"Why don't you just try acting, dear boy?"
You've probably heard the story connected to the above quote. As legend has it, Laurence Olivier said it to Dustin Hoffman after the actor had kept himself awake for 24 hours to look appropriately haggard for a scene in Marathon Man.
The question comes to mind when watching the French film Romance, a movie about a woman driven to explore the boundaries of her sexuality when she is rejected in bed by her boyfriend.
Instead of faking the film's sex scenes, they're real.
Marie (Caroline Ducey) is a schoolteacher. She's deeply in love with her live-in boyfriend Paul (Sagamore Stevenin) and deeply frustrated that he inexplicably refuses to make love to her, despite her best efforts.
Humiliated by the rejection, Marie seeks solace elsewhere, first with Paolo (played by Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi), a widower who, as he tells her, has gone without sex for six months. Despite his studly performance, Marie discards him and moves on to Robert (Francois Berleand), the principal of her school. An undistinguished, middle-aged man, he claims to have made love to thousands of women because "I listen to them." Attuned to Marie's vulnerability, Robert takes charge in some intense bondage sessions, which result first in an emotional-sexual climax for Marie.
"He tied me up without tying me down," Marie says of Robert with some fondness.
Still, she returns to Paul, until his apparently malicious game-playing forces an unexpected resolution to their relationship.
The explicit sex on view here certainly ups the ante of cinematic sexuality in general, especially since the movie is a solid, if radical, dramatic work and not a porn film. (The sex scenes are not necessarily titillating; the scenes between Marie and Paul are actually sad. And a fantasy sequence, in which men have sex in a futuristic brothel where only the lower halves of women are available through specially designed portholes, is downright ugly.)
It's also a vigorously intelligent work. The title is an ironic one; Marie's quest is not for romance but for physical gratification and true desire. Romance -- her connection to Paul -- only makes her miserable.
Still, real sex is its salient selling point. One wonders if, in future, actresses will have to say they agree to perform actual sex as long "as it's necessary to the story."
It isn't exactly necessary to this story but it can't be dismissed as a gimmick either. The truth is that Romance's sex scenes give the film a transgressive potency it wouldn't have if Breillat had employed the usual tricks designed to make sex look real. Since the film is otherwise highly stylized, it also lends a shocking veracity to the proceedings.
In particular, it makes the viewer keenly sensitive to Ducey's performance as Marie. Ducey is certainly exploring the dramatic potential of her own sexuality as much as her character explores her own. That creates a near-total identification of the actress with her character.
What actor or director doesn't wish for that degree of identification from the audience?
(This film is rated R)
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