The sub­ver­sive fan­ta­sy of Cather­ine Breillat’s Romance

Romance is a genre. It is that branch of erot­ic fic­tion typ­i­cal­ly fill­ing the gap­ing crack between love and sex, fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty, and ulti­mate­ly mar­ry­ing its lead cou­ple to a hap­py end­ing. So Cather­ine Breillat’s choice of this title for her sixth fea­ture comes with a cer­tain self-con­scious irony.

With Romance, not only does she invert the gen­der dynam­ics of her own pre­vi­ous fea­ture, 1996’s Per­fect Love – in which a man mur­ders his female lover – but she also stretch­es the very lim­its of her stat­ed genre, deliv­er­ing on its char­ac­ter­is­tic require­ments in unex­pect­ed and sub­ver­sive ways.

Romance opens with Paul (Sag­amore Stévenin) being made up for a pho­to­shoot in which he is to appear along­side Clara, all under the watch­ful eye of his girl­friend Marie (Car­o­line Ducey). Paul is lit­er­al­ly a mod­el of mas­culin­i­ty, but as the direc­tor of the shoot instructs Clara to look ​“a bit sub­mis­sive to the man”, it becomes clear that their heav­i­ly gen­dered roles for this shot are an act, with Clara know­ing full well how to play the part of sub­mis­sive, even to the point of par­o­dy, and with Paul, mere­ly dis­guised as a macho tore­ador, hav­ing to stand on tip­toe to look taller than Clara. Although the direc­tor of the shoot – unlike the direc­tor of Romance itself – is male, the watch­ing pres­ence of Marie ensures that the gaze in this scene is decid­ed­ly female.

Indeed, Marie is the organ­is­ing cen­tre of Romance, pro­vid­ing its nar­ra­tion, its point of view, even its fan­ta­sy sequences. She has been going out with Paul for some time, and is deeply in love with him. But after three months of pas­sion in their rela­tion­ship, he has effec­tive­ly called an end to their sex life and lost all inter­est in inti­mate con­tact with Marie, leav­ing her frus­trat­ed and con­fused. So when she is not engaged in recrim­i­na­to­ry con­ver­sa­tions with Paul in bed, or teach­ing French to young pupils, she is off on an erot­ic odyssey: a series of encoun­ters that test the bound­aries of her body, her desire, and her self.

“There’s a hole in your edu­ca­tion, yet you’re a teacher,” observes Robert (François Berléand), the head­mas­ter at Marie’s pri­ma­ry school who has just dis­cov­ered that she is in fact dyslex­ic and unable to spell the sub­ject she teach­es. Holes dom­i­nate Romance, whether the heroine’s vagi­na, licked, prod­ded and probed by var­i­ous char­ac­ters before in the end graph­i­cal­ly open­ing to push out a baby, or the cir­cu­lar motifs on the art­works adorn­ing Robert’s bach­e­lor pad, or more gen­er­al­ly Marie’s gap­ing sense of empti­ness, long­ing for some kind of ful­fil­ment. With Paul refus­ing to sat­is­fy her desire, she ini­tial­ly turns to bar pick­up Pao­lo, whose very name marks him as the coun­ter­part to the sim­i­lar­ly named Paul.

Where Marie loves asex­u­al Paul, Pao­lo is his sex­u­al dou­ble, pro­vid­ing (in a sin­gle-take hard­core scene) the phys­i­cal cou­pling that Paul fails to give, and thus com­plet­ing Marie’s image of the ​“love between men and women” that she asserts is ​“a devi­ous con­flict” and ​“impos­si­ble”. Her idea of the clash between love and sex is also fig­ured by a fan­ta­sy in which the top half of her body is with Paul (hold­ing her hand roman­ti­cal­ly) while the bot­tom half, pro­trud­ing from a wall, is used and abused by a parade of lust­ful men.

All these scenes come with a chilly arti­fice that brings every­thing to the lev­el of abstrac­tion. In her inti­mate scene with Pao­lo (played by real-life porn star Roc­co Siffre­di), Marie express­ly dis­cuss­es porn, prompt­ing view­ers to com­pare and con­trast what they are watch­ing here with the con­ven­tion­al adult enter­tain­ments in which Siffre­di stars. Robert open­ly describes how he has care­ful­ly fur­nished his home with all the trendy mod cons as a stage for his seduc­tions, and the BDSM rela­tion­ship he estab­lish­es with Marie is all about role play, with plen­ty of ropes but no strings – and a ten­der fond­ness that that Paul entire­ly lacks.

As preg­nant Marie’s uterus is exam­ined by a line of med­ical interns, her voiceover speaks again of porn and the sur­ro­gate func­tion of its sex­u­al pic­tures (“An image is just as com­pro­mis­ing since it stands for you”), in what is clear­ly a reflex­ive com­ment on the often explic­it imagery in Romance itself. The film’s chal­lenge to the view­er to sort art from porn mir­rors Marie’s own quest to sep­a­rate sex from love.

Romance con­cerns Marie’s feel­ings of alien­ation with­in a rela­tion­ship, and as such it is also an alien­at­ing film, vivid­ly pre­sent­ing inti­mate moments while some­how always keep­ing the view­er at a cool dis­tance. It is a dif­fi­cult film to love – per­haps as dif­fi­cult as Marie finds it to love Paul – although there is some­thing in its explo­ration of gen­der norms, deviant desires and the split between body and mind that remains com­pelling to the finish.

Unlike a typ­i­cal romance, it clos­es not with mar­riage but with mur­der, but by the end Marie has found her life’s love for (a dif­fer­ent) Paul, and a way to ful­fil her­self in a male other.

Romance is released on Blu-ray in a brand new scan and restora­tion by Sec­ond Sight Films on 15 July.