Rent Romance (1999)

Average Sex Drama - Romance review by GI

This exploration of female sexuality and desire is a bit of a cold and uninteresting affair. Controversial for its graphic sex scenes they are the antipathy of the film's title but perhaps that's intentional. Marie (Caroline Ducey) is a young schoolteacher desperately in love with her boyfriend, Paul (Sagamore Stévenin) and they live together in their sterile apartment. Paul shuns intimacy and Marie is left feeling unwanted and yearning for sexual fulfilment which she explores in a series of encounters and fantasises. When at last Paul makes brief love to her she falls pregnant and this changes her resolve and the nature of her feelings for Paul. The need to push the boundary of what is cinematic depiction of sex and pornography clouds the theme of this film which would have been better in my view with a more restrained vision. What we have here is a quite unpleasant experience at times. As was proved with Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and its tired sequels there is little to be gained by trying to be deliberately controversial and this earlier film confirms it. Romance has some admirable ideas around the mystery of female desire but sadly it doesn't do it any justice.

Unacceptable - Romance review by HPB

I'm male, and have see many films from Cinema paradiso, but rarely write reviews. So why do one for "Romance"?

First, I should explain I have no problem with sexually expicit films generally, but the sexuality needs to be integral to the story, as for example in The English Patient and Birdsong.

This is a film called Romance that hasn't a shred of romance in it. Also there's nothing that I'd call a story. It concerns a woman who has some form of neurosis related to sex. But her mental condition isn't explored or explained in any way. The film concerns only one thing: how the men who enter her life dominate her, mostly sexually. It is an unpalatable portayal of mysogeny. None of them express what most people would call love. They just act out their own sexual eccentricities or fantasies, subjecting her to what seems intolerably humiliating. The film makes no attempt to identify any reason why she would tolerate them (she's clearly not forced to by her economic circumstances). The whole film seems to me to be a dream world for the sort of men who imagine it's acceptable to contol a woman in a way that is degrading for her if not for them.

I'm aware that censorship is a tricky issue, but I have serious doubts as to whether Cinema Paradiso should have it on its list. The question for CP is whether this film crosses the line into low grade pornography. To my mind the fact that the director is a woman makes the whole thing even more incomprehensible.