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Movie Interview
Tainted love
"Romance" director Catherine Breillat explains why women hold more power than men in the bedroom -- and talks about what happens when you bring a porn star onto the set of a "real" movie.
By Cynthia Joyce
[09/17/99]

Movie Review
"For Love of the Game"
If you're not as old as Kevin Costner's aging character at the beginning of this dreary baseball fable, you will be by the end.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[09/17/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
Four years ago, Leftfield were contenders in the Fatboy Slim-Chemical Brothers-Prodigy poptronica pantheon. Now they're back, but where's the hype?
By Michelle Goldberg
[09/17/99]

Movie Review
"Sugar Town"
John Taylor, Michael Des Barres and Martin Kemp play -- what else? -- faded '80s rock titans in this slight L.A. music-biz satire.
By Daniel Mangin
[09/17/99]

Movie Review
"Stop Making Sense"
Fifteen years later, the delightful Talking Heads concert pic is still the kind of miracle movie that comes about once in a lifetime.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[09/16/99]

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Romance Written and directed by Catherine Breillat Starring Caroline Ducey, Sagamore Stevenin, François Berleand and Rocco Siffredi   Also Today Tainted Love "Romance" director Catherine Breillat explains why women hold more power than men in the bedroom -- and talks about what happens when you bring a porn star onto the set of a "real" movie.

It's quite different from "Basic Instinct," "Eyes Wide Shut" or "Nine 1/2 Weeks." No stars, no melodrama, no rock soundtrack, no flashy cutting. Instead, "Romance" is austere, even clinical. And where such gross-out date movies as "There's Something About Mary" and "American Pie" suggest food fights at the Burger King, "Romance" is like an evening spent at a four-star restaurant, lingering over the paté and snails. "Romance" is about Marie (Caroline Ducey), a sexually frustrated woman who is looking to be fulfilled, wherever that desire may take her. She's a schoolteacher, mousey but chic, whose narcissistic, male-model boyfriend (Sagamore Stevenin) will barely touch her, and he won't let her touch him. For the needy Marie, he's like a Beckettian, cosmic joke. Depressed by his sensual neglect, she seeks physical fulfillment elsewhere. She finds an Italian stud (played by the international porn star Rocco Siffredi). Her boss at school (François Berleand) provides her some surprises, and other men have a go at her too. Woven throughout is Marie's voice, in an unusual kind of voice-over that's part diary, part stream-of-consciousness.

Breillat has a talent for targeting and hitting raw spots. Attracted to images and situations where the gruesome and the voluptuous are hard to disentangle, she's a specialist in unease. (When does she want us to laugh? It can be hard to tell, but the movie is occasionally very funny.) And in "Romance" she has created a landmark -- the first movie to give a convincing, feature-length account of sex from a woman's point of view.

Next page | She wants to show us what following the sex urge out is really like