Posted 11:30 PM by *cnn
Romancing the Feminists: Or how Romance might be understood as postfeminist counter-cinema
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My definition of counter-cinema I take from Annette Kuhn; “Cinema which operates against, questions, and subverts the dominant cinema…” (Kuhn, p157)
My definition of postfeminist I take from the Oxford Concise Australian Dictionary; “of, or relating to the ideas, attitudes, etc., which ignore or reject feminist ideas of the 1960’s and subsequent decades.” (p1048)
I acknowledge and designate Toril Moi’s crucial definitions of feminist, female and feminine. The first is ‘a political position’, the second ‘a matter of biology’, and the third ‘a set of culturally defined characteristics’. (Barry, p122)
All unreferenced quotes are taken from the film.
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So, (alors!) where to start? At the beginning? No, impossible for a film that while structurally linear is thematically circular. “Romance is about female desire, not male fantasy,” says director Catherine Breillat. If only that could be the end of it, the answer complete and resolute. Instead this sentence, these eight words, ruptures much of what has been assumed not only in cinematic discourse, but also in patriarchal society at large.

As I will seek to demonstrate, Marie (Caroline Ducey) represents a post-feminist inversion of the Hero archetype, written into a plot line that mimics the classical narrative pilgrimage to make explicit its debilitating phallocentrism. Moreover, that Breillat’s oeuvre constitutes a counter-cinema as it challenges a fixed view of sexuality by writing a ‘Language of Desire’ that speaks of a female sexuality outside of the naturalized masculinist narrative and world-view. The enormity of this task (refuting Freud et al without resorting to reactive gynocentric feminism) is almost inconceivable. I’ll try to explain.

In ‘The Second Sex’, the landmark feminist text so crucial to first-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir admits the existence and essential nature of Self and Other, but questions the naturalizing of Woman as Other. “The Other is as primordial as consciousness itself...Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.” (de Beauvoir, p16-17) She continues by quite rightly questioning why “...reciprocity has not been recognized between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness?”(p18)

Cinema has perpetuated this idea of the female as the essential(ist) Other through the structuring of its ‘gaze(s)’. As feminist critic Laura Mulvey illustrates, the conventions of visual pleasure in narrative cinema have long subjected women’s desire to an image “as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it.” (Mulvey, p7) This account is a throwback to Freud’s conception of femininity that sees little girls as little men with three possible outcomes for a girl’s sexuality in relation to realisation of phallic lack and the effects of the castration complex. One is a ‘normal’ femininity. The other two are implied failures for Freud; sexual inhibition or neurosis, and masculinity complex. (McNeill & Feldman, p324-325) But for Breillat these ‘failures’ represent fissures in patriarchy just waiting to be investigated.

The pleasures conventionally read into cinema are visual. There are three interrelated ‘gazes’ working to imbue the ‘bearer of the look’ with a (very particular, and also socially constructed) masculinity. The first is the camera that records the pro-filmic event, traditionally held by a man and held up by man’s economy. The second look is intra-filmic, and is articulated by the male protagonist in relation to the female Other who invites his ‘look’; in-itself a manifestation of the assumed active/male passive/female dichotomy. The third ‘gaze’ is that of the audience, which is split into two pleasurable schema; the scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and the identification with an ego libido (an extension of the idolised mirror-image and his gaze). As both engaged viewer and distanced voyeur, the spectator position contains an inherent tension, a balancing act between Lacanian identification with the (self)image provided for him and the tendency to revel in the pleasures of scopophilia available only through voyeuristic distancing. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey expertly sums up the distancing effect of mainstream cinema thus,

“What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy” (Mulvey, p9)

What Mulvey in the 1970s and most feminist critics since have called for is an escape from such phallocentrism, in particular its coding of “the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order”(p8) that in effect disallows alternate notions of gender, desire and representation.

However some feminists, most notably Frenchwomen Hélène Cixous and Luge Irigaray, have gone beyond traditional feminist goals of equality and parity with man to seek out alternate routes to female pleasure. That is to say, they aim to not only displace the dominant phallogocentric logic, but to “split open the closure of the binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality.” (Moi, 1985, p.108)

Romance inverts each of cinema’s gazes; the camera is held by a woman realising her own script; the protagonist is a female who (for the most part) refuses objectification; the male gaze is rendered unworkable – he can neither identify with his ego-ideal, nor does he have anyone to objectify. Erstwhile the film’s form mirrors and parodies classical narrative structure, to draw attention to, but also to strike up a conversation, a dialogue, with patriarchy. To emphasize the continuation of a faux-classical narrative in Breillat’s work I draw your attention to a description given by Kathleen Murphy that keenly parallels Mulvey’s analysis of mainstream cinema. According to Murphy,

