ROMANCE (1999) ***
Reviewed 3/20/99
Director Catherine Breillat's Romance is as lacking in romance as Todd Solondz's Happiness is lacking in happiness. Both films are actually about sex, but Breillat's ideas are more insightful. After making a big splash at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Romance has been picked up by Trimark and will tentatively be released in the U.S. in November.* It should prove to be more controversial than Happiness due to its explicit depictions of sex. Still, while as graphic as Nagisa Oshima's 1976 In the Realm of the Senses, Romance is far less intense in its representation (or should I say presentation) of sex. But then, Senses is all about intensity. My point here is that this element of Romance is not new, but it will probably be cited as a movie pushing the sexual envelope. I hesitate to call this pornography because pornography connotes an intention to arouse (despite the failure of much pornography to do just that). Arousal is virtually the antithesis of Breillat's film. In some ways, Romance is the Jeanne Dielman of sex.
In the story, Marie, played by the delicate-looking Caroline Ducey, is a school teacher obsessively in love with her fashion model boyfriend Paul. But he spurns Marie's sexual cravings, so she goes out and finds Paolo, played by physically-striking Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi. While still in love with Paul, Marie enters another relationship with her school headmaster, Robert, a bondage connoisseur.
Breillat has said she approached the material more emotionally than logically and that shows in the film's amorphous structure. Ironically however, Romance is a glacial film, far more intellectually appealing than emotionally. Irony abounds in this movie, and not just in the title. For example, right after a scene in which Marie gives Paul a blow job, we see her in class and find out she's a school teacher of very young children. Breillat uses this kind of ironic juxtaposition throughout the film. Cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis shoots Paul's apartment as cold and sterile in shades of white and blue yet this is where Marie is most in love. She has sex with Paolo, a virtual stranger, in a warm room of tans and browns. And Marie's bondage sessions at Robert's place are conducted around medieval church-like décor. Robert is the most tender with her, Paul the least. None of Marie's sexual experiences are in the least erotic. Worse are a rape she endures and the vaginal probing she undergoes by a dozen hospital interns.
Marie is not a likable character. Surpassingly selfish and miserable, she clearly suffers from bipolar disorder. In Breillat's thesis, this is not the cause of Marie's behavior. It is the effect, caused by the demands placed on women in a patriarchal society. The concept of romance is one of the contributing factors in such a society to Marie's ailment.
Caroline Ducey is never less than convincing as Marie, but we have to wonder how difficult it must have been for her to open herself so much for this film. I also wonder if Romance, with all its depictions of female degradation, would be much more unpalatable were it to have been directed by a man. In this respect and others, Romance is not unlike Pauline Réage's The Story of O.