French cinema has a long history of “auteur” films about sex and love, most of them made by men. But in the last few months, women directors have startled France’s moviegoers with a flurry of bluntly sexual films. “Post Coitum Animal Triste,” directed by and starring Brigitte Rouan, is about a 40-year-old working mother who has a liaison with a twentysomething boy toy. In Sandrine Veysset’s “Victor… While It’s Too Late,” a young boy’s parents force him to watch their twisted sex games; he runs away and is taken in by a prostitute. And in Jeanne Labrune’s “If I Love You, Beware,” an independent woman, played by Nathalie Baye, has a violent relationship with a man, then kills him.
Breillat has made a career of provoking the French with her erotic view of the world. In 1968, at the age of 17, she wrote her first novel, “The Easy Man,” and it was swiftly banned for its raw language. In 1976, she made her first movie, “A True Young Woman,” about a young woman obsessed with her budding sexuality, and it, too, was banned in France for several years. “Perfect Love,” her fifth film, made in 1996, about an older woman’s destructive affair with a younger man, is best known for the scene in which a hairbrush is used as a sexual device. But none of them compares with “Romance,” which French critics declare the most sexually audacious movie since “Last Tango in Paris.” (Ironically, Breillat had a small part in that picture, too.) Breillat says “Romance” was inspired by Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 film, “In the Realm of the Senses,” the erotic tale of an insatiable Japanese woman. After seeing that movie, Breillat went home and wrote the synopsis for “Romance.” But, she says, “20 years ago, it was impossible to do it… There was a real political and moral censorship.”
The most difficult part of making “Romance” was casting the lead. Breillat met more than 200 actresses before finding Caroline Ducey, 22, an actress who had appeared in two forgettable French movies. “I thought that older actresses would make the S<&>M scenes look perverse,” Breillat says. “I wanted the innocent face of a younger girl, because they burn like hot pieces of charcoal.” Then came the stud. Breillat first saw Siffredi on a French talk show a few years ago and decided that she would use him in one of her movies. “Unlike most porn stars, Rocco has a charisma when he is making love, as if he is looking for something true,” says Breillat.
Although there have been no cries of protest, the film and its provocative posters of a naked girl touching herself intimately have stirred up debates and controversy in Paris. The real test may be in the United States next fall, when Trimark Pictures plans to release “Romance,” uncut and most likely unrated. “There will be those who will label it as art and those who will label it as pornography and those who will question what is art and what is porn,” Breillat says. But for Breillat, the definition is quite simple: “Nothing is prohibited in art.”
