Une liaison pornographique

This little movie is simply sublime. I ran across it again when searching for more Sergi Lopez films. His range is simply amazing, from sensitive fantasy lover (as in this film) to the most dastardly twisted villain. I would be hard-pressed to think of any more talented male actor in European film today. I particularly liked him in "Dirty Pretty Things", due to its serious, thoughtful treatment of the pressures on immigrants. "A Friend Like Harry" was just great entertainment, humor of the darkest sort.

"Une Liason Pornografique" is still another type of film altogether. The French produce many interesting films on sex, some successful, some less so. 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. Also Chocolat by Claire Denys, another quiet but piercingly accurate character study.

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.

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). They meet again; and again. They start to get to know and like each other. They make normal love. Maybe they'll have a normal relationship. 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. This is the epitome of a concise, elegant, sensitively written and acted European film; not designed to move an artistic mountain, but a certain crowd-pleaser.

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

An ad in the paper with a specific sexual fantasy asked for. A meeting of 2 strangers, who remain so both to us and to each other. A subtle deepening of feelings for each other...this movie is so delicate it is like gossamer. Nuances of looks, smiles, movement. "Elle" winds up a little harder, "lui" a little softer. I was spellbound by it. Recommend it to those who like their movies to stay with them for a while. Great acting and direction.