Romance: Excessive Realism. Catherine Breillat and the Pornodrama
Romance (1999) Catherine Breillat
…the cinema can say everything, but not show everything. There are no sex situations – moral or immoral, shocking or banal, normal or pathological – whose expression is a priori prohibited on the screen, but only on condition that one resorts to the capacity for abstraction in the language of cinema, so that the image never takes on a documentary quality. – André Bazin
How does the unabashed display of real sex affect the universe of a narrative fiction film? How can the conflation or juxtaposition of cinematic realism and pornographic “excess” challenge the ways we think about representations of gender and sexuality on screen? How does the “documentary quality” of real sex, so feared by famed cinematic realist André Bazin, enhance, exploit, or undercut the safe space of a fictional, cinematic universe? In what ways can we use these questions to challenge the very notions of cinematic “realism” and pornographic “excess”?
The French film director Catherine Breillat’s body of work showcases a unique interest in the contradictory display of explicit sexuality and its visual and thematic presentation within narrative fiction frameworks. In her films, sexuality is not showcased out of prurient interest, but rather as a means of undercutting previously established notions of sexuality, recognizing the emotional and psychological depths of gender, and, finally, empowering bodies by witnessing, challenging, and celebrating their specificity. In this way, the films establish a critical dialogue between the reality of bodies and their representation on screen. In the following, I explore the incorporation of real sex in fiction film through a case study of Breillat’s 1999 film Romance. In particular, I argue that her films initiate interplay between the melodramatic and the pornographic, an explicit mode of address that can only be called the pornodrama.
Throughout this essay, I will draw upon the studies of film scholar Linda Williams. In her body of work, Williams has developed crucial ideas concerning “body genres” – melodrama, horror, and pornography – with a particular interest in race and sex on screen. In bringing together two of these genres through Williams’s work, I hope to show the ways these genres become bound together, thereby opening these cinematic modes of address beyond typical confines of genre. Developing largely from Williams’s notion of “Hard-core” art [1], I will argue that Breillat’s pornodramas stage a confrontation of contradictions. Her films are thematically concerned with filial relationships, the loss of innocence, and bottled up emotions – elements crucial to the melodramatic mode – while her formal and narrative strategies are situated within the pornographic mode of maximum visibility. This strategic incompatibility creates a dialectic between the moral dilemmas of the melodrama and the sexual issues of classical heterosexual film pornography, which seeks to “make visible the invisible”: female sexual pleasure. In other words, the pornodrama initiates a critical dialogue between realism and excess, or, rather, positions realism (of bodies, emotions, histories) as excess. This radical inversion grants a differential reading of screening sex and begins a process that deconstructs ideologically embedded representations of sexuality, gender, and power.
Progressive Paradoxes: Pornodramatic Contradictions in Romance
Romance begins its pornodramatic investigation by taking its narrative cue from the classic pornographic film Insatiable (Godfrey Daniels, 1980). Insatiable stars Marilyn Chambers as a young heiress named Sandra Chase who, when she is not wandering the streets of London with her aunt, invites guests to her mansion and roams the countryside looking for sexual mates to fulfill her insatiable sexual desire. No matter the variety of sexual partners and positions, Sandra only achieves a very temporary satisfaction calling out again and again immediately following quite long and tiring sexual numbers “I want more, more, more …”
Romance, in a similar fashion, involves a young woman, Marie, in a joyless relationship with a model, Paul, despite their declamations of love. In order to fulfill her sexual desire and, perhaps, reignite her relationship with Paul, Marie strays from him to solve her sexual and emotional problems. Paul has become overwhelmingly bored with Marie. Although he repeatedly says that he loves her, he decides to deny Marie sexual satisfaction for an indeterminate period of time. Hesitant to act out at first, Marie becomes desperate and eventually decides to find random partners to fulfill her sexual appetite while remaining emotionally attached to Paul.
While we would not want to go so far as to call it a pornographic film, Romance seeks to unabashedly “speak sex” through images and words which leads directly to a “Hard-core art” variation on the “frenzy of the visible,” pornography’s requirement of maximum visibility with regard to bodies and sex. Linda Williams states “one of the new ‘truths’ of integrated feature-length hard core: the pleasure can be negotiated through (limited) power, that sex is no longer a ‘microdrama of male dominance and female passivity’ but a drama of both power and pleasure.” ((2)) According to Williams, Romance, much to the disdain of American critics, suggests the coexistence of arousing sex with philosophy and contradictory emotions. Williams specifically cites the reaction of Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan who claims explicit sex turns other content into “bogus posturing.” However, this is not the only case of (white male) American critics opposing the uninvolved quality of sex within various films of Catherine Breillat. Five years after Romance in his review for Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell, Owen Gleiberman argued that Breillat lacked a grasp on pleasure. This second example only goes to show the continued frustration and disapproval, at least in the United States, with frank discussions about sex within a (dull) sexual melodrama, and a seeming preference for the (exciting) pornographic film that showcases pleasure.
