Explicit Depictions in Sexual Films
I don’t consider myself a feminist, mainly because it implies as sense of misandry that I don’t hold. This isn’t to say that it actually does, I’m well aware that it’s just a misapprehension that I grew up with. While I’m right behind gender equality I’m pretty sure that in the fight for this equality, both sides have forgotten their reasons for being. How I see it, as ‘surrealist’ Meret Oppenheim did, we are all feminine and masculine and each of us is a variation on that, agreeing with Judith Butler that feminism needs to allow people to form their own identity without the ideals of patriarchy or feminism. Then I guess that’s an ideal itself.
Film in my view has a tendency to distort any representation of a true because it is too wound up in extricating itself from any expression of gender whether it’s masculine or feminine. Up until Catherine Breillat’s Romance, I had not seen a film that works in setting up sexuality so that it shifts gender representation to a more equal footing.
Breillat has shifted the gender emphasis of her two protagonists. While you could read it as a straight swap, I think it works perfectly in leveling the ‘sexual’ playing field, presenting one of the most ‘truly feminist’ texts I’ve ever seen.
I can see how some would find the sex in Romance confronting if your not comfortable with experiencing images of real sex outside the confines of your own bedroom. But to someone whose seen her fair share of pornography, the sex between all the characters is nothing like the emotionless orgasm directed sex of porn. Marie (Caroline Ducey) walks into each encounter with her eyes open, even when she ends up gettting raped by the stranger in her stairwell.
When you take up a stranger’s offer for ten dollar head I’m sorry but you need to take responsibility for any consequences no matter what your gender, which she does in her refusing to feel ashamed. It intrigues me when a film like Romance is banned in Australia for this scene when you compare it to the nine minute rape scene of Alex (Monica Bellucci) in Irreversible, which was never banned because the Classification Review Board refused to hear the application because it was ‘out of time’ (!?!?).
Not that I believe that it should have been banned, for artistic reasons. Being one of the most harrowing scenes I’ve ever seen (another is the fire extinguisher scene earlier in the film), to me this depiction expressed is the closest one could imagine to actually falling victim to such an attack and as a filmmaker this ‘reality’ is one aesthetic I search for in film.
