Desperately seeking 'Romance' in pornography

COURTESY TRIMARK PICTURES Marie (Caroline Ducey) may look bored, but that doesn't mean she isn't ready to jump into bed at any moment.

Romance plays like a grim attempt to reclaim the crotch shot as part of the French national culture. It seems determined to confront us with something. Writer and director Catherine Breillat often shows the film's explicit sexual encounters in lengthy single shots that grit their teeth and plod forward, daring us to get uncomfortable or say something ironic. It's sex, dammit, and Breillat is going to have you understand that before the movie's done with.

Each sexual encounter is narrated in a clinical voice-over by the film's protagonist, Marie (Caroline Ducey). She's a grade-school teacher who's had the misfortune to have been plunked by Breillat into the world's most deadpan relationship. Boyfriend Paul (Sagamore Stevenin) is a pretty-boy fashion model who refuses to have any kind of sexual relationship with the insecure Marie. He projects the image of sex without engaging in any himself, and this discord between image and action makes Marie cry artfully.

The two of them lie in bed together. She begins to perform oral sex on him. "Stop it," he says flatly. "I disgust you," she replies, also flatly. "I appall you," she continues to drone. Cut to a close-up. It's night, Paul's asleep, and Marie is crying artfully again.

Thing is, the languorous pacing here might suggest Marie's frustration in her sexually stagnant relationship, but this pacing never alters, even when Marie decides to effect a lifestyle change and go out and get some.

The film's unbroken sex-scene shots and Marie's philosophical, dispassionate voiceovers lead to a sort of confusion on the narrative's part. Breillat may want Marie to dissect what's happening before our eyes, moment by moment, but the interminable shots taken from some third eye prevent the narrator Marie from emphasizing any one aspect of her experience, and they get in the way of the on-screen Marie's real-time experience.

Meanwhile, the shots go on and on to the point where they stop emphasizing the process of the sex act and start emphasizing the process of the actors painstakingly emulating a sex act. Like the one-shot coffee shop scene in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies, these shots call attention to themselves in the guise of being unobtrusive. Paolo's (Rocco Siffredi) erection is this film's equivalent of Brenda Blethyn's crying episode.

Breillat's characters speak almost entirely in declarations: about sex, attraction, repulsion, why ugly guys who speak well "get" women, and why penises are like birds. Situations get related to Greek myths at least twice. Robert (Francois Berleand), the school headmaster who claims to have bedded over 10,000 women, gets compared to Don Juan.

By referencing all these grand themes and big ideas, Breillat adds to the distance between the viewer and the characters. Marie's a nice girl with some specificity in her life, and she starts off with some specific goals. After a bondage session with Robert, a sex scene with Siffredi and another long talk with Paul, suddenly her sex life needs to be footnoted.

All this would be okay if those footnotes led back to Marie, but Breillat is more interested in confronting the viewer with sex and erudition about sex. Marie's voiceover narration talks film theory: "Porn movies protect your libido with a surrogate image." This may be a nice tidbit to throw in at a cocktail party the next time that the historical spectator of pornography is brought up, but it's just plain annoying for a film to lecture so blatantly about its own nature.

There are a couple of moments in Romance that do work in one way or another. During Marie's first bondage session with Robert she begins crying, and he immediately unties her and becomes a nurturing, blubbering fool, comforting his sobbing partner. It's an off-kilter ending to the scene, which begins with a jump cut to a gagged Marie, and is preceded by Robert spouting off vaguely chauvinistic mishmash about "dominating" women. There's no intruding narration; the characters slowly extract themselves from their awkward situation, and for a moment it's actually interesting.

Even better is a sequence that comes near the end of the film, in which Marie gets pregnant and imagines a nightmarish bordello in which her nethers are divided from her head by a wall. It's a scene which finally seems to flow from the character and encapsulate her attitudes, rather than having been placed there by Breillat. This is followed shortly thereafter by a birthing scene that is far more unnerving than any of the sex sequences that preceded it. Marie may have claimed before to find "disgusting" things beautiful, but this is the only point at which the statement has any impact, because the camera drops the clinician's attitude and, ironically, turns Romance's most clinical scene into something surreal and terrifying. The rest of the film, however, is too preoccupied with spinning its viscera into abstract ideas.

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