“[Breillat’s] passion plays unfold in emotional bell jars almost entirely insulated from the concerns of the mundane world. In the hermetic atmosphere of these movies, both lovers and those of us marking time in the dark lose sight of any horizon but that of the flesh.” (Murphy in Wilson, p147)

The defining difference lies in the end result. As Wilson sums up, by disrupting the assumption that men will look and women will be looked at Romance de-erotisizes desire by ‘keeping men out as beholders of the gaze’. (p147)

In Romance (Breillat, 1999) Paul’s inability to desire Marie (Caroline Ducey) tempts her out of her compartmentalized neuroses into the actualization of her sexual fantasies. Breillat’s masochist Marie attempts to desire, to fantasize, and to interpellate herself into an ideology independent of masculine influence. In aid of this aim Breillat gives to her the ‘gaze of the camera’. In its very first instance, Romance shows us Paul’s face in extreme close-up, having make-up powder applied to it. The camera pans out to reveal him in the costume of a matador. This image of man is then cut to a point of view shot behind Marie as she watches the spectacle. The scene continues, with Paul’s exaggerated and artificial masculinity being constructed beside a fraudulent, submissive femininity. As the photographer explains “a matador understands death. On three look at me, it’s all in the look”. Indeed.

In the first section of the film (conspicuous for its stark white mise-en-scene that denotes a sense of innocence) Marie is convinced that “a man honours a woman by fucking her”. She is in love with some part of Paul, and believes in a love/desire that is both intellectual and physical. Claiming he loves her, Paul cannot however validate her thoughts/feelings with reciprocal physical desire, and in desperation she seeks out his antithesis and alter ego, Paulo. Hers is a pilgrimage masterfully set up by Breillat to mimic heroic, masculine ideals.

By casting well-known porn star Rocco Siffredi as Paulo Breillat indulges in a direct discourse between established notions of male virility as expressed in the porn industry and Marie’s own faltering, but infinitely more stimulating steps towards a formation of sexual identity. Breillat appropriates the vocabulary of porn to serve the didactic ends of the film and her own politic.

Marie sees sex with a stranger as an exclamation of pure, childish desires and dons at coquettish mask to entice Paolo. To herself, in voiceover, she observes her bodily acquiescence as somehow removed from her intellectual control, “I watch myself yielding as if it is not me”. Later on in bed Paolo looks on, uncomprehending, as Marie muses on sexual difference, before asking her “so do you want it in the ass?” Where Pauls lacks in libido, Paulo lacks in intellect and so her journey continues. Her flight from Paul and experience with Rocco/Paulo elicits one further musing that remains unresolved by film’s end; the impossibility of union between her body and mind. As she declares, “I don’t care who fills my cunt but I can’t kiss someone I don’t love.”

The teacher/father figure of Robert attempts to bridge the aforementioned chasm separating mind and body in Marie’s psyche. He seduces her mind as well as her body. At Marie’s entrance into Robert’s home the viewer is inundated with the colour code of experience – dark, brooding reds that juxtapose the white purity that hitherto dominated the misé-en-scene.
His red shirt serves as flagship to his claim to have “had 10,000 women”. Amongst his various musings Robert differentiates women by their genitalia, incorporating female difference with their individual physicality. When she breaks down during her bondage, he is concerned and tender. He asks politely, “you like the gag?” and Marie replies, “I don’t like having to say things.” She has found in Paul a lover that does not need to have desire explained to him, who in fact forcibly silences her via the gag.

Alone again in her bleached cocoon Marie masturbates, while in voiceover she surrenders her body to the anonymous, lamenting Paul’s distaste or indifference, “he could have reconciled me with my body, but he didn’t want to.” Before Paul returns she leaves, looking in on him at a local hangout where he reads Bukowski, epitomising his intellectual aversion to physical love.

She encounters a vagrant who propositions her. She admits (again in voiceover), “that’s my dream, to know for some guy I’m just a pussy he wants to stuff”. Abandoning all hope of romantic love she sits on stairs with the man’s head between her splayed legs. However the contradiction between what Marie elucidates via voiceover and what she experiences onscreen is palpable.

She returns to Robert wearing a red dress, having moved closer to an identification with desire experienced simultaneously in the body and the psyche. After the bondage session Robert takes her out, they laugh and talk, eat caviar and drink vodka; she is content.

When she returns to Paul he is aroused and asks for gratification. Still wearing her red dress she saddles him, reversing gender roles. “Now you be me, you be the woman, I’ll be your guy, I’ll screw you.” He throws her to the floor, too late. Marie has fallen pregnant.

