French
filmmakers have long excelled at making pictures about sex
because they recognize the fundamental power struggle between
men and women who lust for the ultimate. Romance,
directed and written by Catherine Breillat, more than lives
up to this reputation, far outdoing hard core pornography
in integrating myriad sex acts with a story of Marie (played
by Caroline Ducey), a female schoolteacher who wants to be
loved. Throughout the film, her voice-overs tell of an angst
because she cannot find romantic love despite sexual relations.
When the film begins, she is asked to play the submissive
role in a photographic shot with Paul (played by Sagamore
Stévenin), a male model with whom she has been sleeping for
the past three months. Despite his handsome demeanor, he does
not make love with her even after she asks him to sleep in
the nude with her and performs fellatio on him. Frustrated,
she decides to explore other men. First, she meets Paolo (played
by porn star Rocco Siffredi), a man at a bar who is lustfully
attracted to her, but she is not turned on by his sensuality
because he wants to sodomize her and kiss her breasts but
clearly does not understand how women achieve orgasm. Robert
(played by François Berleand), the much less handsome middle-aged
principal of her school, boasting of 10,000 tricks in a lifetime,
tries a different approach -- bondage. Submission through
bondage at first brings her to tears (and prompts a few couples
to leave the cinema), because she realizes that she enjoys
the physical danger but still lacks sensual fulfillment. She
enjoys both Robert's attention to her body, which he ties
up, and his intellectual companionship, but he again disappoints
her by focusing on himself. A fourth encounter with an aggressive
stud, who offers to pay her a mere $20, yields cunnilingus
followed by a sodomy that he doubtless learned in prison.
Her best experience is a session of masturbation. Finally,
she sits on her boyfriend, who ejaculates, and a baby is conceived.
Medical students then take turns exploring her vagina to prove
that she is pregnant. When he learns that it is a boy, he
proposes marriage and for the first and last time makes love
with her. While pregnant, he goes out with her to nightclubs
and gets drunk, again showing that he is incapable of caring
for her. She fantasizes a brothel in which nude men fuck women
who present only their lower body through a tube as a paradigm
of how men treat women. Finally, she is about to give birth,
but her husband is too drunk to drive her to the hospital,
so she telephones the principal Robert, who takes her to the
hospital, but not before she turns on the gas stove in the
apartment that later results in Paul's death. After she gives
birth, she says that at last she feels like a woman. The film
is a study of a body that is used by men but a mind that seeks
true romance and remains dissatisfied. The duality is symbolized
by hair that bisects her face throughout much of the film.
The film is dialectical-presenting unresolved conflicts between
men and women, mind and body, sex and sensuality, aloneness
and companionship, trust and betrayal, pain and pleasure,
even life and death. Since the principal culprit is the narcissism
of men, the logical resolution of the conflicts appears to
be Lesbian relationships, where women can satisfy one another's
needs and simply import from sperm banks whenever they so
desire. The feminist director of the film wants men to take
note that women are no longer content to play a secondary
role but should avoid going to extremes in search of the mythical
man who knows how to love a woman. MH
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