Romance
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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I still think Romance is a progressive movie in America, even though it was (sensibly) released without an MPAA rating. But many of my colleagues disagree. Judging from their jaundiced disparagements, most of them are bent on shrugging this movie off as a piece of silliness; some of them even admit to preferring entertainments like Dogma, which have the trendy advantage of being both American and conceived by and for people with the mentality of an 11-year-old boy. It’s hard to see how word of mouth can compete with millions of dollars of hype being shoveled into viewers’ gullets on a daily basis, particularly when most reviewers seem to owe more allegiance to the shovelers than to the viewers. If millions of dollars had been spent hyping Romance, American reviewers would undoubtedly be taking it more seriously and according it more column inches.
The plot of Romance is ridiculously simple. Marie (Caroline Ducey), the narrator and heroine, is a grammar-school teacher in Paris who lives with a male model, Paul (Sagamore Stevenin), whom she loves and desires. (The apartment they share is clinically white, suggesting at times a lab.) Paul insists he loves her but no longer wants to have sex with her, at least for the time being.
In any event, sexual and philosophical conventions ultimately become film conventions. It’s possible, for instance, that the wordless opening sequence of the western Rio Bravo–the freedom to rely on images alone–is intrinsically American, as are the taciturn qualities of western types ranging from Gary Cooper to Clint Eastwood. And it’s equally possible that the offscreen narrators who play such a key role in French cinema, fiction films and documentaries alike, reflect a reliance on spoken language that’s quintessentially French–a conviction that images are never quite enough to explain or bear witness to the world, coupled with a taste for poetry that prefers the high-flown to the mundane and the exalted to the merely expository. Yet this conviction doesn’t typically yield a split between mind and body; rather it creates a kind of musical counterpoint, a dance performed by the two, and, at least to my taste, a sensuality of thought–an idea at odds with the American notion that thought is an alternative to feeling and action.
The last unrated and relatively serious sex movie to be released here was Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s 1995 Showgirls, and it wasn’t received at all seriously. The critics hooted it off the screen as a piece of camp, just as many of them, including me, had dismissed the previous Verhoeven-Eszterhas sex movie, Basic Instinct, as a hoot. I now believe that both pictures hold up much better than anything we said at the time would have suggested. Showgirls has to be one of the most vitriolic allegories about Hollywood and selling out ever made, and both films are undeniably sexy to boot. (Incidentally, two of the biggest fans of Showgirls, both unapologetic, are Jim Jarmusch and Jacques Rivette.)
