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Simply Perfect

Great Film overall

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Notwithstanding their national origins, Belgium director Frédéric Fonteyne and Iranian scenarist Philippe Blasband have managed to create the quintessential French film: a film created for adults, with a theme to match, unusual maybe, but still taken out of "real" life, psychological, philosophical and challenging to the viewer. Fonteyne, in spite of his young age (born in 1968), speaks about love and feelings with great maturity. 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. Refined, with simple and subtle dialogue, he facilitated enormously the director's work. The two characters recount to a third party, with emotion and an air of propriety, the passion that they were unable either to control or to really confess to each other. We know that their experiment was a failure, because from the outset, their testimonies indicate that they are apart. 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. They will never know each other's names, their ages, professions. What they do after their trysts, we'll never know, either.The rhythm and content of the story is controlled by the two protagonists who refuse to disclose the nature of their fantasy, allowing the director to impose upon the viewer the role of voyeur by limiting the viewer's space to that of the fantasy never revealed. Actually, the word "pornographique" in the original title, "Une Affaire Pornographique," is a joke, as there is nothing pornographic about this film. Unfortunately, the American title denies Fonteyne's intention to fully condition, right from the start, the viewer's state of mind. Each time the camera in the red hotel hallway bumps against the closed door of room 118, it renews and heightens the voyeur-viewer's interest. 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. These two actors developed chemistry, which is the undeniable sign of mature artists. Their interaction is totally genuine in their exchanges, both verbal and unspoken. We can read on her face the birth of her love for "He": she wants to be happy next to this man, this one and none other. "He" drinks cognac and dips sugar cubes into it while undressing her with his eyes. We can tell that this man knows how to love women, mixing tenderness with desire. There are also their gestures: "Her" expressing herself with her hands, admitting her need to always talk, even during love-making. "He" is reserved, observant, always answering her many questions.The camera movements often consist of static shots on the two characters, in medium-close shots and close shots, contributing further to the viewer's probing into the two characters psyches.The original film score is some electronic music, unfortunately up to now unavailable on CD, by André Dziezuk, Marc Mergen, and Jeannot Sanavia. When the credits are rolling, one hears a downtempo/trip-hop, drum and bass music, which recalls Funki Porcini. It all fits perfectly with this unreal situation.The main theme of this film is boundaries and their perilous crossings. At the beginning of the film, "She" is within her own world, inside her own boundary. This is symbolically represented during the opening as a crowd of pedestrians seen from her point of view, out of focus. "She" has a sexual fantasy, but in order to satisfy it, she will have to cross the first boundary, one set by society. Her fantasy cannot be fulfilled with members of her own entourage, husband, or intimate friends. For this, "She" must look beyond the boundaries of socially accepted behavior, to a stranger. As both meet, they will be beyond society's boundaries in their fantasy world. This accomplished, they breach another boundary when feelings develop: the boundary fixed by love. A whole new world appears to them, a totally unexpected world. Finally, there are the boundaries of understanding and commitment, which they are unable to cross, for previously mentioned reasons. 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. He never moralizes or resolves these apparent contradictions, but instead brings them into harmony as never done before him: the modern world denying love and the Judeo-Christian world negating sexuality. 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. The fears that each feels: the fear of love, the fear of confessing the love one bears for the other to the other, the fear of appearing ridiculous, the fear that the feeling may not be reciprocated or has not progressed as rapidly in the other. The final scene at the café reveals and underscores a cruel, intense moment, the like of which I do not remember having ever witnessed in any film before. Very little is actually said, as most of the dialogue is in individual voice-overs. All the walls come crashing down on one woman and one man who, by all accounts, we judge were meant to be united for life. And this failure in a relationship which we were starting to take for granted is due to their incapacity to communicate.

In a few years they made two movies that had similar plots: "Intimacy" and this "A Liason Pornographique". A man and a woman meet once in a week for one simple reason: to have sex. No love, no feelings... just sex. "Intimacy" was more pessimistic and dark, and maybe "A Lisaon" is more frivolous and absurd, and it looks more like a romantic comedy. 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. It's been filmed in a modern style and it has a "trance" soundtrack that it will sound old fashioned in a few years.*My rate: 6/10

If you are a kind of person who's intrigued with the subtleties in romantic relationship, then you may like this story a lot. Their conversations, facial expressions, gestures...are very true to things that happen to all of us I think. A few discrepancies on how they each recalled the moment when they were still seeing each other. For instance, she said that they met once or twice a week...he said it was once every two weeks. And while watching them, despite some faults in memory, you just know that they felt or perhaps still feel strongly for each other. I can't help to think that these 2 people are quite fatalists, which we sometimes are too. Despite the 'unhappy' ending...it doesn't leave you feeling emotionally drained or sad. Only a very small dose of sadness but as you watch these 2 people, it leaves a kind of smile on your face. Honestly in my opinion, this is one of the rarest intelligent honest romantic stories ever made. A beautifully mature way of seeing love and its intricacies !!! 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. Their love story isn't made to feed your fairy tale ideal about romance. 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. And if it still doesn't turn out to be a happy ending, you know that the memory stays sweetly intact. I can't praise enough of this film. And if any of you enjoy this type of film, then you might also want to have a look at 'le gout des autres'.

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. We are not allowed into the hearts of the two lovers until far into the movie. As for nudity and the act of love, Last Tango had no shame of crossing the line and showing the powerful image of passion. An Affair of Love is more of an affair of teasing and thinking. The characters in this movie spend a great deal in deep though and at most times speechless. It is one of the better elements of the movie, still, it lacks passion and the lust that Tango in Paris gave its audience. 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.