Romance (1999)
Marie, a schoolteacher is frustrated because her boyfriend Paul, doesn't want intimacy with her... So she starts experimenting with others to fulfil her desires.
A woman starved of affection walks out in search of sex—and finds desire, humiliation and power waiting in the same cold bed.
Marie is a young schoolteacher living with Paul, a handsome fashion model who enjoys being admired but has lost all sexual interest in the woman beside him. She loves him, wants him and repeatedly offers herself, yet he treats intimacy as an irritating demand and leaves her lying naked, frustrated and ashamed. Rather than end the relationship, Marie begins separating love from sex. Her first escape is Paolo, a confident stranger she meets in a bar. Played by porn star Rocco Siffredi, he gives her the direct physical attention Paul withholds, but satisfying the body does not settle her troubled mind. She then becomes involved with Robert, the older headmaster at her school, whose calm authority and taste for bondage draw her into something colder and more ritualistic. He ties her down, talks bluntly about beauty, shame and submission, and seems to understand...
parts of her that Paul refuses even to notice. Marie’s search grows increasingly dangerous, culminating in a brutal encounter with a stranger in her apartment stairwell. Yet she keeps returning to Paul, clinging to the maddening belief that sex with other men means nothing because he alone possesses her love. When Paul finally responds to her again, the consequences push their lifeless domestic arrangement into pregnancy, medical examinations and a much darker struggle over what her body now means to her. Catherine Breillat films all this without the flattering glow of conventional erotica. The rooms are pale, the camera is steady and Marie’s voice-over dissects every encounter as if she were both participant and laboratory specimen. The result is sexually graphic but emotionally chilly: part erotic drama, part cruel relationship comedy and part philosophical argument about the mess created when love, desire and respect no longer occupy the same bed. It can be frustrating, provocative and occasionally absurd, but it is never timid—and the final stretch carries Marie’s private rebellion somewhere far more extreme than a routine tale of infidelity.
This is late-1990s urban France stripped of postcard glamour: modern apartments, bars, classrooms, stairwells and stark hospital rooms, with Paris exteriors surrounded by controlled studio interiors. The vibe is minimalist, clinical and distinctly French—white sheets, bare walls, long silences and explicit acts examined with the seriousness of a medical procedure.
Caroline Ducey gives Marie a pale, slender and quietly sensual presence, looking vulnerable one moment and stubbornly unreadable the next. Her nudity is extensive, direct and completely lacking in coy camera tricks, while the film includes close views of erections, oral sex and penetration, with some sexual activity presented as unsimulated. Anyone expecting soft-focus bedroom entertainment should look elsewhere: Ducey is beautiful, but Breillat uses that beauty to unsettle rather than comfort, turning her naked body into the battlefield on which Marie fights with men, love and herself.
Marie, a demure schoolteacher is frustrated by the lack of intimacy in her relationship with her boyfriend, Paul, who for some reasons, doesn’t want to have sex with her… So she starts fucking around and experimenting with kinks & fetishes to explore and fulfil her desires.
Sign in to comment
The same account you use to watch films.