L’ennui (1998)
Martin, a philosophy teacher in a mid-life crisis, has an affair with Cécilia, a young french muse, who drives him insane with jealousy & possessiveness.
A bored philosopher meets a young model who is easy to bed, impossible to read and perfectly equipped to turn his clever mind into jealous mush.
Martin is a middle-aged philosophy lecturer adrift after the collapse of his marriage, prowling Paris in his car and pretending that detachment is the same thing as freedom. One night he notices Cécilia, a placid young artist’s model, with the much older painter Meyers. Curiosity leads Martin to the painter’s studio, but when he returns, Meyers has abruptly died and Cécilia is calmly gathering her belongings. Martin questions her about the dead man with the zeal of a detective and the bedside manner of a tax inspector, half-suspecting that her voracious sexuality somehow finished Meyers off. Yet irritation quickly becomes desire, and soon Martin and Cécilia are locked in an affair built almost entirely from sex, interrogation and misunderstanding. She gives him her body with disarming ease but refuses to manufacture the grand emotions he...
demands; he talks, analyses and pesters, while she answers plainly, often in a sentence or less. The more available she is physically, the more unreachable she becomes everywhere else. Once Martin learns that she is also seeing Momo, a young actor, his intellectual poise goes straight down the lavatory. He follows her, grills her, offers money, attempts bargains and even tolerates arrangements that humiliate him, convinced that one more question or one more fuck will reveal what she “really” feels. Instead, jealousy consumes his work, friendships and sense of reality, while Sophie, his elegant confidante, watches him turn emotional self-harm into a full-time occupation. Cédric Kahn shoots this descent less like a tasteful romance than a nervous psychological thriller laced with dry, uncomfortable comedy. The camera grows more restless as Martin becomes increasingly frantic, and Charles Berling is superb at making an educated man look both frightening and absurd. The film’s sharpest joke is also its cruellest: Martin can explain philosophy to a classroom, but he cannot accept that Cécilia may simply want what she wants without providing him with a theory. Some viewers will find the repetition exhausting, but that circling structure is the trap. This is obsession from inside the cage—sweaty, degrading, darkly funny and painfully familiar to anyone who has ever mistaken possession for love.
Although adapted from Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel, the story is shifted from late-1950s Rome to contemporary, late-1990s Paris, where mobile phones have not yet rescued anyone from waiting, uncertainty or unanswered calls. Filmed in the city’s 19th and 20th arrondissements, this is not postcard Paris of monuments, champagne terraces and lovers beside the Seine. Kahn prefers nocturnal pavements, cramped cafés, anonymous apartments, the dead painter’s studio and streets that seem to keep Martin moving without getting him anywhere. The city feels lived-in, slightly grubby and emotionally chilly, a perfect maze for a man chasing a woman who refuses to become the romantic mystery he has invented. The vibe is cerebral eroticism with its collar undone: lots of flesh and conversation, but also paranoia, black humour and the queasy sensation of watching male confidence rot in real time.
Sophie Guillemin, making a startling screen debut, is the film’s knockout weapon. Full-figured, soft-faced and blessed with a faint smile that can look innocent, amused or utterly indifferent, she plays Cécilia without the usual purring-femme-fatale nonsense. Her allure comes from how comfortable she appears in her own skin and how little effort she makes to seduce anyone; Martin supplies enough fantasy for both of them. Guillemin handles the extensive nudity and frequent, graphically staged sex scenes with fearless naturalism, making Cécilia’s nakedness feel frank rather than coy while still giving the film a heavy erotic charge. Berling writhes, lectures and burns himself hollow beside her; she barely raises her voice and owns the frame. Arielle Dombasle adds a cooler, polished sensuality as Sophie, but Guillemin is the sight viewers remember: lush, unreadable and calmly carnal, the human brick wall against which Martin repeatedly bangs his head—and everything else.
The French will do what they do best, Another Hot Erotic French melodrama about Sexual Obsession, this time based on an old Alberto Moravia novel.
L’ ENNUI (1998) (English trnsln – Boredom) by director Cedric Kahn, a Lolita Obsession Erotic Drama about Martin, a middle-aged philosophy teacher in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Lacking direction or purpose in his life, he initiates an affair with the 17 years old Cécilia, a young artist’s model who might have killed her former lover with the intensity of her sexual charm & appetite. They share a purely erotic relationship as an intellectual abyss separates them, as if they’re almost from different worlds.
In the beginning he hates her but predictably, as in ALL Lolita obsessions we have seen and read, before long, he gets Obsessed with her (and its Very Easy to see WHY when you look at her) and he needs to possess her and cannot resist a sharp descent into violent jealousy & neurotic behaviour.
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