French filmmakers have long excelled at making pictures about sex because they recognize the fundamental power struggle between men and women who lust for the ultimate. Romance, directed and written by Catherine Breillat, more than lives up to this reputation, far outdoing hard core pornography in integrating myriad sex acts with a story of Marie (played by Caroline Ducey), a female schoolteacher who wants to be loved. Throughout the film, her voice-overs tell of an angst because she cannot find romantic love despite sexual relations. When the film begins, she is asked to play the submissive role in a photographic shot with Paul (played by Sagamore Stévenin), a male model with whom she has been sleeping for the past three months. Despite his handsome demeanor, he does not make love with her even after she asks him to sleep in the nude with her and performs fellatio on him. Frustrated, she decides to explore other men. First, she meets Paolo (played by porn star Rocco Siffredi), a man at a bar who is lustfully attracted to her, but she is not turned on by his sensuality because he wants to sodomize her and kiss her breasts but clearly does not understand how women achieve orgasm. Robert (played by François Berleand), the much less handsome middle-aged principal of her school, boasting of 10,000 tricks in a lifetime, tries a different approach — bondage. Submission through bondage at first brings her to tears (and prompts a few couples to leave the cinema), because she realizes that she enjoys the physical danger but still lacks sensual fulfillment. She enjoys both Robert’s attention to her body, which he ties up, and his intellectual companionship, but he again disappoints her by focusing on himself. A fourth encounter with an aggressive stud, who offers to pay her a mere $20, yields cunnilingus followed by a sodomy that he doubtless learned in prison. Her best experience is a session of masturbation. Finally, she sits on her boyfriend, who ejaculates, and a baby is conceived. Medical students then take turns exploring her vagina to prove that she is pregnant. When he learns that it is a boy, he proposes marriage and for the first and last time makes love with her. While pregnant, he goes out with her to nightclubs and gets drunk, again showing that he is incapable of caring for her. She fantasizes a brothel in which nude men fuck women who present only their lower body through a tube as a paradigm of how men treat women. Finally, she is about to give birth, but her husband is too drunk to drive her to the hospital, so she telephones the principal Robert, who takes her to the hospital, but not before she turns on the gas stove in the apartment that later results in Paul’s death. After she gives birth, she says that at last she feels like a woman. The film is a study of a body that is used by men but a mind that seeks true romance and remains dissatisfied. The duality is symbolized by hair that bisects her face throughout much of the film. The film is dialectical-presenting unresolved conflicts between men and women, mind and body, sex and sensuality, aloneness and companionship, trust and betrayal, pain and pleasure, even life and death. Since the principal culprit is the narcissism of men, the logical resolution of the conflicts appears to be Lesbian relationships, where women can satisfy one another’s needs and simply import from sperm banks whenever they so desire. The feminist director of the film wants men to take note that women are no longer content to play a secondary role but should avoid going to extremes in search of the mythical man who knows how to love a woman. MH