Wednesday 4 March 2009

La Passion Fantastique Une Liason Pornograohiique

This has been a day of extremes. Technically yesterday because although I commenced to write in good time to finish before midnight it is already a new day. Without pre planning and intending to what Big Brother House I discovered a French film of rare quality, significantly mistitled, holding my undivided attention for one hour twenty one minutes and 51 seconds, according the British Film Institute background notes.

And now the La Passion Fantastique. The film is called Une Liason Pornographique. A woman said to be in her early forties, I thought she was in her early thirties, Natathlie Baye, living on her own, sexually and relationships experienced, places an advertisement in a magazine, although she says the internet, for someone to act out a fantasy. They must not disclose names, addresses, phones, their everyday lives. The younger man, Sergi Lopez replies, an occasional reader of the magazine, is attracted to the advert and on impulse applies; they meet in a café bar and go to the hotel she has booked under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Earlier in the evening I had watched a young Frenchwoman take us on a tour of Paris, talking to her countrymen and women, including to the top of the Tower, and to various other places I have visited, the cemeteries and the tomb of Delacroix whose work I had studied as part of an Open University Degree Foundation Course.

She books the hotel with suitably red corridors but this not sexually voyeurism more about penetration of the reality of relationships. The film uses his ticket of an interviewer separately getting the couple to explain how they met, and how their physical and emotional relationship changed. The two try to keep their relationship sexual, suggesting they break it off when feelings develop, and then when she admits she is in love with him, and he only subsequently admits to himself that he is with her, they separate, and look back with great affection but also the understanding that had they progressed what had been exciting love making would have deteriorated into marital duty, disharmony, infidelity and a painful break-up where only the negatives are remembered.

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