Romance, by Christine Breillat - a review

I wrote this review of Christine Breillat's film 'Romance' in 2002. I was invited to see it by Anglican Media Sydney, and to participate in a panel organised by the Sydney Morning Herald. The film had been banned, and then the ban overturned. The panel included a feminist, a pornographer who had formerly been a censor (would you believe), a 'concerned parent', and me, the Christian.


Let me be direct: don’t go and see this movie. Romance is crude, pretentious, repugnant, sad and dull. I could not recommend this film to anyone, on either moral and artistic grounds. However, should this film have been banned (as it was momentarily by the Australian office of Film and Literature Classification)? Should Christians have campaigned against the public screening of this and similar pieces?

Having seen the film (participating in a panel run by the Sydney Morning Herald at the behest of Anglican Media), I think not. If you list the various sexual activities depicted in this film you would be likely to question my judgement: genital nudity, oral sex, sado-masochism, rape, and most controversially, scenes of actual (as opposed to simulated) sexual intercourse - the whole repertoire. However, there were certain features of the context of these depictions, as I will explain, that made them different in character even to some less technically revealing M and MA-rates films.

Romance is a deliberately ironic title. Director Catherine Breillat narrates the sexual odyssey of Marie, a young school teacher. Marie is in love with the narcissistic Paul, but he is sexually cold. As a result, she leaves his bed and seeks satisfaction in bold sexual experimentation with a variety of partners. None of the new experiences seem particularly satisfactory; some are even abusive. The men Marie meets are her biggest problem - though she desires them, they are almost all twisted in some way. Her sequence of experiences lead to a devastating rape at the hands of a casual lover. Eventually, her only liberation from her relationship is through a pregnancy and the murder of Paul. We are then treated to a technicolour childbirth scene - which drew the only gasp of shock from the audience!

This is a French film with all the surrealism and metaphysical ruminating, existentialism and feminism one could want for. It is not particularly erotic. In fact, the result of showing so much was rather comic at first, and then extremely dull. Having prayed “lead me not into temptation” as I entered the cinema, I found my prayer unexpectedly answered. It is a cold journey: the audience is not drawn to sympathise with any character in the traditional way. Marie’s sexual journey is a tragic, frustrating and disappointing one.

I would not call Romance pornographic. Pornography exploits desire in search of profit. It is about lust, quick, on-tap, sexual fantasy without the bother of a relationship. Romance was bad - even revolting - but it wasn’t porn. It was sexually cold. It was aimed at a cappuccino-drinking, art-house crowd and will only be shown in small inner-city cinemas. If it hadn’t been banned, it wouldn’t have made it to our screens at all, I daresay.

The experience of viewing Romance led me to several observations. The first is that the response of law - banning in this case - is almost always counter-productive, especially when the work involved has something to say, not just an intent to titillate. Advocating a ban is a simplistic reaction to something which asks for a more complex response, and inevitably brings more people in to see the film! Romance continues an ongoing exploration of female sexuality in our society which includes women’s magazines and televised inanities like Sex in the City and Ally McBeal. At least this film is honest, and doesn’t glamorise promiscuous sex, unlike Pretty Woman and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Here was a raw and open portrayal of the curse’s consequence for the female: “your desire will be for him, and he will rule over you” (Gen 3:16). For all her attempts at liberating herself, Marie repeatedly assumes attitudes of submission to men, even in her fantasies. While claiming feminist credentials, I felt that Breillat allowed us to see the degrading of Caroline Ducey, the actress playing Marie. I was interested that the representative feminist on the panel was quite disappointed with the film.

Secondly, even though I would not have others banned from seeing this film, I must discourage them. The cinema opens our souls like almost no other art form. Our eyes are the lamps of our whole bodies, as Jesus said (Matt 6:22); what we see effects us. In some way, human beings feel that to watch acts of whatever type is to participate in them in some way, to come dangerously close to committing the act itself. The veterans of war know this too well. Our memories capture images, and they may never fade away. Christians know the fragility and vulnerability of the inner human only too well. While allowing a choice for adults to view this film, we can also urge them to choose not to.

Thirdly, as was all too evident at this special preview screening, sixties-style liberalism is a hypocritical and condescending ideology. In an introductory lecture, we were told of the “principled” distributors and film reviewers who pushed for the review of the ban; and of the speaker’s fundamentalist father, who didn’t understand art. Liberalism pretends to appeal to “principles”, like “freedom of speech” and “the right for adults to choose what they watch”, all the while advocating nothing of the sort. Would the liberal press have argued so strongly for the right to see an anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi film? Or a gory anti-abortion film? Of course not - and neither should they. We are all absolutists, and we all believe in censorship, ultimately. But liberals try to conceal their absolutism with an appeal to these golden principles of the Enlightenment. It is about time their bluff was called!

