Marie (Caroline Ducey) is a schoolteacher with steady boyfriend Paul who doesn't have sex with her. She keeps cheating on him with ever riskier partners. One older man likes to tie her up. She's a detached damaged person as she tries to come to terms with her relationships.

This is a pornographic art house indie from France. The sex is explicit. It's basically one nude scene after another. She is completely naked with a lot of male nudity as well. This would be shocking twenty or thirty years before. It does feel like another graphic sex art house movie. Ducey's cute looks clash with her sexually depraved encounters. The sex is visual shock and awe but the interior monologue is somewhat mumble jumble.

I really wanted to enjoy this film but it just didn't work out. I was hoping to see a realistic and perhaps even educational story about relationship-conflicts and adultery but, to my regret, I saw an incredibly pretentious and isolated film...All very stylish and dared... I won't deny that... but overall un-involving and illogical. It's about a young woman who goes out on a sexual odyssey because her lover does NOT want to have sex with her. The obvious decision would be: brake up with him if it really bothers that much!! But no, she doesn't and therefore we get to see a series of semi-pornographic sequences and a whole lot of philosophical mumbo jumbo! Writer/director Catherine Breillat really tests one's attention span here. In general, I love films that are slow and atmospherically built sequence by sequence but this Romance X was a bit exaggerated. Sex sequences are explicitly observed and then you receive a whole analysis of them...You either appreciate this style or dislike it. Also, it didn't bother me that much, but Romance X clearly is a "woman's film". The portrayal of several men in this film isn't exactly anything to be proud of. Either way, there are better things to waste your life with...

Someone hit the proverbial nail-on-the-head with Romance. A critic wrote that it's like a "bad update of an Antonioni film", and I think that's about as fair a description as one could ask for. It may also depend on how you feel already about Antonioni and his depiction of the precise lack of love or responsiveness of emotional contact in people - or, perhaps, if you've even actually seen an Antonioni movie. While Catherine Breillat probably (and, I would admit, rightfully) considers herself a thoughtful, passionate filmmaker interested in passionless people and in trying to pick apart the thoughts (or anti-thoughts) of a character like Marie, I have to ask after a while, in a film that doesn't have Antonioni-stature direction or compositions: what's the point? We have seen women like this in other movies, in loveless relationships or going out to spread or fulfill their empty wishes or such with others. Such as, yeah, Antonioni, but others too.

It's frustrating to watch, to say the least, but I wasn't ready at first to hold that against the movie. I wanted to see what it had to say, to see how Breillat would show people just having realistic sex, explicit in depiction (naturally, and believe you me its real sex) and talking like couples (or not-couples) do in such situations. I tried to stick with Marie's self-analyzing, her self-aggrandizing thoughts expressed in the first-person narration. In an odd way Caroline Ducey gives a good performance, or better than I remember at the time watching it, since she is good enough to not really need the narration to fill in the audience. Her face, her lack of expression, her inverted and bored and, perhaps, deep down f***ing scared self, show enough. The telling becomes overkill, even from a psychological stand-point.

Some may not agree with this, and that's fine. Some may watch Romance and just love that it shows real people having problems and having such problems during real sex. For the first half I could stick with the movie even as it had its pretensions because I wanted to see where it headed with Marie's infidelity (with the unnecessary lie about being married). It's when the other guy at the school Marie teaches at, and takes her in and turns things up on the sado-masochist meter that I started to waver on it... and, odder still, got bored. It didn't interest me seeing how perverted this guy could get, or how accepting Marie was of it or how it was shot or scored or edited. I admired that it attempted at depicting such a torrid sexual situation so seriously, but it ultimately just didn't do it for me - not on the kind of level the old-school hardcore-serious-erotic films did (i.e. Last Tango in Paris).

Romance is intelligent, and it does have something to say about women and loveless relationships. But was I moved by any of it or intellectually engaged after a certain point? No. It's a movie in a limbo where it wants to have something important to convey through art no matter what the cost, but the points aren't as interesting as its filmmaker thinks or terribly original. And if you just want to watch it for the sex, you're in for a not-too-good surprise. 5.5/10