By both literally speaking and showing explicit sex within its melodramatic structure – one of a suffering, sexual female having to take action against a passive, sexless male – Romance opens its discourse into the realm of the pornographic without discarding the ability of melodrama to confront social realities and power structures. While the narrative highlights the ideological failures of stringently feminist and misogynist positions, it does so directly referring to the mode of pornography, which often contradicts the positions taken by characters in the narrative. Breillat’s feminism inverts many tropes of power and pleasure, ever-present in both pornography and melodrama, and places them into a modern female gaze – an incredibly rare point of view in modern cinema. Marie’s moral legibility, produced by her confrontation with the psychological contradictions of random sexual experiences and emotionally binding relationships, reflects a feminized position of emotional, if not physical, power in each sexual encounter. Marie counters her most humiliating sexual encounters, which can be seen as moments of ideological failure, with an aura of detachment that allows her to remain more powerful than the men who dominate her, therein reestablishing the ideology that the film had just broken apart.
All of this begins when Marie ventures from the clinically white bedroom where she and Paul live into a more colorful world. Marie’s varied attempts to discover sexual pleasure are compared with the Freudian notion of displacement, where one thing (sex with random partners) is sought to fill a void (emotional connection with a lover). This displacement, so prevalent in classical melodrama, validates Romance as a melodrama while also utilizing a structural and causal connection to pornography. With this simple narratological outline, Romance is best understood by analyzing its “sexual numbers” and understanding their similarities and differences in regard to pornographic film. I use the phrase “sexual numbers” as a means of borrowing Hard Core’s use of Richard Dyer’s examination of musical numbers, as in Busby Berkeley films, in a pornographic context. While the narrative incorporates and problematizes sexual philosophy through an abundant use of dialogue and voice-over during the sexual numbers, these discussions enhance the concept of “maximum visibility” and “the frenzy of the visible” by creating another outlet from which Romance can “speak sex.”
Just A Kiss
Marie’s first encounter is with a man named Paolo, played by Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi who also stars in Anatomy of Hell. The use of an actual porn star continues to expand the boundaries of the sexual melodrama and, for Williams, reveals the beginning of a crossover between pornographic film and mainstream cinema. This crossover, however, juxtaposes more than the art film and the pornographic film, exemplifying what Williams has called the “Hard-core art” film; it complicates the relationship between the body genres of melodrama and pornography by highlighting a direct integration of the two. In so doing, the pornodrama brings on/scene a direct confrontation with the social and cultural (sexual) realities that pornography attempts to make visible. Again, these contradictions, which instantaneously accept and reject each genre, are precisely what make Breillat’s pornodramatic narratives so uniquely problematic.
Marie admits in her attraction to Paolo that she is seeking a kind of “childish desire.” This desire results in a sexual number where Paolo, at the request of Marie, uses a condom and “takes her from behind.” However, when Paolo asks for anal sex, Marie responds “No. Not yet.” She remains with her face against the mattress throughout the number, while Paolo keeps the number going from behind. As the number continues and Paolo’s grunts increase in intensity, the camera, displaying corporeal interest without prurience, surveys their bodies – panning from their faces to their crotches and back. The camera zooms into a close-up of Marie’s face until Paolo climaxes.
The film conveys a sort of pleasure for both Marie and Paolo in this number, but Marie refuses for the act to become too personal or emotional. Her refusal of anal and oral sex with Paolo plays in opposition to an earlier scene where Paul refuses oral sex from Marie. Her failures in stimulating Paul have no place in her new situation with Paolo. Marie connects an emotional intimacy to anal and oral sex, partly because of Paul’s rejection of her that she does not find in “normal” vaginal intercourse. Marie tells Paolo that “I don’t like the guys who screw me. I hate them.” This infers that her emotional partner, someone she undoubtedly “likes,” is not one of “the guys” she screws, but something more. Marie wishes for Paolo to function as one of the guys she screws and hates. Her multiple meetings with Paolo leading to the sexual number create a dilemma: a possibility of emotional investment. If Marie’s sexual game becomes emotional, then she could lose her power in the situation and, ultimately, leave Paul – something she refuses to do.
