Une liaison pornographique

Plot synopsis:
Frédéric Fonteynes "Une Liaison Pornographique" (US title, "An Affair of Love") is an unusual love story, insofar as it unfolds in reverse. Every Thursday, at the same hotel, at the same café, He and She (they are totally anonymous) meet in order to satisfy their sexual phantasm. Their anonymity is not without recalling Alain Renais characters in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" (1958) or "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961). But here the ordeal is not that of the memory nor of the bomb, but that of a trite story of two people who do not know how to love and communicate.She (Nathalie Baye), a mid-fortyish, confident, unattached woman, felt the need to realize a sexual phantasm. To this end, she placed a classified ad in a pornographic journal (or was it on the internet?). He (Sergi Lopez), a handsome man, ten years her junior, answered it. Now sitting at two different locations, they recall their adventure to an unseen man (a journalist, a pollster, whomever), answering his questions, as the camera goes back and forth between the two characters. Their descriptions of the circumstances which lead to their first meeting are remarkable by their lack of consistency. But, if their recollections of specific facts have grown vague, the strong emotions engendered by their love for each other and their tragic break-up are still very much alive. The rest of the story is presented in a series of flashbacks, interspersed with the characters comments to the interviewer.At their nervous first meeting in a café, She is reserved at first and He is rather shy, although at first glance, one might have an impression of him as a macho-type. They face each other at a table, somewhat self-conscious. Their conversation is sparse and He seems somewhat taken aback by her boldness when She informs him that she has already reserved a room in a nearby hotel.They go to the hotel, register, and go upstairs to their room. The door closes on them, leaving the camera outside, and the next scene shows them in the street confirming their next date for the following Thursday.
And so they meet weekly, for months. However, as time progresses, the sexual fantasy is slowly moving to the background as their feelings for each other develop. It is obvious that from the first moment they met, they were attracted to each other. Now, there seems to be the possibility that they have really fallen in love. This possibility is born out when, back in the café, She declares her love to He. They go to the hotel, but his time, they will make love normally, and for the first time, the viewer is allowed to enter in their room.Eventually, the time comes when the two cannot go further without a real, traditional commitment. Such commitment requires them to change direction, not only into a situation of emotional sharing, but into the realization that their couple is not exactly an island. The latter is brought about by an incident at the hotel, when an older stranger (Paul Pavel) mistakenly enters their room, and is later found dead of an apparent heart attack in the hallway. This incident gets them involved with the reality of the outside world that they experience as a couple for the first time. The brief intrusion of the stranger into their life and the subsequent meeting with his wife (Sylvie Van den Elsen) shows what could be awaiting He and She, should they persist in the logical evolution of their relationship.He and She meet for a final time at the café, each having individually decided to continue toward a final commitment. But unsure of and trying to double-guess their partners desire yet unable to communicate, they instead part forever.Returning to the present moment and to their interview with the unseen man, they both still refuse to divulge the character of the womans phantasm. She brushes off the interviewer by simply stating "It was an act of love. It could have been anything."

Tags: pornographic, realism, flashback

Review:
This is of the best I can recall from my own 20-year love affair with European art films.
Another recent French film that I can whole-heartedly recommend is Coline Serreau's Chaos, which took several years to cross the ocean to the U.S., but was originally released in 2001.
It is a love story with two characters, almost everything happens in just two places (a restaurant and a hotel room), drama is based on characters development, and eroticism is all but explicit.
It is a love story, but it departs the usual romantic comedy pattern and escapes the cheap happy end that spoils that many American movies.
Acting is superb, and actually the best part in the film, though it is sometimes too static, more Russian or East European style than French.
At the end, you are left with a simple story of un-realized love, the message being that the imposed limits of communication according to which the heros decided to play decide their ultimate faith, and the faith of their relationship.
Nathalie Baye was 51 when she made this film and has an attractive body, but she has a great way of making herself erotically desirable.
If you have 80 minutes to spare to think about the relationships in your own life, then this little movie just might help you explore your own heart a little more.
In this film, however, a man and woman, both attractive and personable, seek depersonalised sex, not involvement.
