Flesh wounds

Benoît Jacquot shows class in School

by Peter Keough

THE SCHOOL OF FLESH. Directed by Benoît Jacquot. Written by Jacques Fieschi based on the novel by Yukio Mishima. With Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Martinez, Vincent Lindon, Marthe Keller, François Berléand, Danièle Dubroux, and Roxane Mesquida. A Stratosphere Entertainment release. At the Avon.

When a geezer like Clint Eastwood slaps one on a babe a third his age in True Crime, nobody blinks. What would happen if the genders were reversed nobody knows, because it never happens -- at least not in Hollywood movies. Only in what still passes as foreign film do remotely comparable situations arise, as in Benoît Jacquot's The School of Flesh (L'ecole de la chair); and at least in this movie's exploration of age, money, power, and class in sexual relationships, it's quite an education. But in comparison with other films in Jacquot's repertoire, which though cold are also moving, Flesh tends to be just cold.

Coldness, of course, is the forte of Isabelle Huppert, who is wistfully phlegmatic as Dominique, a flush but single and pushing-40 fashion executive cruising the clubs with her girlfriend (Danièle Dubroux -- a frayed Mioux-Mioux). Walking a bit on the wild side, they check out a place catering to alternative sexual orientations, and there Dominique's eyes lock with "Quentin" (Olivier Martinez's younger brother Vincent, and he looks it). Quizzing the transvestite bar manager, Chris (Vincent Lindon, who looks like a gay variation on Rod Stewart), she learns that Quentin is not his real name and that he's a hustler who does men and women, tends to be violent, and is interested only in money. He might be worth a try, Chris suggests, if only to play a little role reversal.

And so Dominque and Quentin do, repeatedly, and the back-and-forth of their games of power and submission, of ritual and intimacy, takes precedence over any passion. On their first date they agree that Dominique will choose where they eat and Quentin will determine the rest. After she scolds him for sniffing his sea bass at the hoity-toity bistro she takes him to, he drags her off to a video arcade and ignores her.

She storms off but returns to set up another liaison, where they end up in a hotel; Quentin stands naked before her, and she commands him not to move as her gaze takes him in. Before long, with a growing sense of inevitability but not of compulsion, she has paid off his debts, bought him new clothes, moved him into her apartment, and suffered impassively (a tear occasionally trickles down her cheek) for his absences, cruelties, deceit, and begrudged desire.

It sounds like a Douglas Sirk melodrama (the film is based on a purplish Yukio Mishima novel), but without the overinflated emotional pizzazz and kitsch. Or maybe a distaff Last Tango in Paris without the self-laceration, nihilist heat, and suffocating carnality. Instead, the style of this School is very much rote, the sex almost perfunctory. Huppert's face remains a mask beneath which melancholy and ardor are suggested but not revealed, and Martinez remains callow and unformed, dabbling in sadism and tenderness but never becoming more than a figment of either. When he acts impulsively, whether to kiss her or to pick a fight with a vendor in the bazaar when they travel to Morocco on holiday, it seems more obligatory than spontaneous.

What warmth Flesh offers comes from the subsidiary characters, those touched by the couple's folie-à-deux or left behind by it. Like Quentin's former sugar daddy, the rueful charity case lawyer Soukaz (François Berléand), whom Dominique presses for details about her love when his absences become intolerable. Soukaz's crushed soul tells more about the pathos of autumnal passion than any of Huppert's tics. But his suggestion that Dominique cut her losses goes unheeded, whereupon Quentin's nose for money takes him into the household of Dominique's client Madame Thorpe (a bracingly arch and crass Marthe Keller), her epicene husband, and her willful, spoiled, nubile daughter Marine (Roxane Mesquida).

With Flesh, Jacquot seems to be offering his third installment in the various stages of womanhood, following the young adult angst of A Single Girl and the married twentysomething blues of Seventh Heaven (as the ages increase, the period of time covered in each film seems to as well, beginning with the real-time scenario of the tour-de-force Girl). Like these two films, Flesh is acutely observed, almost clinical in its detachment as it confronts the ambiguities of women's desire and strength. In this case, though, the older woman gets a raw deal once again; the flesh may be willing, but the spirit is weak.

---

The elegant Isabelle

---