Volf on 'soft difference'

Miroslav Volf's article entitled 'Soft Difference' from Ex Auditu in 1994 is one of those ones I come back to again and again. In it he tries to describe from 1 Peter the way in which the Christians are supposed to differ from their surrounding culture. It is, he says, a 'soft difference'...

It might be appropriate to call the missionary distance that 1 Peter stresses soft difference. I do not mean a weak difference, for in 1 Peter the difference is anything but weak. It is strong, but it is not hard. Fear for oneself and one's identity creates hardness. The difference that joins itself with hardness always presents the other with a choice: either submit or be rejected, either "become like me or get away from me." In the mission to the world, hard difference operates with open or hidden pressures, manipulation, and threats. A decision for a soft difference, on the other hand, presupposes a fearlessness which 1 Peter repeatedly encourages his readers to assume (3:14; 3:6). People who are secure in themselves—more accurately, who are secure in their God—are able to live the soft difference without fear. They have no need either to subordinate or damn others, but can allow others space to be themselves. For people who live the soft difference, mission fundamentally takes the form of witness and invitation. They seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even "without a word" (3:1).

Review of Urban Tribes by Ethan Watters

“Why isn’t she married yet?”

Pretty much everyone knows by now that people are putting off the decision to settle down and get married until they are well past thirty: which means that for members of the so-called “Generation X”, there is a decade-long (or more) period of adulthood between leaving education and becoming a member of a traditional family unit. Social commentators and politicians alike have seen this as a result of rampant individualism and shallow hedonism. Gen-Xers are charged with being commitment shy and selfish. We are a generation of wanderers, dreading the thought of “settling down” and extending our adolescence well into our thirties. We will, it is prophesied, reap the rewards of our attachment phobia in spades of loneliness.

In his intriguing book Urban Tribes, Californian journalist Ethan Watters argues that, in fact, young adults are forming their own significant communities in place of traditional family units; and finding in these groups some of the benefits that family life offers. Watters claims he discovered the mass phenomena of the Urban Tribe almost accidentally: having written a brief magazine piece on the idea, he was invited on TV to discuss it. In the following weeks his email inbox was inundated by twenty-somethings from all over the US who felt that he had articulated something very real to their lives. They had found community in all sorts of areas: among college friends, in book clubs, at the gym, or even in groups that just kinda evolved from friends and friends-of-friends. People performed different roles within the tribes in order to enable organization and decision-making, nurturing and entertainment. Some group members were valued even though they contributed very little to the group at all.

Watters is insistent that the sense of belonging and loyalty he and others feel is just as strong as family ties may be. He recounts example of remarkably loving and self-less behaviour, and the experiences of great tenderness, group rituals and generous sharing. As he puts it:
After more than a decade, my sense of living as a single person in a modern American city was that of belonging to an intensely loyal community of people. (p.39)

The social conditions that have lead to this phenomenon centre on the remarkable freedom that young adults in western cities now experience. They are wealthy, with a high disposable income; and may choose voluntary poverty in order to study, travel or follow a dream without to much hardship. They have grown up in the age of contraception and sexual liberty which means that sex does not appear to need the safety-net of marriage. The women of this group are the first “post-feminist” generation, aspiring to have a meaningful career as a priority. Socially acceptable behaviour has become a much broader category. Watters notes that the advice that Xers have received from their baby-boomer parents has been strangely reticent and devoid of any heavy moralising. “Only conservative politicians”, he writes,

"continued to give lifestyle advice as if it were still in style. It was pretty easy to read this for what it was: political posturing. George W. Bush’s advice that we abstain from sex before marriage was an excellent example. Given that many of us were delaying marriage until we were thirty or thirty-five, his just-say-no-to-sex rhetoric read like a blatant pandering to the Christian Right or willful ignorance of social trends or both. Regardless of whether we voted or these conservative politicians, the idea that we would let their advice influence our personal choices was laughable." (p.28)

Watters goes on to make the case that separating sex from the decision to marry and delaying that choice leads to much more mature decisions. Gen-Xers, as the first generation who were children of divorced parents, are understandably slow to commit themselves given the domestic disasters they have witnessed.

What Watters describes I found resonated with what I see my contemporaries experiencing in Sydney and in Oxford, where very similar social conditions apply. It strikes me that many evening church congregations or university-based churches resemble urban tribes, in a way which would have been unimaginable only a generation ago. The longing for belonging that so many twenty-somethings feel is an opportunity for these communities. However, it may be the informal contact and the spontaneous social gathering that most unites the group as much as the formal meeting.

