Film - Jonathan Romney gets a dose of healthy, and deeply unhealthy, hard sex
L'Ennui sounds like a dream ticket for movie miserabilists - ideal programming for a feel-bad all-nighter, along with films such as Melancholia, Angst and Inquietude. Alberto Moravia's novel La Noia, on which Cedric Kahn's film is based, is translated in the current English edition as Boredom, but the feeling Kahn evokes is more like a transcendental spiritual enervation, with something of Sartre's existential nausea, a hint of Baudelaire's Le Spleen and maybe a dash of that mediaeval theologians' favourite, accidie. Actually, the film deals with an even headier mixture, because you also have to add a healthy (rather, deeply unhealthy) dose of hard sex.
L'Ennui is a French film about a man's obsessive sexual involvement with a much younger woman: nothing new there, you'd think. But in this story, the obsession is pushed that bit further, affecting the film's very language: we come to feel immersed in the texture of madness. Films about obsessive affairs that force out the rest of life often have just such a claustrophobically crazy aura, and it's not unusual for mainstream art films to flirt perilously with pornography's defining monomania: for example, Last Tango in Paris and Ai No Corrida; and more recently, the incongruously jolly Korean S&M film, Lies, and Catherine Breillat's Romance.
In L'Ennui, Charles Berling plays Martin, a philosopher who declares that he is through with sex and will in future seek sublimation in writing. He protests too much: next thing, he's prowling round Pigalle, where he meets Meyers, an elderly painter (the late American film-maker Robert Kramer, whose resemblance to Marlon Brando surely is no accidental echo of Last Tango). When Meyers dies, Martin inherits the painter's obsession with his model and mistress, an altogether ordinary but highly sexed and exceptionally compliant teenager called Cecilia (Sophie Guillemin). At first, Martin wants to know more about her relationship with Meyers, but it seems he can only understand it by getting inside it, by himself becoming obsessed. He reaches the point where his entire life is sacrificed to the relationship, though "relationship" is too conventional a word for this mixture of mechanical screwing and obsessive interrogation.
Their relationship is just as mysterious to us as it is to Martin. We think we know what's in it for him - intense sex, insatiable inquiry, the existential self-negation that invariably accompanies such cinematic amour fou. But it is harder to understand what Cecilia gets out of it: she says in her blank, matter-of-fact way that she loves him, but it is never clear what that means. Why does she submit to his endless quizzing and neurotic ordering around? Is she entirely there, or just routinely turning up, as if to a day job that doesn't impinge on her being?
L'Ennui explores a sexual trope familiar in French cinema: the macho-intellectual fantasy of sexual slumming. But Kahn and his co-writer, Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa (herself a director specialising in female sexuality), open up new perspectives on the cliche. Martin projects his desires and anxieties onto Cecilia, but her blank surface refuses to send back any meaningful response. This is where the film's structure is so daring - the couple communicate almost entirely in the form of interrogation and reply. He asks her a question, she answers, quietly, co-operatively, to the point - but never in a way that leaves him in peace. Everything forces him further into paranoia, cranking up the interrogation by another oppressive notch.
The questioning is interspersed with sexual workouts, so fleshy and arduous that they are more like calisthenics, together with moments of social embarrassment that explode the usual poised complacency of all those Parisian intello party scenes. There's a quite Bunuelian visit to Sophie's parents, creating the unnerving juxtaposition of her youthful sexuality with age and death. And there's a fevered running gag about Martin's telephone addiction, which reaches its apogee when he angrily smashes his phone to pieces, then calmly goes to his cupboard and takes out a new one.
The casting is brilliant. Charles Berling's Martin is compellingly creepy with his enraged, bone-dry narcissism and oddly lizard-like appearance. The great revelation is Sophie Guillemin, whose physicality as Cecilia busts every stereotype - her downright chunky body is perfectly real by everyday standards, but a startling anomaly after French cinema's endless succession of Guerlain-ad waifs. To cast one of those would have made Martin's obsession banal: instead, he is not even sure why he is fixated on her. Cecilia's body is an object to him, but one into which he can't read the conventional sexual signs. Guillemin's acting, with its taunting, subliminal hint of irony, uses her Matisse moon-face and blank delivery to make Cecilia a question to which the answer is entirely her business and no one else's.
The film, in fact, is finally about the impossibility of knowing anything, about the way that jealousy is addictive precisely because it never allows you to get nearer any answers. That's what makes L'Ennui so compellingly strange and original - it's a philosophical inquiry into the problem of knowledge, a sex film more about a state of mind than a state of bodies.
L'Ennui (18) is on general release from 14 April
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