Marie realizes her dilemma as she leaves Paolo’s apartment following their sexual number: “But when I kissed Paolo I felt it. When I kissed him, I stopped thinking about Paul. So I decided to stop seeing him.” While this propels Romance’s melodramatic questions, it simultaneously initiates discussion regarding the impersonality of the sexual encounters compared to a kiss. Sex does not initiate memory for Marie in the way a kiss does. This posits Marie’s sexual encounters are ambivalent and that real emotional connection is accessed outside of sex and discovered in seemingly more innocent moments. The sexual play remains just that; the kiss is where emotions and play become less artificial and ignite a deeper passion that Marie refuses to accept for anyone other than Paul.
Williams argues that the kiss in classical Hollywood cinema highlights a starting point for a display of oral pleasures that becomes more perverse as it normally progresses from the kiss to oral sex. She goes on to say that a kiss is the starting point for any discussion of screening sex. This placement, however, fails to account for the intimacy of oral pleasures and the possibility that “even just a kiss” could be as emotionally engaging as the sex act. Though the screening of culturally privatized bodily organs has not been as present as a kiss, there seems to be little engagement with the idea that “just a kiss” can have the emotional and psychological depth of the sex act.
Marie’s emotional connection with Paolo instills fear of the detrimental effect it will have on her relationship with Paul. Notably, Paolo’s name reflects that he is a mirror of Paul, albeit Italian instead of French. Paolo is a constant reminder of Paul and Marie’s emotional and sexual lack. Moreover, Paolo quickly becomes Marie’s pleasurable surrogate for her actual would-be lover, Paul. Indebted to Paul, Paolo becomes a reminder for Marie of unfulfilled desire rather than simply a figure of sexual fulfillment. These dynamics help explain the significance of the physical body within the pornodrama and also highlight the importance of sexual negotiation with a partner. In Breillat’s work, philosophies of emotion and connection correspond directly with an understanding of the realism and excesses of bodily functions. In pornography, the body becomes the locus for arousal, while in the melodrama sexual pathos leads directly to physical action. Breillat consciously intertwines each of these elements and establishes a dialectic between the rhetorical messages of bodies and speech. In the pornodrama, bodies speak. This dialectical motion is of the utmost importance in Breillat’s work and essential in analyzing Marie’s subsequent sexual encounters.
Bound and Gagged
While Paul continues his sexual abstention at home, Marie brings sexual frustration into her workplace: an elementary school. She begins a sadomasochistic relationship with the older principal of her school. In two sexual numbers, a large amount of time is spent showing how Marie is tied up and restrained. At first, Marie is gagged and tied to a chair. Quickly, she requests to be untied and breaks down in tears. The principal, Robert, displays sympathy for her and says, “I can tie you up less severely, or we can make love normally.” Again, the options are left to Marie and sadomasochism is seen as just another option in a variety of choices they have in their sexual play. Romance makes sadomasochism normal and proposes it as another option in a multitude of sexual options, which Marie can choose to solve her sexual problem. Therefore, it allows for a change in attitude and behavior, although it requires a difficult action to get to that point. This further indicates the melodramatic impulse where Marie must go through a certain amount of suffering in order to achieve sexual satisfaction.
Romance takes this position of the pornographic film to reflect changing attitudes and ideals about the handling of sexual power and domination. Marie always retains control in each sexual situation, even more humiliating ones. In the midst of her relationship with Robert, Marie masturbates in her apartment as she cries and laments that she hates her body. She composes herself and wanders the streets looking for a partner. Along the way, she notices Paul in a restaurant having dinner alone. Refusing to return home before him, an act indicative of her powered position, she bumps into a stranger who offers “twenty francs, just to eat you.” Marie accepts and voice-over explains her need for “raw desire.” The man quickly becomes violent and stands up saying “Turn over. Show me your rosebud. You’ve got no choice, bitch.” Marie fights for a brief moment before turning to face him saying “You like me?” A skirmish ensues, but Marie quickly gives in. He remains incredibly aggressive, calls her a slut, and forces anal sex. As he leaves, Marie weeps, but screams distraughtly “I’m not ashamed, asshole.”
This scene works as part of Romance’s discourse built around a melodramatic sympathy for Marie’s situation and is made stronger by the pornographic structure of power that becomes inverted in each encounter. Marie’s sexuality, power, pleasure, and insatiable desire become the driving forces of the narrative. Even in this humiliating scene, Marie seems to restore her power. As the male scampers away, she refuses to be ashamed of the experience. She rejects her powerless position and fights the loss of sexual dignity. This brief sexual number may be the most problematic in the narrative of Romance, as it seems to strip Marie of her power. Yet her refusal to accept the position of the subordinate, defeated female flips the situation around and leads to her sexual problems with Paul being solved. While “raw desire” is not the option Marie finds most pleasurable, it provides another choice in sexual power that was brought on/scene to Marie through her exploration of differential sexuality.
