Society is perpetually exercising less and less censorship of explicit materials. The social freedoms that we enjoy such as the right to divorce, obtain an abortion and engage in homosexual activities free of legal concern have all played a role in destabilizing the influence of morals on what we choose to censor and what we choose is acceptable. Naturally some things such as racism and harmful influences on young children need to be protected by legislation, and in the past this has been attempted with varying degrees of success. But has parliament protected us from a pornographic anarchy amongst which all morals and decency would crumble? Or has it gone too far and limited the freedom of speech that is our right.

In January 2000, Catherine Breillat’s film Romance was released in Australia. Romance is an art-house film from France that was only ever going to service the small but loyal audience in this country. The film is revolutionary in that it featured scenes of explicit sex, including physical penetration and various other forms of physical contact formally considered inappropriate in mainstream cinematic circles, causing a crisis for the Autralian Censorship Board. “I take sexuality as a subject, not an object,” said Breillat in defense of her work. Stanley Kubrick had expressed his preoccupation with the concept; standard Hollywood narratives partnered with hardcore sexual material. The idea was fictionalized in P. T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights when Jack Horner (approaching the idea as a pornographer) expressed his wish to produce a film that would satisfy the pornographic crowd while entertaining them with an engrossing narrative plot. My point is this, Romance is not the result of perverted cinematic conception. Some of the most respected and acclaimed filmmakers of the last quarter-century have fantasized about achieving this very goal and the moment of realization has arrived.

After a week of isolated screenings in Melbourne’s underground cinema’s Romance was banned and the issue of obscenity in cinema was ignited. This issue has been a hot potatoe in this country for the last six years with films such as Adrian Lyne’s Lolita and Todd Solondz’s Happiness screening in Melbourne, both depicting sexual encounters between elderly males and young children (both male and female), although neither did so with anything like the graphic force and intensity of Romance, both choosing the more sensible route of misdirection and suggestion. As I write this article the video release of Romance is available from almost every commercial video store in Melbourne, including Blockbuster Video who implement a strict “No-Adult-Video” policy.

Romance tells the story of a woman’s struggle to find a satisfactory sexual identity, and it is important to examine its content in detail. Marie (Caroline Ducey) is disappointed with the bedroom performance of her boyfriend Paul (Sagamore Stevinen) who is a model and claims to be impotent. One night, after attempting to perform oral sex on him (presented for us in explicit detail) she confronts him asserting he has achieved erection and can commence intercourse, prompting his reply, ‘It doesn’t interest me’. Frustrated she leaves the house and meets Paolo in a bar (Rocco Siffredi, regular pornographic actor) who attempts to seduce her, but has to be satisfied with the promise of future sexual gratification. At home Paul promises that he will sleep with Marie only when she is ovulating so that they may have a child, meanwhile Marie sleeps with Paolo protected by a condom and we are given our first scene of physical penetration. The camera pans Marie’s body and while it doesn’t linger too long on the penetration we are assured it is genuine as is Marie’s discomfort. While not flattering for our protagonist, the scene is physical and erotic while lacking the dominating, degrading tone of what we might expect of ordinary pornographic material.

In the workplace Marie teaches grammar to young children, and eventually her dyslexia is revealed and she is reprimanded by the principle. Rather than punishing her, the principle decides he will seduce and dominate her, and tells her has sexually conquered more than 10,000 women in his life (assumedly representative of historical sexual domination). Upon her consent he begins to restrain Marie with various bondage apparatus. This time, while still unpleased, Marie has consented to her disempowerment and while not in control of the situation as a whole she has at least come willingly to the circumstance. Later, Marie is shown at home masturbating with her legs crossed, as she tells us is so that she can pretend she is raping herself. It won’t be long before a stranger offers her twenty dollars in exchange for allowing him to perform oral sex on her. The incident quickly turns bad as the man promptly rapes Marie on the stairs near her apartment. Paul eventually concedes to Marie’s wishes and sleeps with her, but the exercise only lasts long enough for her to fall pregnant and from here we follow the agonizing downfall of both characters; Marie into a laboured pregnancy, Paul into a binge of alcohol and sexually flirtations with other women.

In a fantasy sequence Marie speaks of a place in which men have sex anonymously with women, their upper half on one side of a wall, the lower half presented for the men to penetrate. Here we get out most vivid taste of explicit sexual material when a male ejaculates (in close-up) on a female’s stomach only to be matched with an image of lubricating fluid being squeezed onto Marie’s swollen, pregnant stomach during one of her ultrasound examinations. No less than five students insert their fingers into her vagina, all framed plainly in the camera’s gaze. With the birth eminent Marie’s patience with Paul will reach its end resulting in Marie’s decision to kill by leaving the gas on in their apartment. Marie goes into labor and we are shown up-close the birth of her son and the film ends with Marie, newborn boy in arm, at Paul’s funeral.