They meet once or twice a week in the same coffee bar and hotel room for six months or more, yet still know virtually nothing about each other (apart from their sexual fantasies).
Sergi Lopez as her homme de jour is a bit more emotionally expressive but still holds himself back.I suppose one could see the film as suggesting that the alienation of modern life can be traced to an unwillingness to become emotionally attached, that life is faster and cleaner if relationships are disposable without much pain.
In this day and age when people resort more to meeting thru personal ads and online - this is a movie that shows what we are all looking for......that one passionate relationship where two people truly connect on a very deep level.
An unnamed man and woman find each other through the personal ads of a sex magazine, to engage in a pornographic act that forms their mutual fantasy (the camera, old-Hollywood style, lingers in the hotel corridor during the act itself).
But the film continually reminds us of the proximity of the crowd, within which they might blur back into being strangers; of the beguilingly complex topography of relationships (you feel the emotional landscape as electrically as you feel her finger trace the contours of his face and back in one scene); of the possibility for devastatingly wrong moves even amid the most enveloping intimacy; of the inevitability that even our profoundest memories will erode; of the relationship between the experience and the interpretation of an event.
From its title, A Pornographic Affair might seem like the kind of film that might appeal to a 13-yr old boy just entering puberty.
Une liaison pornographique can trace its textual roots to another tri-national production made over 25 years ago called "Last Tango In Paris" in which an Italian director (Bernardo Bertolucci) used Paris as a backdrop to explore the possibilities of sex as identity in a highly dysfunctional relationship.
Their knowledge of each other's lives is minimal at best recalling Marlon Brando's demand of his partner in Last Tango that he wanted to know nothing of his female cohort thereby defining the relationship through a mutual ignorance.
But where that film ceaselessly rotated around Brando's sulleness, une liason pornographique succeeds as a mature and thoughtful meditation on the nature of relationships and how healthy sex can actually serve as a positive introduction into understanding emotional complexities and thereby underscoring the irony of the title of the film.
A finely tuned performance from French acting veteran Nathalie Baye, who at the age of 52, communicates an unforgettable sexual and sensual presence throughout the film complimented by intelligent and accesible dialogue make une liaison pornographique a truly good film and while its characters do not escape sadness, the emotions and ideas that are communicated honour the film's creators and their audience.
The beauty of this film shocked me, and I will always remember it.The entire situation pulled me in right away, and "she," "he," and the interviewer unraveled what turned out to be a love story.
I love how the interviewer, no matter how he tried to siphon the details of the sex from the man and the woman, just could not ever get his "dirt," so to speak.
Man meets woman : from sex to a perfect relationship.
One way to distinguish excellent from good or medium films is the fact that no matter how many times you see it you don't get bored of it.
The acting is brilliant: both Natalie Baye and Sergi Lopez give top performances, they have touched the heart of their characters.
In French the title is "An Affair of Love," not "pornographique" ...
In any case, this is a highly erotic film - because what is supposed to be unattached becomes quietly intense, and the reality, capturing the failures, flaws, and beauties of two plain, ordinary people who want passion and eroticism in their lives, yet cannot seem to catch it, or are not brave enough to risk their pride for it, is so touching.
Two people meet through an ad, arrange a liaison at a hotel to act out their fantasies, fall in love, and split.
There was nothing pornographic about this film; it was a beautiful love story.Nathalie Baye (Catch Me If You Can, Le Petit lieutenant) is an adult.
It is what makes this such a beautiful love story.I said I wanted to see Gilles' Wife to see more from this director and writer.
When a younger man answers the advertisement, they start up a sexual relationship (pornographic as she calls it, because that's what pornography is, just sex and nothing else) based on the fulfillment of her fantasy.
However, the initially sexual relationship becomes more complicated when they become sentimentally involved and start liking each other."Une liaison pornographique" is an honest and pure movie about love, sex and human relations, which lacks all the usual paraphernalia, ornament and romanticism.
From this scene on the film shows how difficult it is to maintain a relationship based on something so natural as sex between two adult, responsible and free people.
The film also shows how feelings may interfere and complicate human relationships, and how easy it is to misunderstand each other's feelings.Although the title may suggest otherwise, the film advances mainly through the conversations of the two starring characters previously to the sexual encounters that take place in a little hotel's room.
