Romance by Catherine Breillat

Catherine Breillat, the French filmmaker, is one of the most talked-about women in the field of contemporary arts and letters. I had read about many of her films and how her films managed to merge heavy-duty eroticism and French philosophy together and present it from a supposedly woman’s perspective but never got a chance to see any of them. Not until I got hold of the DVD of Romance sometime last month when I was in Bangalore. I thought of writing something about it now because somehow the images from the film keep returning to me, not necessarily because I have nothing else to do to pass these gloomy, lonely and cold nights of Chicago! I am reading Nabokov and Stendhal but more about that later. It might just be that the film was more provocative than I had thought when I had first seen it. And some of the ideas generated by the film have taken root in my consciousness and become complex.

In any case, the film itself is very easy to follow. "Romance" is about Marie, a sad, depressed and needy girl with small breasts and a vast ego, who is sexually frustrated and looking to be fulfilled both physically and emotionally. She's a schoolteacher, mousey but chic, shy yet forward, whose narcissistic, male-model boyfriend barely touches her, and doesn't let her touch him. The film never makes the reasons clear. Although Marie thinks it is because she is a woman! (The guy is straight and that is made clear). For the needy Marie, he's like a cosmically absurd joke. Depressed by his sensual neglect, she seeks physical fulfillment elsewhere. She finds an Italian stud. Her boss at school provides her some surprises, and other men have a go at her too. All these sad, desperate encounters are woven together by Marie's voice, in an unusual kind of voice-over that's part diary, part stream-of-consciousness which makes it sound like porn written by Virignia Woolf only not that well written. The film ends with the pregnant Mary giving birth (shown in full clinical detail), while her boyfriend is killed in the apartment accident which was actually triggered by her with the voice over announcing something like a woman’s life is fulfilled only after she becomes a mother (pretty reactionary for a French feminist movie I thought) and concluding perhaps with the message that a man’s usefulness for a woman is only in so far as he can help her become a mother and reach that final goal of her life.

With all the eroticism and heavy-duty theorizing (French style) aside, the film is also unintentionally comic at places. Although the best joke is in the title because the film is more than anything else a systematic annihilation of the idea of romantic love and makes a mockery of the idea that men and women can have sexual relationships which can be even remotely fulfilling and meaningful. Which is no doubt an extreme point of view and I am not sure if even Breillat sincerely believes in it other than pulling a few rhetorical feminist punches at the patriarchal establishment.

The film also relies on shallow metaphors and easy symbolisms to make its many points. But it is sufficiently eloquent at places. The name of the heroine becomes important later on when Immaculate Conception is hinted at, in an amusing sort of way. There is also a grotesque surrealist episode, which because it is unintentionally funny, in an embarrassing way, looks as if lifted from a porn film directed by Fellini or Bunuel. I could understand that the episode was meant to symbolize the radical split between body and soul (or mind if you will) that women feel in a male-dominated society but I could only manage a sigh and pressed the forward button on my DVD player. Move on girl, I said, tell me something that’s interesting and new!

Many of its flaws aside, the film does succeed in making its ideas come across in an articulate way and also the skill with which Breillat joins sexual content with the psychological, visual and narrative power of real movie art can only be commended and which makes the film worthy of sitting on the same shelf as great classics like Last Tango in Paris which deal with similar themes in a similar style. And like Bertolucci (director of Last Tango in Paris) Breillat too wants us to acknowledge that, while sex can lead you into a sense of self-discovery, it's just as likely to leave you overwhelmed by loneliness and most probably will never resolve or even leave you more confused with your existential issues.

I was also thinking after I finished the movie that perhaps the problem with Marie was not all that complicated. She just thinks a little too much. And given that she is a woman, it is plainly too much! And that’s her problem. May be Plato was just joking when he said, an unexamined life is not worth living. Because the irony is that when you start examining your life you are not living it anymore, you are actually studying it. May be the motto “enjoy don’t think” isn’t as stupid as it sounds.