Paris doctor Catherine starts to think her husband, Bernard, is having an affair when she hears an unfamiliar woman's message on his voice mail. Hoping to learn more about his extramarital activities, Catherine heads to a strip club, where she hires call girl Nathalie to have a fling with Gerard. As the affair progresses, Nathalie gives Catherine regular status reports, and the relationship between the women evolves from business to personal.
23 Feb Nathalie… (2003)
Womanly Closeness
A film about two women, or rather the two hemispheres of a woman, made by a woman.
I find nothing to like in most French films. The burst of reflexivity in the 60s where film critics became the most important filmmakers has had a negative effect today. Virtually nothing can be made and pretend to be real unless it is deeply internal. This drives most stories to farce or worse: romantic tripe.
Catherine Breillat breaks out of this by using cinematic sex to punch through the internal/external skin by cinematic means. But sex — even her extreme versions — are pretty boring unless connected to emotions we know. Here is a French filmmaker in Anne Fontaine that gets it right, even though she is saddled with the French vocabulary. She even uses mainstream French actors.
The film is rather simple. We are presented with two sides of being a woman with a man. One is the domestic hearth, the mother and constant. The other is the sexual partner, the life. The major challenge in being a partner (so this film has it) is to balance these because they cannot be merged. It is a matter of integrating selves while maintaining both.
They try to seduce each other. They each find that their inner dream is to be the other, and many problems come from the fact that they are not and cannot be. They lie while supporting and comforting each other. Even after watching the ‘making of‘ featurette, I cannot know whether the actresses involved in making this were quite attuned to what it is. I am supposing not, because their performances aptly seem like performances. The sexy one literally plays a sex actress.
There is much too much space taken up early in the film establishing the narrative. I believe this filmmaker could have does as well with less, because all the tropes used are from French films we know. But the ending is worth it, the faces. It is all about the faces here, and we need the hour and a half of learning those faces to know what their expressions mean at the end. It is not a happy ending, though it uses a film standard for one.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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