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Movie Interview
Tainted love
"Romance" director Catherine Breillat explains why women hold more power than men in the bedroom -- and talks about what happens when you bring a porn star onto the set of a "real" movie.
By Cynthia Joyce
[09/17/99]

Movie Review
"For Love of the Game"
If you're not as old as Kevin Costner's aging character at the beginning of this dreary baseball fable, you will be by the end.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[09/17/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
Four years ago, Leftfield were contenders in the Fatboy Slim-Chemical Brothers-Prodigy poptronica pantheon. Now they're back, but where's the hype?
By Michelle Goldberg
[09/17/99]

Movie Review
"Sugar Town"
John Taylor, Michael Des Barres and Martin Kemp play -- what else? -- faded '80s rock titans in this slight L.A. music-biz satire.
By Daniel Mangin
[09/17/99]

Movie Review
"Stop Making Sense"
Fifteen years later, the delightful Talking Heads concert pic is still the kind of miracle movie that comes about once in a lifetime.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[09/16/99]

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When did people decide that the aphrodisiac has no place in art? Some moviegoers have fallen into the habit of dismissing such work as "just a turn-on." But that is to dismiss essential parts of major art traditions -- Japanese, Italian, Indian and French film, just to start, which were once sought out by what were known as "adult filmgoers." It was understood that a French movie wasn't just an excuse to get out of the house, but also an occasion for visiting cafes and bars afterwards, to flirt, drink and flex a little intellectualism. Another hurdle for filmgoers who might otherwise be open to more eroticism is the legacy of some feminist film theorists, who have long asserted that the camera is an expression of the phallus, and is thereby related to technology's rape of nature, America's rape of Vietnam, capitalism's rape of everything -- you name it. They have made a lot of educated people feel that it's offensive to look at performers with adoration and lust, and to use movie images to keep our inner flames burning. (We do it anyway, but we react to being chastened by becoming crude.) But taking erotic pleasure in filming and watching performers isn't just some perverse hobby. It's central to the history of movies. Certainly, there can be a kind of implicit pornography in shots of performers; there can also be admiration. Often, and perhaps ideally, there's both. Stiller and Garbo, Hitchcock and Grace Kelly, Von Sternberg and Dietrich -- these were collaborations, not acts of rape. Jean Renoir once said that the reason he went to all the trouble of financing, writing, directing and editing movies was to justify making close-ups of actresses he loved. As moviegoers, we tend to luxuriate in the idea that the image before us is of both a made-up character and a real person. (That really is Nicole Kidman's butt, and at the same time I accept it as the butt of the character she's playing.) For much of film history, this duality -- the fact that every movie is both a work of fiction and a documentary, more specifically a documentary about its performers -- has been one of the major, disturbing attractions of the medium. It has always been part of what draws people into theaters, and draws some people into filmmaking itself.

Younger American audiences, particularly those raised in a P.C., media-saturated environment, are especially likely to find "Romance" objectionable. It won't reward a channel-surfing, crack-wise-with-your-friends state of mind (as, say, "Sex in the City" and "Cruel Intentions" do). Worse, a full-bodied appreciation of the movie depends on having a range of cultural references that extends slightly beyond the purely pop. That lighting calls up Ingres, doesn't it? And isn't that image of scissors and clingy, wet panties reminiscent of Oppenheim's furry teacup? Some familiarity with authors such as Colette, Tanizaki, the comtesse de La Fayette, Georges Bataille, Lady Murasaki and Strindberg won't hurt either. Enjoying "Romance" depends on our ability to feel the seductiveness of beauty, to wince when it's violated, and to recognize what it implies of an inner life. The spareness of the film's visual design (the Japanese touches, the white/blue/crimson color scheme, the use of circles and visual frames), Breillat's attentiveness to acoustic shifts, and of course the eyes, flesh and feelings of the actress Ducey -- they're what the movie is built of.

In the 1970s, these aspects of film -- a fascination with beauty, movie history, performers and sex -- all boiled to the surface in what I think of as the "let's fuck in a bare apartment until we arrive at an existential realization of ourselves, or die trying" genre. These films range from the sublime ("Last Tango in Paris," "The Last Woman") to the provocative ("In the Realm of the Senses") to the preposterous ("The Night Porter"). Breillat had a small role in "Last Tango," and has said that she was inspired to make "Romance" when she watched "In the Realm of the Senses." Can art and porn be fused? Can a movie achieve the stature of, say, the novel "The Story of O"?

Breillat's approach to moviemaking is lordly in a way that I myself usually find off-putting. (Of her previous movies, only the 1988 "36 Fillette" is available on video in this country, and I didn't enjoy it much. A search on the used-book Web site Bibliofind turned up a copy of her novel, "A Man for the Asking," which she wrote at 17. It's ferociously pretentious, but pretty sexy.) She's a '60s princess with a weakness for dry theory, and in "Romance," she's aristocratically pitiless in the way she cuts her characters almost no slack. Yet in this case her temperament and approach yield some astounding scenes.

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