Besides a curious interest in the film following its censorship or deviant sexual gratification, what does the film have to offer? Breillat presents us with a unique cinematic experience that seamlessly combines a tale of existential moral abandonment and sexual identity crisis with scenes of physical penetration, moving back and forth as though the viewer were shifting in and out of an erotic dream. Romance subtly plays with the audiences understanding of what is real and what is fantasy, similar to the Luis Bunuel film Belle De Jour. Brian Price points out that in the beginning of the scene where Marie is raped she expresses her wish to be taken in such a way, and while the scene could be observed as a fantasy sequence it is concreted in the realist mode of the film. Price claims this technique (if deliberate) is what gets Breillat into trouble, that her most controversial decision is to disallow the audience a clear, distinguishable moral position. This is one of the devices through which Breillat achieves a degree of discomfort in the audience (as a lot of ambiguous foreign cinema does) and provides the most pleasurable aspect of this type of filmmaking. Is it reasonable that organizations such as the OFLC have the power to recommend illicit material be banned? What if we consider that material far more offensive is screened every night in adult movie houses such as Club-X or the CraZyhorse. Why is sex considered beautiful if suggested but offensive and dangerous when depicted?

Breillat has a theme running through her films regarding the “myth of love”. She admits Romance was influenced by Oshima’s In the realm of the senses, but assures us she didn’t want to simply remake the classic. When asked why she cast an adult movie star in Romance she confessed not only that major film stars were refusing to star in her films, but Rocco was good looking in a way that most French actor weren’t and that he sported the necessary physical traits for the character she had created. When asked about her concern of the rating of her films she answered, “what they call ‘adult’ cinema should be the most noble and serious, but it seems like no one here grasps the meaning of this term.” Sexual exploration has always come naturally to Breillat. She published her first novel at the age of seventeen and due to its controversial content was not allowed to legally purchase it.

To help set the material in context a consideration of Michel Foucalt’s “History of Sexuality” is useful. Foucalt suggests that the topic of sexuality and control of it by societies controlling powers are two-fold. Firstly, sexual pleasure and our gratificational nature leads to the creation of identity and secondly, sexuality leads to issues of reproduction. Power over sexuality for Foucalt does not come from the sovereignty of state or enforcement of laws, rather our own enforcement of a multiplicity of force relations. In other words, society does not have power over us; it is the power we have over ourselves that creates a sense of society. Also, Foucalt suggests that control of sexuality does not come from making specific sexualities unlawful, but rather by the denial of sexual liberations on an individual basis, thus ensuring the continued flourishing of specific sexual practices while suffocating others.

For Foucalt sexual relations give rise to two separate systems; the deployment of alliance and the deployment of sexuality. The deployment of alliance is defined by the adherence to rules and defined categories of what is permitted or forbidden. Marie’s sexual advances on her lover Paul would constitute the sexual deployment of alliance, a bonding of socially acceptable sexual practice. The deployment of sexuality operates in exceeding or advancing the restrictions of the deployment of alliance. Marie’s affair with the headmaster would be seen as breaking the unspoken agreement of fidelity toward Paul. Breillat’s work sees the deployment of alliance as being irrelevant, or at least is not interested in investigating its significance. Rather she focuses on the romanticised bastardizing of such social conventions, i.e. the emotions that fidelity and matrimony are based on are now dead (if indeed they ever existed) and humans beings with physical needs will need to find a new form of social evolution which will incorporate sexuality but discard the fondness of love. Her films could be seen as a forward projection of the chaotic decomposition of society without the hollow bounds of sexual deployment of alliance.

Part of the second wave feminist movement in the 1970’s was a school of thought that reanalyzed the nature of cinema at the time. Laura Mulvey became the spokesperson on feminist concepts in cinema and claimed that filmmakers until that point had locked their audiences into a masculine point of view. Male antagonists always controlled the action or plot of a film, while the women were only presented through the masculine viewpoint as glamorous objects that existed for their observation. Females are often presented in the light of exhibitionism rather than introspection. Romance subverts this view of a masculine viewpoint by providing us with a female antagonist who controls the action and whose point of view is used to tell the story. Also, the male characters are presented as either impotent and sexually inadequate (Paul) or somewhat oafish and naïve to the fact that they are being exploited by Marie (i.e. Paolo). Some characters may seem one-dimensional but the intention of the film (i.e. myth of love) necessitates that both genders be viewed narrowly.