Sex is shown only when it is strictly necessary and in a delicate way (the spectators never get to know what her fantasy is, since the camera lingers through the hotel's corridors during the act), so people looking for explicit sex will be deceived.
This film takes itself very seriously and seems to think it is making a profound statement about something: men and women, relationships, love, sex--who knows what?--when in fact it dares and says nothing.I won't rehash the plot, but I will make a few points about its illogicality and lack of believability.
This is a good movie that could have been a great film with a better script.
"Une liaison pornographique" is a entertaining movie, but its beginning promises much more of what it finally delivers.I liked the performances of Nathalie Baye and Sergi López, and the topic of the movie but I think with a better script this would have been a great movie.The plot of the movie is about two people Nathalie Baye and Sergi López who meet frequently only to have sex without knowing anything else about each other like the name, profession, phone number, address etc.
During the movie we can see to each one of them talking to the camera about what they thought about this kind of relationship that they had..
In short we are never allowed to become involved with them in any way other than as voyeurs watching them analyze their feelings as they try to figure out if they are falling in love while leaving us with a feeling of detachment....outsiders looking in with the real story just beyond our reach as the film serves up one bit of story at a time all the way to its anticlimactic conclusion.
Frerick Fonteyne's 'Une Liason Pornagrahique' is a brief, but very French film, with a stylish female protagonist, and lots of talking about sex.
Great French movie about feelings and the difficulty of facing love.
The two actors, Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez, offer a human and touching interpretation of how feelings and alchemy develop in a relation, while at the same time showing how the perception we have of the other's feelings may distort the root of the relation itself.
Une Liaison Pornographique (A Pornographic Affair - please disregard the awful title 'An Affair of Love', which shows that the distributors either didn't watch the movie or didn't pay attention) is one of the most earnest, most naturalistic portrayals I've seen on film of a sexual relationship, and in that respect it's much more successful than English-speaking films (American and otherwise) that tried for something similar - films like Better Than Sex and Strictly Sexual, which attempted to shed Hollywood's romantic vision of sex, but ended up adhering to it anyway.
As the female lead in Une Liaison Pornographique says in one of the film's key lines, sex in movies is either heaven or hell, but in real life it's usually somewhere in-between.
The film is too short, not taking enough time to fully explore the relationship between the two leads, and yet it also feels excruciatingly long - large chunks of it are just not interesting enough.
If you are a kind of person who's intrigued with the subtleties in romantic relationship, then you may like this story a lot.
There's nothing original about this film, it's an ordinary love story of the 20th/21st century...so ordinary that it becomes nothing else but ORIGINAL.
Yet, it leaves you feel hopeful, it's an eye-opener sort of film...in which you learn that the best way to communicate when it comes to express your love...is to say it and don't risk to read on the other person's face or words, simply say what you feel.
While Last Tango in Paris was full of passion and lust, An Affair of Love is full of talk and thinking.
While Brando brought us into the bedroom for most of the movie, the audience in Affair of Love is left outside, in the hallway for most of the story.
The characters in this movie spend a great deal in deep though and at most times speechless.
At times, the movie is honest and deep into the situation that the characters are living, but it lacks the true grit of love that is mentioned in the movie's title..
Sometimes it seems that only the Europeans can get away with making a film as surface simple as "An Affair of Love" (AKA "Une Liaison Pornographique").
It tells the story of a woman and a man who meet for sex through a personal ad.
Unlike that film "An Affair of Love" only briefly conveys any on screen sex, and tiptoes around it in dialogue.
It's a character-driven, reasonably romantic film that feels made by deft filmmakers, but a forced second act dramatic twist ruins its impact..
The film is about a man and a woman who begin a relationship that is supposed to be simple.
Their relationship is so human at times though, it almost makes you want to think about decisions you may have made in life..
Namely, the sex is left mostly upto the viewer to imagine, but in the meantime, you see how the pair go from complete strangers at the beginning to developing a level of comfort with each other that progresses from lust to friendship to love.
