CURRENTS
<3
Five VasesThree poems called Love and one called Matador
Notes on Red Heart Emoji
Obscene Gaping Hole: A Review of Catherine Breillat’s Romance
Five works by Chloe Rees
horizontal business after e.e. cummings
Five exerpts from praxinscope
Okul Güzeli
Love In Chelsea
Tapestry Trials: An Interview with Rusty Janardan on Weaving
Memory of you, kiss me new in the spring pool It was pink, Yellow
Obscene Gaping Hole: A Review of Catherine Breillat’s Romance
by Julia Petrocelli
The film opens, after some lag due to my 320p pirated copy of the film, with a sort-of irrelevant shot of Paul, the abhorrent asexual, getting a full face of loose setting powder on the set of a medieval photoshoot. His girlfriend, Marie, (the protagonist) watches as he poses for intimate shots with another woman. And she’s peeved. And so am I. Because... well. What do you expect when you have a male model boyfriend? Largely, this is the plot of the film; Marie is mad that Paul’s favorite pastime is reading Camus and not having sex with her. Marie feels justified to cheat on him and he passively agrees. Beautiful shot of them walking on the beach at low tide white Ann D.
Marie’s exploits are questionable at first. She meets a blonde man and flirts with him while she has 30,000 strands of hair in-front of her eyes and they fornicate in his car. Then she realizes she must go teach kindergarteners, so she runs to the école. The dialectic of the sex ravaged elementary school teacher is trite and depressive French; but Breillat alienates these familiar tropes by adding a biting and bitter emotional distance between the characters, and the audience. The same affect is carried into the design of her and Paul’s apartment, a strange interpretation of a Bauhausian aesthetic, an early 20th-century attempt to fuse art and function, but to a late century audience, it is sterile and hackneyed and looks like a staged Ikea loft. Ubiquitously sexy and vapid, like a Viagra commercial.
But now Marie is back with the blonde man in a hotel and cannot stop babbling a thesis of sexuality but in a depressive way. Her affair with him is forgettable, (I don’t remember his name and he will remain demonstratively unnamed). They share one moment in his apartment, about 30 minutes into the film, where we feel Marie’s sexual frustration and understand her mind and body disjointedly through her monologue about wanting to be an obscene gaping hole. The hole gets bigger and bigger, she disappears, and the cock remains. Real intimacy is a surrender to her psyche. She knows this and parabolically speaks to its metaphysicality, but no man, especially this blonde venture capitalist, will help disappear into the hole. The film exists almost entirely in sterility and her monologue is the first reach towards fecundity.
Now, of course, her boss at the kindergarten. And of course he is a lot older than her, and he is self-admittedly unattractive, but his ugliness is what attracts beautiful women like Marie (a truism). I think they allude to some tender moments together, but still, Marie remains entirely ambivalent, and it’s never quite reached. When he ties her up, it is the first time emotion is not contrived but felt by Marie; she relinquishes her ambivalence, and for the first time there is a clear relationship between body and mind only reached through pain. Another, reach towards fecundity; these moments structure the film. Breillat is a master of a shocking, waking, scene. In Romance Marie’s horrifying event propels the story in an inordinate, but effective, way. We’re left with a picture of a glossed over life punctuated by unexpected, halting events. For Breillat, these moments may seem unrelated, and untimely at first, but they retroactively end up being the film’s impetus. These punctuations distinguish her films in a landscape of dreary humanist films from the turn of the century (Dardenne brothers). Marie’s event is followed by ambivalence, she returns to life with her asexual creationist boyfriend.
So, Romance is an ironic title, and in diminutive summation the film is an entirely depressive case study of a woman’s hollowness “in the bedroom” (sorry); not a universal statement on a female experience of sex and love, but a familiar, interstitial sentiment.