The film’s censorship and the circumstances surrounding it suggest desperation on the side of the censorship board. If the film was deemed offensive how did it make it into this country and achieve a degree of legitimacy by being screened theatrically at all? Why, if the ban was the correct decision, has the film since been approved for distribution in the home market and been distributed internationally in countries like Britain in an uncut state? Is the argument that by renting the film on video the material can be viewed in the privacy of the viewer’s own home away from the rest of society? If so, I can only suggest that in this environment the material is more likely to reach those people who should be protected from this type of film, i.e. children and adolescents.

In a bizarre circumstance the majority of the censorship board (by their own admission there were a few objectors) found that some scenes, such as the explicit consensual sex scenes, exceeded the guidelines of an ‘R’ rated film (“Sexual violence may only be implied and should not be detailed. Depictions must not be frequent, gratuitous or exploitative”) which would imply the only remaining classifaction, ‘X’, but other scenes such as the implied rape which would be acceptable in an ‘R’ rated film failed to meet the legislated limits of an ‘X’ rating (“'No depiction of sexual violence, coercion, offensive fetishes, or depictions which purposefully debase or abuse for the enjoyment of viewers is permitted in this classification”). Where did this leave Romance? According to the board’s report it floats somewhere between ‘R’ and ‘X’ (which must have been Breillat’s purpose) but rather than come down on either side of the classification legislation the board’s decision was to classify the film ‘RC’ meaning Refused Classification, denying its promoters any hope of having the film shown theatrically. Justifying their decision the board claimed that their role was “to reflect and not to lead community standards in the application of statutory criteria”.

The explicit scenes in Romance are in no way gratuitous as they in all cases serve a narrative function. Catherine Breillat as an artist has chosen to make the most of the options available to her on the filmmakers’ palette. Rather than helping her case that this brand of cinema is legitimate, the board found that since Breillat is a distinguished and notable director that her film is less deserving of an ‘X’ rating since it didn’t lend itself to the normal procedures of an ‘X’ film.

The argument that films such as Romance constitute pornography and should be banned outright have only a moral argument to make. Yet research has shown us that the more pornography is suppressed the more strength it gathers. In Denmark in 1964 the production and consumption of pornography was decriminalized and the country was flooded with readily available pornographic materials. By 1970 the “porno wave” had subsided as curiosity in the area had waned and distribution fell to a new low as people realized there was no danger in it. The myth that pornography is dangerous disappears when the understanding that it is not immoral is embraced. A study in Copenhagen in 1970 showed that even after prolonged exposure to explicit material the majority of subjects achieved only mild sexual arousal and most quickly tired of it. A similar study in the US concluded that subjects exposed to explicit material experienced extremely minimal deviations from their regular sexual activities, and that no proof of social harm such as crime or sexual misconduct was evident.

With pornography there is a crucial point to be made; some people when exposed to pornographic material will have a negative response leading to harmful circumstances for themselves and others. There is no point hiding the fact that this has happened and will continue to happen in the future. There is no need, nor is it my intention, to be needlessly cruel to victims of sexual attacks, but anyone who believes that depriving sex offenders of elicit material will solve the problem are incorrect. Studies conducted with prison inmates have shown that criminals incarcerated for crimes relating to sexual offenses showed across the board a lower level of indulgence in explicit material compared to criminals convicted of crimes of a non-sexual nature. Add to this the notion that in some countries the use of non-violent explicit material has been used to correct unacceptable sexual attitudes and the case for pornography causing sexual assaults falls to pieces.

The censorship board’s decision not to classify Breillat’s film could be seen as a moral one. Some would herald the idea, but it is simply hypocritical for some people to support the banning of films such as Romance, and others like Sex: The Annabel Chong story and Baise Moi (“Rape Me”) in a society were novels such as ‘The Story Of O’ and ‘American Psycho’ feature on prominent university syllabus. Why should those who wish to see revolutionary French cinema be denied? Imagine what we have missed if the New Wave films of Truffaut and Godard were banned, and while I am not in any way comparing the artistic talent of the new wave directors to that of Breillat, nor am I claiming that Romance is a spectacular piece of cinema, it cannot be denied that her work is an interesting and important development in cinematic history. It is no wonder Australia struggles to make any significant impact in the global cinema market when our right to exhibit and view films that expand the boundaries of artistic possibility is denied. We need to debate and more crucially to understand this issue and realize the freedom of our own expression and ensure that our values are our own, not the result of vague legislation. Our right to a free and uninhibited voice, unique and individualized, is effectively as important as our right to breathe.

© 2003 R. W. Gordon. All rights reserved.