Even in English, the title An Affair of Love sounds French.  It’s not even a direct translation of the French title (which would be A Pornographic Affair), and still the distributors have managed to pretty much catch the feel of the film.  The first image one gets when one hears “An Affair of Love” is that of a slick, unshaven guy in a beret, hanging out at a coffee shop, saying “Eet truly vas un affair… un affair ov love.”  And then he’d take a puff from a long, overpriced cigarette.

    An Affair of Love is the story of a couple, unidentified by name, who meet when she (Nathalie Baye) places a personal ad in order to fulfill a never-revealed sexual fantasy.  The two meet in a coffee shop and adjourn across the street to a hotel after some initial conversational awkwardness.  The two decide to keep their relationship on a purely sexual level, a method for their fantasies to be acted out and nothing more, but soon enough, idle conversation leads to a more emotional bond.

    At first, it seems easier than a normal relationship, as the sexual tensions between the pair have already been overcome.  However, when they begin overcomplicating their affair by analyzing each other’s feelings and even reverting to sex in the missionary position as a representation of it becoming actual romantic involvement, things get messy.

    Despite the French title, there’s very little sex or nudity in An Affair of Love, and the film is all the more tense because of it.  Their first awkward walk to the hotel room, for example, is filled with enough sexual tension for a dozen erotic thrillers.  The acting is top-notch, and the exclusion of virtually everything in the world outside of their immediate relationship allows for a beautifully anonymous feeling that allows just about anyone to identify with the characters on screen.

    Still, it’s has a very French feel to it all, and that’s bound to turn off less adventurous viewers.  But An Affair of Love never gets so ponderous that it becomes pretentious; It remains a simple testament to a complicated issue.  At 78 minutes, it never becomes overindulgent or drags, and it’s bound to provoke conversation as a date film, provided your date is open to the experience.