Romance

Ashton2.0

hope whoever the baby i just watched get live-birthed is doing well

Olivia3.5

All the french know is sex, pubes, smoking cigs & being melancholic.

Sally Jane Black

Let it not be said that Breillat does not understand sexual submission. She crafts a scene about halfway through this film that manages to be both erotically charged and intensely disquieting as a man and a woman engage in a sadomasochistic exchange. The man is repugnant in his views, but in a way, that's somehow more appealing. He creates an atmosphere, a suspension of disbelief, such that her willingness to be with him sexually is moot. She is allowed to believe that his dominance is real, even though he asks directly, :"Do you want me to dominate you?" He gives her the agency to submit, and that is the appeal, that is the enticement. That's not what the film is about (not wholly, only marginally), but it's a pristine moment.Breillat is the most adept at using discomfort to emphasize her themes. Nothing in this film allows you to breathe easily; constantly, the sexual experiences are contextualized through either violence, control, objectification, cruelty, and exposure, all in order to convey ideas about the divide between lust and love, a divide the film... it does not reject it. It simply suggests that it needs to be reexamined, I think. Redefined. The caricature of a relationship with the boyfriend suggests not that love/romance is sexless, dull, unfulfilling, but that the misapprehension of creationist sex as love/romance is. Actual romance is never quite discovered in the film, perhaps because it's something that in traditional sexual relationships in a patriarchal world isn't yet properly defined. Instead, she opts for brutal honesty, a man whose views on sex are passionate, powerful, and patriarchal, violent and repulsive, but fitting with her own self image. (At least they fit together in their own way.)