On the first night of the release of
Catherine Breillat’s Romance, the cinemas
in Paris were full. Romance was, for a
day, the number-one film in the city. The
audience was composed of cineastes,
intellectuals and young men and women
eager to view an explicit excursion into
the sexual realm by an esteemed woman
film-maker who had worked with such
masters as Fellini. The following
afternoon, things were a bit different.
According to one viewer, the audience
consisted of solitary men, a breed who
emerge from God-knows-where, whenever they
hear that bare tits and arse are showing
somewhere. ”I was the only woman in the
place,” she told me.
How do you make an erotic film when
there is no universal expression of human
sexuality? When the only sexual
predilection that unites the people in the
darkened auditorium is that of voyeur?
When Romance was shown at a press
screening in London, two disgruntled women
complained that they didn’t find it as
sexy as they had hoped. They got as far as
the bondage and they were turned right
off. Was it possible, they wondered, for
there to be a women’s erotica?
Over the past few months, Romance has
been sold to the British media as the film
that will take that breakthrough step. It
is about a young schoolteacher, Marie,
whose boyfriend has stopped having sex
with her. So she sets off on a sexual
odyssey through Paris, picking up a man in
a bar, then moving on to an older man, who
suggests that she should experience
bondage, and so on.
I found it unsexy. But this, says
Catherine Breillat, isn’t the point. Her
aim is not to turn you on but to make you
think, and this, she asserts, is the
difference between art and porn. Romance
was the opening film at the Edinburgh Film
Festival last August, and Breillat has
been back and forth to Britain giving
interviews, but I wanted to meet her in
Paris because this is a film so French, so
dependent on a French intellectual
context, that it’s almost impossible to
consider it outside of that environment.
Breillat lives with her seven-year-old
son in an apartment on a nondescript main
road, a few minutes walk north from the
Boulevard Haussmann with its grand
department stores. Beneath the dusty
chandelier and the belle ‚poque
plasterwork, her decor is ethnic,
anthropological: wooden chests, African
carvings, painted wooden figurines. She is
a dark-haired woman of 50. If you focus on
her face, you can see the young girl who,
nearly 30 years ago, had a bit-part in one
of the great films of the sexual
revolution, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last
Tango in Paris – a part smaller, she says,
than a Hitchcock cameo.
French and English are conceptually
different. There are rarely direct
translations. English is concrete, French
abstract. So in the script we find Marie
musing to herself, ”An invisible cage,
heavy, laden, descends on me. A tacit
interdiction.” Or, ”Women are the victims
men need for atonement.” This is the kind
of thing that makes the English laugh and
say that the French take themselves too
seriously.
But French is so seductive a language,
that once you start reading it or just
listening to a French-speaker, it starts
invading your thought processes, which is
why so many post-modern academics from the
Anglo-Saxon world, saturated in French
source material, sound as if they are
writing their native tongue in
translation. There were certain ideas
Breillat expressed that seemed beautiful
and daring when I was sitting in her
apartment. But, two hours later, in a
stifling hot, semi-darkened, stalled
Eurostar train, I thought, ”Oh, what
bollocks.”
Breillat wrote her first novel, called
L’Homme Facile, when she was 17, and,
under the French system of book
classification, it could only be bought by
over-18s, so that the author was debarred
from reading her own work. She was
sexually aware from a young age, starting
her periods and developing breasts at 11.
To some extent, she has spent the rest of
her career inflating that early,
precocious sexuality into a universal
principle.
”Women have always been tormented by the
idea of obscenity and prudishness,” she
asserted. ”The fact that there has been
that suggestion around sex has made me
feel that I ought to be ashamed of myself.
I can’t stand that.”
So she set out to make a film that
liberated women from this sense of shame.
She first wrote the synopsis 20 years ago
after seeing Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida
(In the Realm of the Senses), the most
sexually explicit film ever to have
obtained a theatrical release. ”It was too
hard to make [Romance] then,” she said.
”Because of censorship, actresses would
accept the role then change their minds.
The gap between the art film and the X film
is impossible to breach. But two years ago,
I found it possible and necessary.”
