Une liaison pornographique

In the search for intimacy and meaning in the dehumanizing urban environment, quite personable, intelligent and attractive people have to resort to newspaper or online ads to meet someone for romance or just companionship. In this film, however, a man and woman, both attractive and personable, seek depersonalised sex, not involvement. Or so they thought. Of course they become emotionally involved, and then the question becomes: will they continue?

This is a very nicely judged piece using a combination of interview sequences intercut with flashbacks. There are no distractions: we focus almost entirely on Nathalie and Sergi as they are interviewed separately about their affair. Their versions are not identical but there is only one flashback version of each encounter so there is not a lot of confusion. The curious thing is that although intimacy develops it follows the rules of the original impersonal pornographic encounter – no names, no talk about jobs and families and friends, no swapping of personal detail. 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). Why this holding back? Neither is currently attached to anyone else. The only explanation is that they really didn't want to get involved, or don't want to take the risk. Burned before? Who knows?

Nathalie Baye as the (slightly older) woman is poised, charming and not obviously hung up about sex. She seeks the zipless f*** of feminist legend. She does have trouble expressing her feelings – for her `I love you' are the hardest words in the language (all right, `Je t'aime'). 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. These two want intimacy, but they don't want to pay for it.

It's a well-made movie with plenty of Parisian bustle and lots of nice close-ups. It's all a bit sad, though. Have we been reduced to being consumers of personal relationships as well as sex?

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. Its actually a very restrained and beautiful love story. The format of the narrative is in the form of interviews of Him and Her after the affair has ended. There is a mysterious fantasy which brought them together. We never find out, despite the interviewers repeated prodding, what that fantasy was that led Her to advertise and Him to read and respond to the advertisement.

Inevitably, the physical aspects of that fantasy don't matter because the two eventually move on to more conventional forms of sexual activity. Neither knows anything about the other - children, marital status, profession or age. Both are good people and inevitably the affair has to develop into something more. Both are charming and beautiful in their own way. Eventually they begin to like and be infatuated with each other.

Obviously, adult themes are explored in this film, but there is no gratuitous nudity or smut. It has a surprisingly human touch even though the route followed in a conventional relationship is inverted here.

This is one French movie which I am pretty sure will not run through an American remake. It has all the elements that attract the intellectual European movie goer, and all what is rejected by the typical American viewer. 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. Not too much, but decent cinema if you like the style and genre. 8/10 on my personal scale.

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. Now Belgium director Frederic Fonteyne uses Paris to explore the lives of two people who define their relationship initially as nothing but physical gratification. 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. Highly recommended

It is not a perfect film, it has flaws, the most obvious being the pseudo psycho babble that could have been achieved with greater effect by having said less, but having said it better. It is a romance, it is romantic, it is sexy, and it is a slice of life, their lives, a small part that keeps the rest of their lives from being without charm. There is no need to contemplate the past or their futures but the moments that make the present happiness complete. The film proves that sex between mature adults can be beautiful, and not bound by the petty mores of witless societies that demand sex take place between pnuematically enhanced teenagers and souless males who would not understand the rhythms of sex without a street directory. 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. Any person that has never laughed, joked or cried during sex has not had much good sex. It is the casual and caring ease between the leads that demonstrates how sex can be imtimate and romantic and caring. The people who call this movie cold have looked at it from the director's eyes and have failed to capture the warmth of the two leads. The title, I think is in the French style of ironic (a word missing from the American dictionary) rather than the British sense of the word. While the British treat irony like a Shakespearean tragedy the French equate it more with the "little death" and regard it more as humour tainted with pathos. The French idea of tragedy is to leave the ending out of movies, but perhaps I am over using irony here. 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. And remember a movie without flaws is called, "Looney Tunes."