Romance

Catherine Breillat's breakthrough film is big-budget, shot in a studio, and has a spiffy-looking cast, beginning with the dark-and-dewy-eyed leggy lead (Caroline Ducey). The big influence here is Buñuel, specifically Belle de jour and Catherine Deneuve's degraded, perhaps-dream fantasies.

The story is typical Breillat. The young woman, Marie, can't take it that her model boyfriend, Paul (Sagamore Stevenin), would rather watch TV than screw. She goes on a spree of one-night stands, with a tanned sex machine (Rocco Siffredi, an Italian porn star), an older-guy expert in sado-masochism (François Berléand), and an orally talented stranger. After many adventures, she gets pregnant and has a baby.

I've seen Romance twice, but though several sophisticated women critics have championed the movie, this guy critic can't decide how he feels about it, or about Breillat's cinema in general. I do applaud the filmmaker for skillfully merging hardcore scenes (blow jobs, erections, open vaginas) and artsy ones -- down with puritanism! -- and for the persistence of her singular, obsessive vision. What is she proving? In her inimitably uncompromised, artsy way, I guess, that men are from Mars, women are from Venus. At the Avon and Jane Pickens.
-- Gerald Peary