Romance

Marie, a primary school teacher, loves her male model boyfriend Paul, but he has lost interest in having sex with her. Out of frustration and in wanting to explore her sexuality, she embarks on an odyssey of sexual encounters. She has a fling with a guy in a bar (played by porn star Rocco Siffredi), gets into an S&M relationship with her boss, and a stranger licks her on the stairs to her apartment. In an almost philosophical voice-over, Marie ponders the boundaries between desire and disgust, pain and pleasure, intimacy and fucking until you’re nothing more than a hole.

An admirer of Ōshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Catherine Breillat had always wanted to make a film in which she could unboundedly show physical love. Romance is that film. The sex and erections are real and shown explicitly, occasionally in close-up, by the French auteur. Back in 1999, when this X-rated film was first released, it caused considerable controversy. Even today, Breillat’s film remains a staggeringly bold exploration of intimacy and sex from a female perspective.