Title aside, Une Liaison Pornographique is actually a love story. No hot sex scenes. Lukewarm emotional scenes only.

Just so you know.

A man (Sergi Lopez) and a woman (Nathalie Baye) meet through a personal ad to act out a specific sexual fantasy. They do not exchange names. They do not offer any details about their personal lives. Their mutual "fantasy," whatever it may be, is acted out behind closed doors. No specifics are even hinted at, this being between two consenting adults and all that.

The first meeting goes well. They agree to meet again in a week. And then again. Eventually, they fall in love.

What's interesting about Une Liaison Pornographique, but not very, is the telling of the tale. The man and the woman each tells his or her side of the story directly into the camera; then there are sequences when the camera speaks for them. How each remembers the details of the affair, what longing each may have had, what attachments were formed -- all these things are told from both the male and female viewpoint. It's an odd mix of documentary style and feature film style.

The main problem with the film -- for this viewer -- is that most of the notions expressed about physical desire and emotion seem so obvious. As well, the script by Philippe Blasband creates a female character who is an annoying stereotype, all self-reference and romantic interpretation. When, for example, an old man gets sick in the hotel where the lovers meet, the woman interprets the incident as being related to her love affair. "It was a sign," she notes grandly. Indeed, but mostly a sign that an elderly man in a bad marriage was going to die.

Just as the camera rarely admits the outside world into this story, so do the characters rarely seem conscious of the existence of anything outside themselves. Too precious.

And, alas, too boring. If you cannot care about the characters, any film fails to engage.

Une Liaison Pornographique is in French with English subtitles.

(This film is rated R)

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