ROMANCE

This smutty little French film caused quite a stir when it was released. There was an uproar that it blurred the line between arty foreign fare and outright pornography. I guess there was some scenes, including where the lead character Marie (Caroline Ducey), um, "services" her boyfriend Paul (Thomas Sagamore Stévenin) in a way that obviously wasn't faked, that shocked and, I assume, titillated audiences. I'm only guessing at this, because you sure ain't gonna see any of the controversial stuff when you rent it from Blockbuster!

I had heard that Blockbuster intentionally edits racy material (which I think is ironic, since they have a whole series of soft-porn flicks, with titles like Teacher's Pet II, right there next to Hope Floats) but the way Romance is "cleaned up" is outrageous. Just when something smutty is going to happen, the camera zooms in so that the scene is framed awkwardly (to hide the naughty bits), or better yet, in one case a scene abruptly fades to black with no transition or explanation! It felt like the priest from Cinema Paradiso had taken his scissors to the film to save our morals. The funny thing is, Romance is so bad and so boring that it is almost a relief that Blockbuster took it upon themselves to spare us the details.

Our heroine Marie is crazy in love with her beautiful male-model boyfriend Paul, but he hasn't been able to perform sexually for months, leaving her frustrated. Disgruntled, she goes out and about to have emotion-free sexual encounters to prove to Paul (and herself) that she can get it elsewhere. She just wants to be treated as a "hole" because she supposedly loves Paul more than anything. She has an anonymous encounter on a staircase (edited out), a fling with a guy she picks up at a bar (zoom in really close), and an affair with the school principal where she teaches. He, of course, is into S&M, and tells her, without emotion, "I have had over 10,000 women, though I am not handsome." About a minute later, he mentions that he has made love with 10,000 women. Oh, and a tad later, he says that though he is not a handsome man, he has had over 10,000 women. In the meantime, Marie, of course, has inexplicably gotten aroused. Then he ties her up.

Oh my goodness... I have never seen characters look so bored throughout an entire film! Marie and Paul are beautiful, wear only beige and white, and live in an apartment that is decorated only in stark white and chrome. For people so in love, I don't think I've ever seen two people look so uninterested in each other. No one has any personality, or is even remotely interesting. There is absolutely nothing sexy going on in this film, and it drags. Not only that, there is a climax (no pun intended) that is so bizarrely out of place that I openly scoffed at my TV.

I'll tell you the best thing about my experience renting Romance: When I angrily turned off the movie at the end, I just happened to catch the middle of a rerun of the TV show ER. I was just in time for a scene where nurse Carol Hathaway (Juliana Margulies) is giving a dying man some relief by letting him smoke marijuana in his hospital bed. When he is too weak to hold the joint and inhale, she wordlessly takes it from him. Off camera, she lights up, inhales, then leans in and blows the smoke between his lips. She pauses, letting him breathe in the smoke, then softly asks, "Again?" Wordlessly, with tears in his eyes, he nods. That scene alone was a thousand times more sensual than anything in Romance.