Fallos won't find her at home. “When he pulled it out and I was able to touch it, I completely forgot that there was a guy attached to it,” these words from Sex, Lies and Video could well be the epigraph for Romance, the most controversial, according to critics, film of 1999, which became a kind of manifesto of female sexuality.
What could shock the establishment saturated with spectacles and provocations? Probably not only porn scenes, although the Frenchwoman Catherine Breia repeatedly provoked the audience excitement with sexual revelations inherent in the film category XXX. Four episodes, which caused her to have problems with censorship, in their boldness are able to compete with the shocking “Corrida of Love”.
And yet the main reason for the scandal was a fundamental change of perspective – the view of sex. Intimacy in “Romance” is shown from the point of view of a woman, and “the vague object of desire” is the man. As a result, the male prejudice against the freedom of expression of female sensuality, on behalf of which the story is being told, once again made itself felt.
Marie, a French teacher, begins to feel more and more indifferent to her boyfriend Paul. And she is doubly offended, because Marie knows that Paul is not impotent, and she is not at all stupid. Paul belongs to the category of those cold intellectuals who prefer a book to a woman, and their indifference to sex refute Freud’s theory about the all-consuming power of the sexual instinct.
Paul can spend the night next to a naked Marie without any muscle straining on his young body. “When a man makes love to a woman, he honors her. He dishonors me, sums up the inner voice of Marie, as well as the director himself.
Then Marie begins to look for satisfaction on the side. One of the first to respond to her anonymous appeal is the head of the school. But in fact, the aging Casanova turns out to be an ordinary sex sadist, able only in this way to excite his feelings for the opposite sex. Therefore, in the conditions of "salon torture" vaginal satisfaction still does not bring Marie the desired joy of love.
A more attractive option for her is a casual connection with the “ordinary stallion” met in a nightclub. For this, the most “dangerous” of all male roles in the film, Braia deliberately invited pornoid Rocco Siffredi, who with unflappable simplicity demonstrates his well-erected 28-centimeter dignity (according to “credible sources”, at that time already served more than 4,000 partners in more than a thousand porn films).
In this sense, the task of Carolyn Ducet, not so much an actress as a type, was an order of magnitude easier due to the more “primitive” female physiology. In the absence of a visually manifested libido, it was still more comfortable for her to exist in the porn scene than for a partner who must maintain his “status quo”, demonstrating his desire in the literal sense.
Bray’s clever intention was that the best way to cope with this is a porn actor, whose physiology is always in good shape, and psychological complexes have either long ago atrophied, or simply not able to manifest themselves. Siffredi is absolutely identified here with the phallus, which emphasizes the next confession of Maria, addressed not so much to him as to his member. “The pure desire to surrender to a stranger is like a childhood love of chocolate. I don’t want to be anything but a hole or a hole, and that’s my purity.
Due to the initial inability of the “vaginal cinema” to express itself visually, he has to resort to mirror reflection, the role of which is assigned exclusively to phallus. Having looked at sex not with a male, but with a female view, changing the point of view - the object and the subject, Breia expanded thematic as well as artistic frameworks in Romance, thereby bravely stepping over the border of primitive porn. And immediately there was an unusual angle, causing men, due to their assigned subsidiary role, a sense of dependence and even intolerance.
This is the main difference between Romance and any porn, where feelings and psychology are not involved at all, and the ball is ruled by physiology. There, any foreplay is short (" Preliminary caresses, that's what I love most), but the climax can last and last, as if emphasizing the strength and importance of the male, whose main task is to maintain an erection as long as possible.
And since "Romans" is removed from the position of the vagina, the usual roles change fundamentally: the man is given secondary importance. However, for all the seemingly primitiveness of the film, ostensibly addressed to purely female problems, it cannot be denied sincerity and openness, almost a virginal view of things about which it seemed difficult to say anything original.
"Romans" harmoniously fit into the determined at the end of the century, the trend of closing art cinema and porn. Instead of exquisitely searching for new sexual metaphors, Braia said it was more important to show things as they really are. Sex, adequate to itself, became a true revelation.
While there were premiere demonstrations of “Romance”, in 1999, invited to all major film festivals without exception, male critics (and especially Russian ones) relished the plot in their festival reviews. But once it came time to rate the film, they tended to be limited to the lowest scores.
Thus, militant male chauvinism fully recoiled at Romance, fighting mainly against the “primitive of female philosophy”, which is based here not so much on the speculative work of the brain as on instinctive nature. The chance to significantly approach her understanding was provided by Breia.
As Zhvanetsky said, “I will never be a woman.” I wonder how they feel? ?