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January 29, 2006
An Affair of Love
Although my patience with slow, character-driven French films is diminishing, I liked this 1999 film all right. It wasn't particularly sexy, despite the subject: a six-month "pornographic" affair carried on and then narrated to an unseen interviewer by two characters whose names are never revealed to us or to each other. I was in mild suspense about the particular unorthodox act they carried out. The real subject of the film is error: of memory, of emotion, of communication.
The question I was left with was about personal narrative. The two preface their lovemaking with what is described as easy, natural conversations as they grow to like each other over the months. They also claim that there was an implicit rule not to bring their lives into the conversations. Could one really have such weekly chats about anything without growing difficulty in keeping out the rest of one's life, one's background and history? So much of what I know, believe, think, is linked to my life in such a way that abstracting it in a series of conversations like these would become artificial, stilted, and, ultimately impossible, I think. Obviously thought is social, but there are moments when we perceive it or represent as individual. An intense interpersonal relationship could not be such a setting, it seems to me, without excruciating work.
Posted by johnn at January 29, 2006 8:59 PM
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