tone, alternating between wickedly funny absurdities to dangerously sad situations. Even with a tear-stained face, Marie reflects on her position with a critical eye and sharply detached wit. The unexpected ending is a bold act of defiance, with self-destruction eventually leading to the heroine's triumph. While difficult to watch for audiences expecting their titillation needs to be met, Romance remains totally unforgettable, with a shock ending that makes its impact even more brash. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
When Marie's maudlin boyfriend Paul refuses to have sex with her, she is forced to search for intimacy beyond the bounds of traditional sexual limitations, a journey that proves to be both fulfilling and empowering.
Controversy
In Europe, Romance was shown in mainstream cinemas; in the U.S., it was reduced to a mainstream-acceptable R-rating, and the European original version is un-rated. In March 2004, the original version was broadcast, late-night on German public television. In Australia, the original version of Romance was broadcast uncut on the cable television network "World Movies".[citation needed] In Canada, particularly in Alberta and the Maritimes, the sexuality was seen as gratuitous to the film and it was given an A rating and XXX rating in those regions.[2][3] In June 2008, in the Netherlands, the original version of Romance was broadcast on Dutch public TV, by VPRO, as one of a series of Eroticaart house cinema.[citation needed]
References
^ Anne Gillain, "Profile of a Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat" Beyond French Feminisms: debates on women, Politics and Culture in France, 1981 - 2001, edited by Roger Célestin et al. New York: Macmillan (2003): 202. Catherine Breillat's "film Romance had received much praise--and criticism--the previous year for using a porn-film actor and a scene showing a nonsimulated sexual act, including a shot of an erection in the foreground."
