An affair of love - 1999

An Affair of Love (1999)

Due to the fact that human beings have this capacity called intelligence, sexual desire amongst our species is an immensely complicated matter — it can't just be boiled down to reproductive instincts. When American movies attempt to handle this subject — especially when it concerns female lust — they almost always come up short. Too often, the women in these unpersuasive and uninvolving films are too pretty, too neurotic, too idealistic, or too dull to engage our attentions. Luckily, we have Le Cinema Français and films like An Affair of Love to remedy the problem. French filmmakers have consistently been responsible for bringing more mature fare about the complications of love and lust to these shores.

Affair is a brief, but pithy drama about an unnamed woman (Return of Martin Guerre's radiant Nathalie Baye) who has a fantasy she wants to enact with a stranger. Her offer is taken up by a handsome, middle-aged man (Sergi Lopez from Western) of Spanish descent. Their story is told mostly in flashback as an unseen man asks each of them separately about the relationship. When speaking to this interviewer, the pair often differ on certain details — she thinks they met online while he believes she placed an ad in a pornographic magazine; he believes they exchanged photos, but she comments that she didn't know what he looked like until they met face-to-face. In this way, the film touches on the faultiness of human memory in the same way as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, but with far less pretentiousness.

Although the nature of the woman's fantasy is never revealed, it's not important. As she tells the interviewer, "It was an act of love. It could have been anything." What is central is the film's ability to convey the whimsical and powerful nature of desire and the increasing level of connection between the two.

After the first encounter, they agree to meet weekly. The film fascinatingly delineates how the power dynamic between them continually shifts. One thought-provoking suggestion posed in An Affair of Love is that by getting the sex part over with early, a couple has a greater opportunity to be completely honest with one another. Each of the protagonists may not know the other person's name or where he or she works, but they do know about each other's fears and fantasies — and ultimately, which of these things is more important?

There is, of course, a moment when the characters have to decide if they want to pursue a more traditional romantic relationship, but since such a path requires a different kind of commitment and a form of emotional sharing that diverges from how they currently communicate, there are barriers they must overcome in order to walk it successfully. Affair limns these difficulties concisely and wisely, especially in a segment featuring an elderly couple whose marriage has soured. Because these are the only two people that the trysting pair meet over the course of their affair, this couple's romantic malaise is seen as a symbol of the abyss that can await people who marry the wrong person.

It's no big secret that our hearts and heads rarely agree with our loins, but Philippe Blasband's script explores this dichotomy carefully. Affair shows that there are advantages to beginning a relationship with sex, but that a couple has to be compatible out of bed as well. While day-to-day mundanities may be of little importance on a larger scale, they are an integral part of our lives and must play a part of any long-term romantic endeavor.

In a remarkably brief 80 minutes, the cast, screenwriter Blasband, and director Frédéric Fonteyne manage to depict the intensity and complexity of a single relationship with much more acuity than most of the interminable romantic pap that Hollywood constantly churns out. As Baye's character tells her interlocutor, "In movies, sex is always Heaven or Hell, never in between the two. In life, it's almost always in between." An Affair of Love captures this middle state perfectly.