Herald rating: * * * * *
Cast: Nathalie Baye, Sergi Lopez
Director: Frederic Fonteyne
Running time: 89 mins
Rating: R16.
Opens: Thursday, Academy
Review: Peter Calder
What might love be like if you had sex before the first date? That's the intriguing proposition at the heart of this touching little love story
which was one of the standouts at the midwinter film festival.
It's the kind of movie only the French could make (and only the Americans could misunderstand; originally Une Liaison Pornographique, it was released in the United States as An Affair of Love, a title which completely misses the irony of the original).
It's shot partly in mock-documentary style - at the film's opening, they are apart again, reminiscing to an unseen interviewer about what happened and, tellingly, their stories don't entirely tally.
But as the film unfolds we are witness to a superbly observed, beautifully paced study of how love and sex uncomfortably overlap, despite the lovers' best intentions.
The two characters, referred to simply as Elle and Lui (Him and Her), are upper-class articulate Parisians who meet in a cafe after she has advertised for a man to help her enact a sexual fantasy.
We never learn what it is - their secrecy, sometimes sadly dignified, sometimes impish and mischievous, adds to their appeal - but when love (or something like it) grows from sex, the story becomes at once pungent and poignant.
The couple's performances - only a handful of lines are given to other characters - are extraordinarily winning and we are drawn into their affair at the same time as we are paradoxically held at a distance.
A scene in a bathroom is among the most unself-consciously intimate I've seen on film.
However, the camera remains outside the door for most of their liaison and the only sex scene is no wilder than you'll see on mid-evening television.
Fonteyne owes much to the nuanced and sensitive script by novelist and playwright Philippe Blasband but even more to Baye and Lopez. There's no pornography on show here, but there is something pretty extraordinary.
