Watching Catherine Breillat's Romance
hardly more than a week after having seen American Beauty
was like travelling to another planet. The film describes the
love affair of a Frenchwoman, Marie (Caroline Trousselard) ,
with a young man who treats her in an unspeakably
contemptible fashion and whom she dispatches to Hades at the
conclusion after finding happiness in the arms of an older
gentleman who goes in for bondage. Not only is Romance far more
sexually explicit than American Beauty, with Marie's
disquisition about the peculiarities of the male organ when
she is trying unsuccessfully to arouse her lover, with some
quite graphic visuals of the sexual act, and not least of all
with its openness about her need for gratification--most
conspicuously when she has a hot fling with a passerby--but
Marie's malheurs make the misfortunes of the Burnham family
look like an episode from Father Knows
Best. Yet the difference in style between the two
films is far more radical and profound than that of content.
I gladly leave to feminist critics the interpretation of
Mlle. Marie's erotic pèlerinage, but whatever
the viewer makes of her adventures the movie's considerable
power and the strong directorial personality of Mme. Breillat
are both incontestable. If the film takes considerable risks,
the most audacious of these--the rigorously linear narrative
line, the use of long takes, the slow editorial pace, the
absence of any deviation from the unvaryingly serious
tone--have to do with the mechanics of film making and not
the mechanics of love. Romance is not what I would
call a particularly nuanced film; the movie sustains an
effect of unrelieved emotional intensity as do few movies
these days, with the result that its monotone sometimes
threatens to pass over into monotony. Although Romance
has similarities to some older French motion pictures--I was
particularly reminded of Jean Eustache's La Maman et la
Putain--it is totally unlike any movie that has been
produced in this country for years. No one who expects to
pursue a career as a director here--at least in more or less
commercial film making--would dare to make the demands upon
an audience that Breillat makes in Romance. Not
surprisingly the movie has gotten under the skin of some
reviewers--Kenneth Turan wrote a violently hostile review
that appeared in The Los Angeles Times--but how many
directors these days are willing to hold a shot on the screen
even after the action has terminated until the shot's full
significance has sunk into the mind of the viewer? Breillat
has more courage as a film maker than most people who earn
their living in the movie industry here or abroad, and I
salute her for it.