Romance (1999)

Catherine Breillat is certainly not a tepid director. Fat girl made some very good points on body image & sexuality - in a very blunt, in-your-face way. Watching the film was hard, but it was not in the least exploitative. Although stamped with a bad rumour, I sat down to watch Romance. Yes, it is very explicit, but it wasn't pornography. Sure, this movie could only be made in France: explicit sexual images - plus a monologue about the metaphysical relation between the male and the female. The style of the film is immersed in self-conscious gestures: almost every image seems to be aimed at challenging traditional images of sexuality and aspects of embodiment. What is it about? Masochism and self-annihilation? Well - sure. Take a long, hard look: "The woman is dead." Impossible female desire? Sex & birth? Well, it is certainly not about romance. Is it yet another film the purpose of which is to provoke and to shock? Partly it is, but there's more to it also. There's an undercurrent of extremely dark humor here. Early feminist writers held the medium of film to be an extension of the male gaze, for which women were made objects of desire. This kind of theorizing has partly been rejected as too simple, and there has been much discussion about how to understand practices of watching in a less one-dimensional way (Teresa de Lauretis is one example). Breillat's film joins in with this tradition in that she, too, poses questions about fantasy & gendered gazes. Romance is a complex film. The arrangement of scenes is very strict. But for all its self-consciousness, did I find clarity in those images? This is a difficult question. To be honest, the more I think about it, those ending scenes, depicting the birth of a child and the death of a man, exhibit a brilliant dose of sour irony.