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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"
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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?
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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
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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 I saw "Romance" for the first time, it was in New York at a festival of French films. The audience was largely French and largely female -- the house was full of scarves, sweaters, makeup and disdain -- and the humidity level got pretty high during several of the film's sexier scenes. Outside afterwards, the women smoked and chatted appreciatively. The next time I saw the film was in a screening room, among a small crowd of New York media women who tittered happily and knowingly during the film's first few minutes. There's some just-among-us girls truth-telling in the film that resembles the sex-confession columns in the new grrrl-power-influenced women's magazines, and the media women recognized and enjoyed it.

Then Ducey is in bed with the sweetly tender Rocco Siffredi, and there's a yucky condom being held up and mused about -- those Europeans, they'll philosophize about anything! -- and then Rocco gets hard, and my lord but he's hung, and he politely asks Ducey -- sorry, Marie -- if she wants to be fucked in the ass (she declines, but graciously), and then, omigod, it looks as if they're really having sex. From then on, the media women seemed agog. In the elevator after the film was over, most of them were visibly pulling themselves and their irony back together. But one woman looked at the others and asked straightforwardly, "Were you ready for that? Did you know what we were in for?"

These days, movies can be made more cheaply and with more freedom than ever before, and cable channels need programming. We also have a remarkable abundance of performers -- especially women -- with the gifts and drives to take dicey chances: Elizabeth Shue, Diane Lane, Georgina Cates, Rebecca de Mornay, Kelly Lynch, Fairuza Balk, Joey Lauren Adams, Elizabeth Pena, Ming-Na Wen and many others come to mind. We've even had a few small movies that have shown some worldliness -- but Andrew Fleming's "Threesome" and Amy Jones' "Love Letters" went largely unnoticed. And when Kevin Smith's "Chasing Amy," which did have some success, was discussed, what got mentioned was the comically smutty dialogue, not the film's tone of erotic melancholy, or its evocations of pain and regret.

But educated Americans, even while they've become more adventurous in their cooking and eating, have largely given up the pleasures of erotic movie art. They'll rent porn, or watch a few minutes of a Cinemax "erotic thriller," but they've lost the habit of searching out films that join sexual content with the psychological, visual and narrative power of real movie art. "Romance" can't be beat as a way to remind ourselves of these pleasures, or perhaps to learn about them. Seeing it in a movie theater, in its full, stained-glass radiance, will certainly leave you with plenty to think about. Why not visit a bar, order drinks and talk the film over? That can be its own kind of erotic pleasure.
salon.com | Sept. 17, 1999

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