Looking A Vagina Square In The Eye
When Marie returns home from this violent encounter, she finds Paul eager to finally initiate sexual intercourse. This is an unsatisfying experience for her, made even worse when it results in her being impregnated. The film’s conclusion does not feature a typical sexual number, but it nonetheless exemplifies the function of one. It asks, as film scholar Stuart Klawans asserted, “whether we’re prepared, so to speak, to look a vagina square in the eye.” ((3)) During a gynecological exam following her impregnation, Marie describes herself as “a slab of meat” on a table, while four doctors surround her and prod her genitalia. This clinical hospital, glimmering with white light and white walls, has a strikingly similar aesthetic to that of Marie and Paul’s bedroom. Furthering the pornographic positioning, the camera places Marie’s vagina in the middle of the frame for maximum visibility. As each doctor (male and female) takes a turn in this would-be orgy scene, Marie’s voice-over verifies her discomfort. Additionally, a close-up on her face at this unbearable moment epitomizes her displeasure and weakness. Here, she has become an object of study, her body defamiliarized to herself as it becomes an instrument of outside fascination.
The pregnancy forces Marie into a weakened position from which, for once, she cannot claim victory. This subverts the norms of pornography, shown earlier in the film through numerous close-ups of Marie during pleasurable, if purposefully detached, sexual numbers. This purposefully shifts film historian’s Ara Osterweil’s conclusion that “Pornography radically redefines the relation of the face to interiority; it interpellates the face not as proof of the soul, but as proof of the pleasures of the body.” ((4)) At this moment in the pornodrama, the face and the vagina are radically redefined in relation to the objectified female. Rather than being a proof of the soul and pleasure of the body, they reiterate the inherent displeasure that comes with Marie’s powerless position when her body turns into an object of study. Pornography becomes generalized, inverting excess into realism when the body loses its livelihood and exists as mere biology. The female body is no longer present for arousal, but is rather a repressed, elusive, unknowable thing.
What makes this scene so striking is that, at the height of pornographic visibility, one close-up underwrites the pornographic and places the film back into the realm of the emotional melodrama. At this point, Romance turns itself against pornography by recontextualizing the face as proof of the ultimate displeasure; at the same time, the melodramatic mode is reintroduced by showcasing the constructs of the filial narrative. Marie attempts to reconnect with Paul, but the relationship continually fails. He sleeps while she prepares to leave for the hospital to have their baby delivered. Marie, in the ultimate action representative of her tragic pathos turned into joyous action, ignites the burners on the stove as she exits the apartment.
The closing scene of Romance, once again, revives the pornographic structure. Breillat brings on/scene what is often considered the most essential part of the heterosexual female identity: the birth of a child. Marie says “they say a woman isn’t a woman until she’s a mother; it’s true.” Marie’s child is delivered in extreme close-up at the exact moment that her apartment explodes and Paul is killed. The reproduction of new life transforms into the sight of death. Despite the child’s father being killed, Marie leaves the hospital with Robert, the chosen father of her child and answer to her sexual desires.
The birth of the child makes Romance cease to be pornography because it refutes sexual pleasure as a social and personal solution. Despite this failing, just as Romance returns to the filial melodrama, it uses the tropes of pornography to bring on/scene female sexual identity. Further complicating the situation, feminist film historian Chris Straayer has argued “the use of maternity as an essential metaphor for womanhood sustains the historical elision of female sexual desires and pleasure.” ((5)) This again illustrates Breillat’s desire to utilize contradictions in both emotions and theory.
Such moral and conceptual contradictions heighten Romance’s melodramatic genre characteristics just as its pornographic rhetoric is made most evident. Collapsing notions of realism and excess, Bazin’s fears may be realized as Romance’s pornodramatic structure allows it to speak sex paradoxically, elusively, and differentially. With an excessive realism and realist excess, Breillat’s pornodramas allow bodies to speak through their new flesh.
Notes
[1] See: Linda Williams, Screening Sex, Duke University Press, 2008. I draw heavily on her conceptions of cinematic sexuality throughout this essay. See also: Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible, University of California Press, 1989.
[2] Williams 1999, 174.
[3] Stuart Klawans, “Adults Only,” The Nation, Sep 16, 1999. Web.
[4] Ara Osterweil. “Andy Warhol’s Blow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-Garde,” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams, Duke University Press, 2004, 439.
[5] Chris Straayer. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Reorientations in Film and Video, Columbia University Press, 1996, 247.
On print in Wuxia 1-2, 2014