Possible because, she says, something
quite significant has changed in film: ”It
is much better to be a woman in cinema
today than a man, there’s so much that can
be said by women. For men, women are the
ultimate mystery … Until 50 years ago,
women’s sexuality had to be protected and
never exposed. Only recently have women
been allowed to discover themselves.”
Today, the only things worth saying
about sex are being said by women, because
the male view has had such a long, long
run that it has exhausted its potential to
observe anything new. A bondage scene
imagined by a male director or writer
could be dismissed as an expression of his
own desire for domination. A bondage scene
imagined by Breillat, however distasteful
to some, at least provokes the question,
why?
But her answers to my questions were not
quite what I expected. In fact, Breillat
says she is explicitly not making an
erotic film. ”The object of cinema is not
sexual arousal,” she said. ”It’s not there
to give pleasure, it’s not a vehicle for
sexual consumption and I’m quite surprised
when people say they’re aroused by it.
It’s quite a cold film. It’s about sexual
identity. The details of sex are more
medical than sexual.”
”The difference is in the soul, the
look,” she said, adding that Italian porn
star Rocco Siffredi, who has a part in
Romance, ”told an Italian press conference
that, in an art film, the soul is coming
through. Every image is a vehicle for
bringing out what is invisible. But in a
porn film, they’re not real actors,
there’s nothing emotional, and each image
is just a utility for wanking.”
I told her that women who had seen
Romance hoping to be aroused had found it
a turn-off, and that perhaps this was the
dilemma with making erotica; in a way,
each of us, within our own sexual
fantasies, is a kind of film-maker. In
cinema, what we see is someone else’s
fantasy, which will never be as good as
our own. ”Cinema is not here to do surveys
before each film is made,” she said
sharply. ”We do not ask, ‘How many people
are attracted to this person?”’
I asked Breillat why she had included
the bondage sequence, which made women at
a London press screening cry out. ”A taboo
is an area of transfiguration, it’s not
something to be despised or disgusted by,”
she said. ”[The bondage scene] is a
destruction in order to reconstruct
herself … It’s like a trial, and as soon
as she’s past that barrier she can
reassemble herself.”
I hadn’t noticed this reassembly taking
place in the film. But my big question was
to do with the age of the heroine – about
22. Why did Breillat express her own ideas
about sexuality through the medium of a
girl less than half her age? ”I realised
that she [Caroline Ducey] had to have a
very pure heart and soul to play this
character, like a virgin who, regardless
of what she does in the film, still needs
to come back to this glow of youth. What I
am looking for is that moment on the face
when a woman reaches orgasm, there’s a
clarity and purity and light and it’s
almost a miracle face. Inside, she is
151/2. We are all 151/2 in our hopes.”
I wanted to throw one of her African
figurines at her. For me, there is only
one genuinely subversive moment in this
film, and it is the most controversial. It
is the scene in which Marie gives birth.
Why, argued members of the audience at the
Edinburgh screening, does she only find
herself at the end, in motherhood? Isn’t
this an anti-feminist statement? But what
is radical about it is the way that the
role of the vagina as the place of sex,
the bit of woman’s body that can be
entered (with or without consent) by men,
turns into the birth canal. You realise
that, in the end, men are left out in the
cold.
Lizzie Francke, director of the
Edinburgh Film Festival, says, ”It was
refreshing to see a film which is
completely open and candid about complex
ideas about what a particular woman wants.
I’m fed up with seeing male fantasies and
desires. It was erotic to see the male
body and what she [the character] found
erotic about it. Quite a lot of straight
men were quite uncomfortable with the
film,” Francke said.
Romance is about that great post-
Romantic preoccupation, the search for the
self. It seems to me flawed by a heavy-
handed overlay of philosophy. But if it
fails, it isn’t because it doesn’t turn
you on. If we want eroticism alone,
perhaps we are doomed to pornography or,
better still, the films we make in our own
heads for which there is no price for
admission.
Last month Linda Grant won the Orange Prize
for woman writers for her novel When I Lived
in Modern Times, published by Granta.