The growing relationship between a man and a woman who met because of an advertisement (she searched for a man for sex only) is photographed in an easy, slow style which gives the actors much room for their brilliant acting.
This is the kind of thought-provoking, beautifully crafted film the French recently seem to have forgotten how to make.
Couple in this movie are in their 40s, yet their views on sex, relationships and life are more suited for a couple of 12 year olds, if that.
A man and a woman meet once in a week for one simple reason: to have sex.
Also the narration is pretty artificial: a fake interview with the main characters and a series of flashbacks.It's a pretty nice reflection on how much we complicate things such as love or sex.
The two characters portray the life of probably many of us in today's day and age, a disposable society where there seldomly is time for feelings to be discussed, even though we'd like to.
They don't even know each other's name; they just carry on, consuming their rapport behind the red of their hotel room walls, a deep, intense red, as deep and strong as the attraction for one another.No matter how prone each of them is at the end of the movie to declare their feelings, they will eventually fail in the attempt to chip the red off the wall and carry some of it along in their lives.
Being rather inexperienced to the foreign film genre, I wasn't expecting much...sometimes, watching an actor speak in a foreign tongue and trying to read subtitles simultaneously causes me to miss the action, and facial expressions...something that would capture my attention...reel me in...not so with this flick.The acting, the script, even the flow of the French language was superb!
love is as simple as an affair, yet it's so deep that it was painful to watch.
The story of a romance between two people - no names, no lives, only each other and the time they had together.It's beautiful.
At the end of the movie, anyone who's seen it, knows it ends with an unhappy ending, but I can't help but think it will end differently.
It's like two of my best friends breaking up and ruining everyone's lives...Of course, everything makes it all the more beautiful.I also love the way that the movie is brought out.
He mystifies the viewer with his approach to modern sexuality.Blasband's scenario presents his love story "upside-down." Starting from a fantasy, which will eventually end up in love, he surrounds the slow but inevitable drift of the protagonists' feelings for each other.
But the way each talks about "the other" makes us want to discover this "other." We would like to get involved in their story, know their pasts, their presents, and understand why they speak about the "other" with so much nostalgia.
Actually, the word "pornographique" in the original title, "Une Affaire Pornographique," is a joke, as there is nothing pornographic about this film.
This contrasts sharply with the only time the camera penetrates in the lovers' blue room to witness a banal love scene, which in fact leaves the viewer even more bewildered as to the nature of the fantasy.The success of this film rests entirely on the flawless acting of Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez.
At the very end of the film, we see again a crowd of pedestrians out of focus: she is back within the confines of her own boundary.Fonteyne shows us a modern society where sex is no longer taboo, but love is becoming such.
In the process, Fonteyne destroys the actuation of the fantasy and reinstates it in the secret, in the intimacy, both personal and private of the viewer.Finally, the film tackles another great theme in the relationship between man and woman: the incommunicability.
This movie proves that a wonderful film will overcome a stupid title that can only attract the wrong kind of audience.
From the very first frame it's clear that the two protagonists who met only in the interests of pure unadulterated (sorry about that) sex are going to fall in love and it's just a question of watching it happen and seeing if it ends in tears.
They are either too old, too ugly, too short, too fat (short AND fat will usually do it every time) in fact the LAST thing they are is as gorgeous and desirable as Nathalie Baye and as handsome as Sergi Lopez - this is a wonderful film and I'm delighted to add my voice to all those others who have praised it on this board.
It is easy not to notice good acting but in this film Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez gave a master-class in how to do it well.Admittedly the plot is slightly artificial.
In end relationships work by sharing, and so one where the lives were so entirely disconnected was doomed.It clearly does not appeal to some American tastes (the six of the lowest seven rating so far are from the US) but for those who like a subtle and thought-provoking film, this is recommended.The French title is unnecessarily provocative and does the film a disservice..
After some months, she suggests to love, we invited to watch the nearly nine film minutes.
As she sees him for the last time, one is reminded of the strong ending of THE WAY WE WERE where the substance of is more satisfying because of the lovers in that film's having an interrupted past.
So, I am left with a feeling of Sergio still like a young boy who does not know if he is loved by anyone including Baye and at "home'.