I feel strongly however that churches also have the opportunity to remind the generations that they are not the only generation. We must resist and transcend the segmenting of our community into demographic sub-groups, which is chiefly driven by marketers and journalists. The cry of generational identity (“we are such-and-such”) is also a cry of non-identity (“and we aren’t like you old so-and-sos”). The community of Jesus is built around the shared experience of forgiveness and conversion, not the shared experience of being brought up in the 80s.
Then there’s the sex thing. The powerful social trend to delay marriage that Watters notes is fairly universal. For the Christian determined to pursue chastity there are two options – marry early, or marry late and remain celibate. Both choices fly in the face of prevailing cultural wisdom; for the young adult with non-Christian parents it will be probably even counter to their easy-going baby-boomer advice. Trust and commitment in matters of the heart are going to be rare qualities indeed.

The Play Ethic – A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living by Pat Kane

Lego. We all played with as kids, right? (Well if you were born in the 60s or 70s you did). It’s time to get your old Lego out of the garage at Mum’s, because the Lego company have set up a business consultancy and training arm called “Serious Play” (don’t believe me? check out www.seriousplay.com). Serious Play is:- An innovative, experiential process designed to enhance business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, Lego Serious Play is an efficient, practical and effective process that works for everyone within an organization.


Um, which means, basically, you go to a work planning-day and you get to play with Lego!! But what the good people at Lego have discovered is this: play works. Playing is something that enhances the creativity and cohesion of groups of people. It engages people, and lets them take risks. Play is unlimited, special and voluntary. And most of all, it is fun.

I learnt about play from Pat Kane’s book The Play Ethic – A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. This sprawling website of a book is perhaps a little less fun to read than it ought to be and could be half as long. It swings between groovy journalist chat and would-be academic prose. However, it contains a real and profound challenge to the way we live life in the west.

Kane makes the case that we have denigrated play for far too long in Western culture such that we have limited the potential for human creativity and enjoyment. For us, work is the serious business. Serious people work hard; and it is morally good to embrace hard work. Both Labour and Coalition politicians appealed to the ethic of hard work in Australia’s recent election. A dole bludger is one of the most shameful people in our culture. Think of the way we speak of “wasting time” as if it is morally wrong.

And yet the digital revolution has spawned a generation of people for whom play is work is play. Kane calls them “Soulitarians”, and travels to Finland to meet some. Finland, he reports, has a tertiary education system with no fees and no deadlines, allowing students to play around with knowledge and technology “feeling their way into their life’s vocation”. It is in this period that some of the most innovative ideas arise – most famously, Linus Torvalds inventing the Linux system at age 21. Publishing the operating system for free, as Torvalds did, is a very Soulitarian thing to do. Very unMicrosoft. Not dot.commerce, but dot.communist, perhaps?

Play is spiritual, says Kane. Of course, Kane talks about spirituality as if it is another way of talking about human beings and their longings He is quite savage in his condemnation of the Puritans for the “250 year suppression of play by the Protestant work ethic” against which he offers the ethic of play. This is “a deeply limited vision of human possibility.” The decline in organized religion has meant a corresponding rise in “disorganized spirituality”. The Protestant work ethic, offering duty, routine, deferral of pleasures, regulation of intensities – offers little, he argues, to the postmodern person who lives in the universe of risk, openness and opportunity.

Those who experience –as so many do – a gap between “their interior richness and the limited expressiveness of their exterior lives” because of the blandness of their jobs will not find satisfying an ethic which holds hard work as belonging to a higher moral order.

Play, on the other hand, is about possibilities and pleasures. It is non-utilitarian and un-economic, when so much of the world is framed by the bottom line. Kane is at pains to assert the productiveness of play, but also wants to show that it doesn’t need justification according to what it produces. Ultimately, it is just a better way for everyone to live.

These are fascinating challenges directed to the Christian worldview. I am not sure whether he has accurately read the Puritans, but the “work ethic”, whatever its origins, is certainly alive and well in the materialist west. What is needed from Christians is a re-evaluation of the notion of the Sabbath and of the nature of work. Remember that it was God himself who first rested; and his creative work sprang not from mere necessity (though sometimes I have heard God defended as if he is a prisoner to some eternal principle) but from his sovereign freedom.

But also Christian theology urges us to take the long view. Kane describes a brilliant X-Box ad, where a baby is seen being shot out of its mother through the air. As it travels we see it age until it lands, in its coffin, an old man, dead: “Life is short. Play hard”. There is truth to this of course; but the world ordered to Jesus Christ is a place where eternal life is a thing to anticipate; and so there need be no fear of missing out on play time. If anything, play is more an inkling of the world to come than work is...