A Pilgrim’s Digression

Recently, my wife and I have been watching mostly French films that have been stored up in our Netflix queue since we first subscribed to the service. I had been moving other movies to the top of the queue, until my wife noticed and asked why none of the movies she picked were coming in the mail.

Ahem. It was all a misunderstanding. Really, it was.

Some of the movies, both Lynn and I admit, are hit or miss. Café au Lait I found boring and pointless, despite the promise of threesome sex scenes and creative French swearing.

Others weren’t half bad. I thought Venus Beauty Institute was quite good; Lynn liked it less than I did. The story concerns a forty-ish beautician, Angèle, played by Nathalie Baye, who routinely scopes out and picks up men for one night stands. In one scene, we see her simply sit down at a man’s table at a restaurant and proceed to have dinner with him. The man is shocked, but receptive. He is married, but this does not concern her, and they leave the restaurant together. He suggests a hotel; she says his car will do just fine.

Although normally we would simply call this woman a slut, her story is deeper than that of a nymphomaniac. In the first scene of the film, we see her eating in a restaurant with a man with whom she has apparently been fornicating for the past couple days. She is talking incessantly. He sits there grim, anxious to be done with her. Finally, he tells her to “Stick to screwing; you talk nonsense,” and he puts money down on the table and leaves.

Angèle is a middle-aged woman desperate for love, but is afraid of the inevitable loss of love. Perhaps a previous lover hurt her, or died; we are never told the source of her neurosis. However, the result is that she accepts the approximation of love, which is sex with strangers.

Meanwhile, at her job at the Venus Beauty Institute, she spends her day helping old women defy age. She applies creams to their bodies, washes and dyes their hair, recommends new products, gives massage. Sometimes men walk in off the street thinking that she and her co-workers give those kind of massages, the kind with the “happy ending,” as it’s called.

Audrey Tautou (Amélie) plays Angèle’s co-worker, a cute, young girl with pig tails, who marries a wealthy, elderly widower who begins coming into the shop to see her. The other co-worker, Samantha, is twenty or twenty-five and only interested in finding a husband. Both Angèle’s co-workers, thus, represent two stereotypes of female identity and sexuality. It is Angèle who is different.

Angèle is disturbing because she seems to so openly flaunt the double-standard which holds that men can have as many one-night stands as they wish, but the women they have those affairs with are mere sluts. Angèle is sad, tragic in her inability to allow love to enter her life. But there is a nobility about her, a strength her two more conventional co-workers do not possess, as if her loneliness only made her stronger.

In the end, Angèle does find love, and the movie settles into a more standard pattern of a man pursuing a hard-to-get woman, who eventually gives in. Along the way, there are some humorous moments, some sexy moments, and overall, engaging viewing.

Nathalie Baye also stars in another movie we saw recently, also about a middle-aged woman flouting convention. An Affair of Love has a more titillating title in French, Une Liason Pornographique. The film itself is not especially pornographic, however.

The story concerns a nameless woman who places an online ad for a “pornographic affair.” She meets a man, also nameless, and they begin to meet regularly for sex. Much of the story is told in flashback, as the two of them meet separately with an interviewer, after the affair has ended. I am not sure why the director chose to tell the story as a documentary, but it adds a bit of flavor to the film. If the French had Reality TV, it would probably indeed be sexy.

The crux of the story is that the two of them become attached to each other, but feel they cannot violate the contract which they have made to keep their affair strictly “pornographic.” The central event of the story is one day, while preparing for their afternoon tryst in their hotel room, they meet an old man who knocks on their door by mistake. After he apologizes and departs, they hear a thud outside. The old man has had a heart attack in the doorway of his own room.

The female protagonist rides to the hospital with him, but he dies. In the hospital, she meets his elderly wife. It turns out, the old man had been going to the hotel to meet a prostitute every week for an untold number of years. Our heroine seems surprised that the old wife seems unconcerned about her husband’s philandering. “He always came home to me,” she says, weeping, “And when he did not come home I knew something was wrong.”

At this point, the affair between our two main characters begins to break down and they gradually stop seeing each other. The movie is simple as that. It ends with them reflecting to the interviewer on the bittersweet nature of what they had together, for a short time.

I find Nathalie quite lovely in both movies I’ve seen her in. I also appreciate seeing an attractive older woman in a film about love, or at least sex; that is uncommon in America. The man who plays her lover in Une Liason Pornographique is also normal; that is, no Hollywood leading man-type. His body ain’t sculpted; no “Fitness Made Simple with John Basedow” videos in his collection.

Judging by the disgruntled men who have reviewed this film at Netflix, I think they were expecting more skin and less talk when they rented this movie. I found it to be slow, but interesting, and I’ve learned that a rated R French movie isn’t much sexier than a rated R American movie. It’s just that sometimes the French movie will show a man’s penis or mix things up with a ménage a trois, often involving a lesbian (French Twist) or jailbait (Artemesia).