Catherine Breillat's Romance Reviewed
'Romance' focusses on the relationship between the film's protagonist, Marie, and her boyfriend, Paul. Six months into their relationship, Paul refuses to sleep with Marie anymore. Sheared off from intimacy, Marie is catapulted into a crisis of belief which causes her to lose faith in romanticism, monogamy and ultimately, herself.
Marie goes on to crave intimacy from many men, but it's a paradoxical situation - she isn't so much symbolically hopping the gender line and exchanging men in the way that men exchange women -but instead, wilfully exchanges herself.
As in many a David Lynch film, the notion of women in trouble pursuing sex as a salve is ever present in 'Romance'. I also felt that this film had some serious shades of 'Under the Skin' and 'Breaking the Waves' present in it, mixed in with the more graphic and psychologically charged elements of the various versions of 'The Story of O.'
All tolled, I wasn't quite sure what to make of 'Romance', but I found it's painfully confessional tone, which often teetered on the abject, brave and compelling cinema nevertheless.
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