From the start of shooting, Catherine Breillat’s new film has been the object of close media scrutiny – less to do with her reputation as an uncompromising director than with its highly graphic sexual content. Its central figure is Marie (Caroline Ducey), who can’t get satisfaction from her impotent boyfriend and so has casual sex with Paulo (well-hung Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi – wooden in more ways than one) and an obscurely liberating sado-masochistic dalliance with Robert (François Berléand). The really graphic stuff lasts in total no more than a few minutes, but the effect is profoundly unsettling. ‘Romance’ is a bleak and pessimistic film, coloured by a schematic, prejudiced view of love and sex that verges on paranoia. (In French.)