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Barbara Creed: Romance, the film
INITIALLY BANNED IN AUSTRALIA, Romance captures a series of stock images from hardcore pornography and re-locates them, perhaps for the first time, in mainstream art-house cinema. I say 'capture' because the director, Catherine Breillat, argues that pornographers have 'stolen' explicit images of sexuality 'from the rest of us' and made them the specific preserve of pornography. Her intention was not to make a pornographic film, but to open up mainstream cinema to the possibility of representing sexuality in a clear and uncompromising manner. Romance explores the limits of representation, of what is representable, in the twenty-first century -- a crucial fact which most critics appear to have missed.
Some -- including art critic John McDonald (The Australian's Review of Books) have felt sufficiently motivated to attack the film for its lack of eroticism. McDonald claims that 'as pornography Romance is a dismal failure'. Romance does not aim to be either pornographic or erotic. Drawing on Brechtian distancing devices (first person address to the audience, images designed to shock, impersonal tone), Romance deliberately eschews the erotic, in order to explore themes of sexual politics, female desire and non-traditional sexuality. McDonald also argues that the heroine's 'cinematic ancestor' is the schizoid Catherine Deneuve of Roman Polanski's Repulsion and the similarly disturbed, 'cold, aloof' Deneuve of Bunuel's surrealist masterpiece, Belle de Jour. Romance has little in common with either of these two films which both explore female sexuality from the basis of frigidity, piety and repression. Breillat's work belongs to a genre of films, directed by women, in which female protagonists peel back the seductive myths of romantic love in an attempt to discover the meaning of sexuality for themselves -- no matter how delightful or degrading their experiences. These films include: Carine Adler's Under The Skin, Davida Allen's Feeling Sexy, Bette Gordon's Variety, Jackie Burrough's A Winter Tan, Monika Treut's The Virgin Machine.
Critics have pointed to the clinical style and serious intent of Romance. Richard Corliss (Time Magazine) denounced it as 'slow' and 'morose' -- an 'ordeal' for the audience. McDonald has criticised it for presenting a 'singularly bleak and depressing view of human relationships' and for being a 'deadpan, bitter film' that -- in relation to earlier films like Now Voyager (1942) -- tempts one to believe 'that Hollywood occasionally got it right'. Well Hollywood may well have got it right in earlier decades, but this is the year 2000 and audiences these days want more than the mainstream's usual clichéd representation of sexuality.
Romance is based on a central and amusing conceit which reverses the traditional depiction of the sexes; the woman has a strong sexual appetite: the man is frigid. It contains scenes of fellatio, bondage, masturbation, penetration and group sex. In keeping with her desire to breathe fresh life into the stereotyped images, Breillat has filmed sequences of actual, not simulated, sex. There are also gruelling scenes of a gynaecological examination and of childbirth which suggests that -- for most women -- sexual experiences are inseparable from the traumas and delights of procreation. To even hypothesise about how audiences might have responded if Romance had been directed by a man -- as McDonald does -- is to miss the point entirely.
The central theme of Romance is the heroine's sexual odyssey. Marie (Catherine Ducey) responds to her lover's indifference (he prefers a good book to sex) by embarking on a series of sexual encounters in order to see whether or not she can (presumably like a man) separate her sexual desires from her emotional needs. For this is how she must live if she decides to stay with Paul, her partner. Can she have sex with a stranger she picks up in a bar? Can she surrender to a man who practises sado-masochistic bondage rituals? Can she become just a bundle of 'raw desires'? Can she continue to masturbate and fellate the man she loves in a desperate, probably futile, attempt to capture his love? Can she leave romance -- 'that sentimental bull shit' -- behind? Men don't seem to need it, why should women? Predictably, Marie finds herself pregnant. The fact that the baby is a boy (a humorous dig on the theme of the indestructible Freudian family) suggests, however, that woman can never completely free herself from the male-defined oedipal circuit of desire. As Marie herself says with just a touch of irony, 'A woman is not a woman until she's a mother'.
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Barbara Creed is Associate Professor and Head of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Melbourne.