Film - Jonathan Romney on the carnal knowledge of Romance

There's a much overused phrase in the French press - "celle par qui le scandale arrive", roughly meaning "she who guarantees good copy". The director and novelist Catherine Breillat has filled that role for 30 years. All her films address female sexuality fairly directly, and her new film Romance most directly of all. But while it confronts some cold sexual realities, it is as distant from realism as its literary near-relations The Story of O and The Story of the Eye or, in film, Oshima's Ai No Corrida.

Marie (Caroline Ducey) is a young teacher whose boyfriend Paul (Sagamore Stevenin) refuses to sleep with her. Feeling "dishonoured", she finds herself a priapic substitute, played by the Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, then gets together with the headteacher Robert (Francois Berleand), a middle-aged Don Juan who introduces her both to bondage and to his prolix theory of seduction.

A film that could only possibly be French, Romance is genuinely in the tradition of de Sade, combining the two registers of hard sex and hard philosophy. The physicality is start-lingly explicit: Ducey appears to perform real fellatio and appears to have penetrative sex with Siffredi; she definitely undergoes a gynaecological fingering by a rubber-gloved procession of medical students. There is also what must be the only come-shot seen in an uncut 18-certificate film - all the more alarming because Breillat abruptly cuts to an ooze of lubricant on Marie's belly during an ultrasound scan. But the most confrontational sight is an extreme close-up of childbirth. Breillat's transgressive project is to restore to the language of pornography its great unsaid - real anatomy, a woman's insides, and not just the fetishised outsides of those insides.

Just as disturbing is the way the film's verbal register combines with the action. In the tradition of de Sade's windbag libertines, Robert discourses as he fastidiously ties Marie up, announcing that "physical love is the trivial clashing with the divine", even explaining the Latin etymology of the word "seduce". Argument A, if you're trying to convince people that Romance is not a titillating film, must be this sequence, which trembles between nervous expectation and pedagogic earnestness - sexual apprenticeship as arcane book-learning.

Marie, too, largely in voice-over, holds forth about her feelings and desires. For British viewers the language, straight out of Georges Bataille, will cause more nervous titters than the sex. "I want to be a hole, a pit," Marie announces. "It's metaphysical. I disappear in proportion to the cock taking me." This will certainly seem mystifying in the current British climate, where the talk about sex (if not necessarily the practice) is flavoured with have-a-go hedonism. To a culture of born-again jolly shaggers, where Denise Van Outen represents the last word in female sensuality, Marie's philosophically informed drive to purification through abjection will seem downright foreign, not to say Catholic.

Romance may superficially resemble the classic Emmanuelle scenario: virginal young thing gets screwed every which way in a crash-course of carnal enlightenment. But the whole point is that Romance is directed and written by a woman, and one for whom female sexuality is the central issue. If Breillat shows us more of Ducey's body than anyone else's, it is because the film speaks, as it were, from within Marie's skin. Men get short shrift: Marie judges them largely by their bodies and their willingness to use them. Thin cocks, she says, are "ignoble", and she feels Paul's feminised delicacy as an affront: any man, the film suggests, who would rather spend the evening alone in a Japanese restaurant deserves what he gets.

The sex itself is used to confound expectations and categ-ories. Rocco Siffredi is there not just because he can guarantee a hard-on: his very presence in the credits is a challenge, a statement of cross-genre intent. It's perhaps a superficial shock that the sex is filmed so coldly and analytically (Marie's first session with Paolo is a seven-minute single take). But by having her cast perform as if for real, Breillat makes us reassess the distance between the things people actually do and feel during sex, and those things and feelings as they are conventionally performed on screen: the oohs, aahs and thrusts of hardcore, as against the more complex, contradictory signals given out here.

The physicality has implications that viewers of "legit" cinema don't normally have to worry about. In the bondage scenes, Ducey suggests an awkward, trembling agitation that we can't easily distinguish from the real discomfort she may be feeling. We're never quite able to separate her considerable acting skills from her willingness to expose herself, to push herself to limits that may really be physically and emotionally painful. The film thus makes us question not just the power relations between Marie and her part- ners but also the potentially fraught contract between the actress and the female director who speaks through her.

The extremity of the spectacle is tempered by a cool, distancing execution: the photography is by Yorgos Arvanitis, who works with Theo Angelopoulos, and you can't get much chillier or loftier than that. Everything becomes diagrammatic - Marie's white dress, Robert's red shirt, the white flat that Marie and Paul seem to have rented from Antonioni. Despite the aesthetic alienation, Romance is a genuine turn-on in parts, as female and male viewers have testified. But it can't easily be boiled down to a simple proposition or a simple effect, and that's what makes Romance a radical anomaly - a film that uses pornography not to produce pleasure but to start arguments.

"Romance" (18) plays at the Curzon Soho, ABC Panton St and Cine Lumiere

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