Throughout the film Marie has been framed and reflected in mirrors; firstly a fractured image in the apartment, later shown her abject body by Robert. By constantly referencing Lacan’s locus of identity Marie perpetually re-evaluates herself, erstwhile pontificating on her mind/body conundrum. This identity crisis is most literally played out in the brothel/hospital fantasy that immediately follows a hospital examination scene where Marie’s reflected examination of her vagina and face confirms to her that “You can’t love a face when a cunt tags along”. Marie’s fantasy shows her lower half, in a red dress “with those silly trappings that turn men on”, being serviced by lecherous, anonymous men while she and Paul, her supposed Love-object, share an intimate moment in a hospital strangely reminiscent of their clinical home space. Taking the metaphor to its logical outcome she concludes that “love between man and woman is impossible [because] if she gets you hard you want to screw her, which is to despise her.” The notion that sent her out at the beginning of the film has been revised. This is the circular thematic alluded to in my introduction.

Ultimately, the film charts a progress from innocence to experience resulting in death and rebirth. It is a tale redolent with essentialist angst, which is resolved in the destruction of Love and the conception of a baby boy. It is unfortunate that Breillat’s Marie must remain confined by Freudian oppression when it states, “the feminine situation is only established [...] if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby” (Freud in McNeill, 326)

Paul’s tragedy is that has not understood either desire or death, retaining an innocence illusion of masculinity the entire film. Conversely, Marie’s triumph is her arrival through the pilgrimage at a partial resolution, hindered as is it by a phallic order that can not be completely usurped. She remains Marie, not woman as spectacle or object, but (revolutionarily) woman as woman.

A key to Breillat’s films is their resistance to simple, limiting character comprehension. A crowbar to jimmy the window to get in is the attempt to undermine and discomfort assumptions apropos gender, desire, representation and the ‘gaze’ (it’s such a passive sounding word, don’t you think?). Anyhow, I’ll bookend my thoughts and analyses with a final word from Breillat, just in case it wasn’t clear. “There is no masculine psychology in my cinema. There is only the resentments and desires of women. A man should not attempt to recognize himself in my male characters. On the other hand, he can find [in the films] a better understanding of women. And knowledge of the other is the highest goal.”

FIN

Works Cited

Barry, P. ‘Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory’. Manchester UP, Manchester and New York, 1995.
Cowie, Elizabeth. ‘Representing the Women: Cinema and Psychoanalysis’. Macmillan, New York, 1997.
Dollimore, J. ‘Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture’. Routledge, New York, 1998.
Haskell, M. ‘From reverence to rape: the treatment of women in the movies’. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Canada, 1974.
Kaplan, E. Ann. ‘Women and Film: Both sides of the camera’. Methuen, New York, 1983.
Kay, K. and Peary, G. (eds) ‘Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology’. Dutton, New York, 1977.
Kuhn, A. ‘Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema’. Routledge and Kegan, Paul, 1982
Martin, A. ‘X Marks the Spot: Classifying Romance’ from Senses of Cinema website, www.sensesofcinema.com/00/4/romance.html accesses 11th March 2003.
McNay, L. ‘Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self’. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992.
McNeill, W. and Feldman, K. (eds.) ‘Continental Philosophy: An Anthology’. DePaul University, Blackwell Publishers, Chicago, 1998.
Moi, T. (ed.) ‘The Kristeva Reader’. Blackwell, London, 1986.
Moi, T. ‘Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory’. Methuen, London, 1985.
Mulvey, L. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol.16, no.3, Autumn 1995, pp.6-18.
Price, B. ‘Catherine Breillat’ from Senses of Cinema website. www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/breillat/html accessed 11th March 2003.
Whitfield, M. (ed.) ‘An Irigaray Reader’. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991.
Wilson, E. ‘Deforming Femininity: Catherine Breillat’s Romance’ from ‘France on Film’. pp. 145-157.

Filmography

Une vraie jeune fille (1975)
Tapage nocturne (1979)
36 Fillette (1988)
Sale comme un ange (1991)
A propos de Nice, las suite (1995: segment of Aux Nicois qui mal y pensant)
Parfait amour (1996)
Romance (1999)
A ma soeur (2001)
Breve traversee (2001: for television)
Sex is Comedy (2002)

Other relevant films

Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais, 1959)
Belle de jour (Bunuel, 1967)
Salo (Pasolini, 1975)
Ai no corrida (Oshima, 1976)
L’argent (Bresson, 1983)
The Piano (Campion, 1993)
Portrait of a Lady (Campion, 1996)
An angel at my table (Campion, 1990)
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
Baise-Moi (Despentes, 2000)
Irreversible (Noe, 2002)