Romance

Synopsis: Marie (Caroline Ducey) is a pretty young Parisienne, who, unrequited in her love for her fashion model boyfriend, indulges in random sexual encounters as she tries to grasp her own identity.

Catherine Breillat's film belongs squarely within the discursive tradition of French New Wave cinema, recalling the films of Lelouch, Rohmer, and Eustache et al in which the characters, with or without the aid of a narrator, dissect the dilemmic nature of human relationships. A more recent subject of comparison, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was a more elegant, but less frank, reflection, on the conflict between sexual desire and the reflective consciousness (the films share one remarkably, though presumably coincidentally, similar scene of orgiastic sex, Breillat's version being far more dramatic). Be warned, although this film has a goodly quotient of aestheticisation (Ducey and her boyfriend are both beautiful, they live in an all-white minimalist apartment, he drives a soft-top Mercedes etc., all completely gratuitous), the title is thoroughly ironic and the sex scenes more physiologic than erotic.

Thus, marketing for the film suggests that the female protagonist is exploring her sexuality. That implies some kind of celebratory liberation, which is not what is happening here (at least not until the somewhat questionable, denouement). Rather she is exploring her sex or sexual identity within the context of a trenchantly macho/misogynist society. Caroline Ducey's performance is quite remarkable.

Cultural and women's studies students will find easy pickings here as Breillat sets the situation with little subtlety (sometimes it is either almost laughable or groan-worthy). Here the woman perceives herself as an object of loathing because of her sex, unrecognisable to the male beyond the impulse for sexual gratification. Her abysmal condition is graphically portrayed in a descending series of encounters which leave her "a slab of meat on a table" ( There is little here to be enjoyed (given that this is a criterion for film-goers) but on the other hand Breillat has achieved much in being able to confront the normally phallocentric spectator with different (should one say "vaginal"?) view of heterosexual relations. This is a film driven by feminist theory rather than characterological interplay. Unusually with this background, it has been made by a sophisticated film-maker, although one who even given her critical agenda walks dangerously close to the kitsch world of glossy French art-house cinema.

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