Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez in "An Affair of Love."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, the critic gives this film a: Stars: Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez Director: Frederic Fonteyne Rated: R, with sexual issues Length: 80 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Matt Wolf
The Associated Press

(September 15, 2000) -- Why worry about love when you can settle for sex?

That's the provocative starting point of An Affair of Love, Belgian director Frederic Fonteyne's French-language movie about feelings that sometimes even the most determinedly soulless of flings cannot keep at bay.

Sure, Nathalie Baye's Her -- the film's principal characters are unnamed -- speaks of a relationship with Sergi Lopez's Him that is "purely and expressly pornographic." The trouble starts when a little word called love creeps in.

Une Liaison Pornographique (A Pornographic Affair) was the original European name of the movie, and the adjective "pornographic" has been excised from its title lest American audiences get the wrong idea.

But the replacement title -- An Affair Of Love -- seems a bland substitute when the film is anything but. There's something genuinely liberating in our coarsened age about such an adult treatment of an arena that too many movies treat with a snigger.

If An Affair Of Love seems brave, and it does, that's not merely because it restricts most of the action to two people -- almost as if Philippe Blasband's script were a play.

Even more radical is the movie's depiction of sexual desire and what happens when it spills over into the far messier realm of love.

At the start, that particular four-letter word isn't on the menu; the protagonists are brought together via a personals ad in Paris.

We know early on that their affair comes to an end: Both participants are seen after the event, chronicling the liaison's demise from different perspectives.

Whose version is right? It scarcely matters, since An Affair Of Love occupies a realm beyond facts. More truthful is the film's respect for the arc of a relationship begun hesitantly over coffee and cognac and ending no less hesitantly -- in tears.

It's important, at first, that the two know next to nothing about each other beyond the appointed date and time of each assignation. The less that is revealed, the less room for guilt. (The woman at one point declines a lift in a car, deciding even that is way too intimate.)

Nor is either partner eager to exist much in the outside world. Each creates a self-contained "ivory tower" that breaks apart as the film proceeds.

The point of Fonteyne's film isn't plot; it's a gentle accretion of detail in a Gallic tradition that may remind some of the work of Eric Rohmer. (Like Rohmer, Fonteyne finds eroticism in the seemingly commonplace.)

The material is a gift for actors alive to shading and nuance. Baye's Vermeer-like features are perfectly suited to a 40-something woman of mystery who is never far from sadness.

The Spanish-born Lopez is a burlier figure than one associates with tales of this sort. And there's something deeply human and recognizable about his character's uncertainty, just as there is about a naked body that resembles real ones rather than the usual cinematic perfection.

Both performers move poignantly toward the resolution of a scenario that is essentially unresolved, with each person fatally second-guessing the other and, in the process, denying themselves any shared future life.

If that sounds bleak, it probably is, and bruisingly honest as well. An Affair Of Love is about two people doing themselves out of what they most feel and want, in a movie whose capacity for feeling is utterly, sorrowfully fearless.

An Affair Of Love runs a short and stirring 80 minutes. For once, the R rating is fully justified, since this is an adult movie in the richest sense.