Of the many films this year that have enjoyed the pre-publicity of ersatz controversy, Romance and Fight Club, released within a month of each other, both gained attention for their apparent pushing at the boundaries of the explicit. Romance is one of the most sexually graphic films to gain a certificate in Britain (although Ai No Corrida has enjoyed theatre screenings); Fight Club was erroneously trailed as one of the most violent films in cinema history. Both films, for all their flaws, are genuine attempts to look at gender; essential femininity in Romance, crisis-riven masculinity in Fight Club.
Catherine Breillat's Romance has suffered a little from the distraction caused by its sexual content. It is rarely a sexy film – certainly not pornographic. For all its explicitness – in fact, because of its explicitness – it is able to portray sex not as the performance piece of pornography, divorced from character, relationship and narrative, but as symbolic of power relations. Its heroine, Marie (Caroline Ducey), is oppressed by the refusal of Paul, her boyfriend, after only a short period of passion, to make love to her. He lies there boredly as she tries to arouse him; even when she succeeds, he, tellingly, rejects her. At first, this premiss – and the cod-philosophical voice-overs Marie provides to explain her thoughts, feelings and motivations – seems thin and risible. It is as the film develops that we see exactly how coldly controlling Paul is; he enjoys flirting with other women, until he knows he has caught their interest and desire; he tries to hide his jealousy when Marie hints at infidelity or stays out late; when she cries in triumph at briefly mounting him near the end of the film (an event that makes her pregnant in an almost immaculate conception), he immediately flings her to the floor. It takes the entire movie for her to tell him how boring his chasing games are; and the fate of this grotesquely arrogant and manipulative man is a genuinely satisfying climax.
Marie's adventures with other men, in the meantime, seem dispiriting, but are crucial to her regaining of power and self-esteem. She carefully selects Paulo (played by the Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi), whose equipment does most of the acting for him; as they have sex, her face is expressionless, almost bored. She refuses to fellate him when he asks; she ditches him when she starts to feel close to him. Her boundaries of intimacy are quite clear, and this tension between her unhappy subjugation at the hands of her boyfriend and her determined progress to personal fulfilment is the crux of the film.
This is certainly true in the widely misunderstood bondage scenes with Marie's boss, the headmaster of the school at which she teaches. The headmaster, as he freely admits, is not a handsome man; this lends him a glow of pride as he talks, incessantly, of his thousands of conquests. Marie does not become a conquest herself, however; her apparent passivity when she is tied up is the cool control of situation in which her consent is constantly sought and given. During the first session, she suddenly, startlingly, breaks down; the headmaster is alarmed and apologetic for having misjudged her limits. The moment is equally upsetting for the viewer, who then has immediately to rethink that reaction when it turns out that Marie is weeping with cathartic intensity; the experience has been profound for her, but not unpleasant. She wishes to repeat it. Marie is not Everywoman; the specific elements of her character demand an effort of understanding from the audience, rather than offering easy recognition.
Indeed, at one stage the scenes develop an excellent humour, as the headmaster fusses with accoutrements of bondage and clumsily and ineptly has to make do, despite missing items and intransigent equipment; also when, as he mentions yet again his 10,000 lovers, Marie merely smiles and rolls her eyes. Her tolerant amusement is confident. The bondage scene, for her, is self-exploration, not sexually, but mentally and emotionally. It is the most erotic part of the film – the rope-work is aesthetically beautiful and ornate, lovingly and diligently performed – while being the least genitally sexual. This is highly significant in a film whose explicitness is serious and, at all other times, unarousing. Just as Marie's relationship masks its power games under the trappings of domesticity, so the trappings of bondage mask a real tenderness between Marie and her boss; it is significant that she later orders him to assist in the birth of her child, and he quietly complies.
In contrast to say, The Story of O, in which "O" is a hole, a void, an orifice – the work is alluded to in Romance – while Marie feels incomplete ("I am a hole – I disappear in proportion to the cock taking me"), she wants to complete herself on her own terms. Pornography is paralleled with gynaecology, most strikingly in the medical examination Marie undergoes when pregnant, as junior doctors queue to penetrate her impersonally with their fingers. There is wit, too, when a standard trope of hard-core pornography – ejaculation over the female body – is juxtaposed instantly with the squeezing of gel on to her belly, in preparation for an ultrasound. The fantasy scene, of women's bodies walled off at the waist, their top halves in a hospital environment, their lower halves merely receptacles for impersonal sexual couplings with well-hung porn-style men, is designed to make the audience consider the various views and employments of the female body; the graphic scene of birth, a baby's head pushing through and out, becomes a triumphant and beautiful moment. This scene has been accused of feeding into an anti-feminist discourse about a woman's reproductive role; it is arguable, though, that Marie has been shown as sexually confident, professional and independent (dramatically so). What the scene does do is to remind us that, although the female body can be viewed, controlled and abused in various ways, as we have seen through the film, it retains unique and creative power. This does focus the viewer away from the fetishized synecdoches of pornography. Breillat has made a film in which iconographies are being quite carefully considered; the stark, primary colour canvases against which she shoots the scenes do strip the symbolic down to essentials, and the vérité of the scenes of congress does allow for greater concentration on the significance and power of those symbols.
Fight Club, in contrast, does not show genitalia, though it is obsessed by testicles; the fear of castration, real or symbolic, runs through the film. The unnamed narrator (Edward Norton), an insomniac insurance man, is advised by his doctor to see "real suffering", and finds himself at a self-help group (Remaining Men Together) for people with testicular cancer. Bob (excellently played by rock singer Meat Loaf), a former bodybuilder, has lost his testes and developed some formidable and unwanted breasts; in a grotesque parody of the maternal, he embraces Norton in the group hug. Norton weeps; Norton sleeps. Everything is better; except that Norton becomes addicted to the self-help groups. When Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a nihilistic Goth-haired girl, starts attending all the same groups, highlighting her own tourism as well as his, Norton's pleasure is tainted. They agree – in a scene of exquisite black comedy – to split the groups between them. ("Okay, you can have testicular cancer.")
What goes wrong, during Norton's return to insomnia and jet-lagged business travel, is that he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on a plane. Shortly afterwards, Norton's perfectly equipped, catalogue-furnished apartment is blown up; so he goes to stay with Tyler in a dripping, condemned Gothic pile, miles from civilization. The men begin to discover themselves through bare-knuckle fighting, interspersed with occasionally amusing sloganeering ("The things you own end up owning you"), a hodgepodge of Maoism, Taoism, Situationism, fascism and Iron John masculinity. More and more disenfranchised men reject Ikea furniture and therapy for the "reality" of bonding during breathtakingly violent physical combat in the Fight Club, set up by Norton and Durden, not unlike Freemasonry for fist-fighters. The misogyny and homoeroticism of the partnership (a homoeroticism that the film, strangely, calls attention to initially and later disowns) is perhaps summed up by Durden, speaking on the subject of marriage: "We come from a generation raised by women. I'm wondering if, right now, another woman is really what we need."
In fact, both characters actually feel abandoned by their fathers; they feel abandoned by all the father figures that society was supposed to offer them. When Marla begins sleeping with Durden, Norton is filled with rejection, rage and horror; and the Fight Club that the men started spirals out of control, evolving into a paramilitary organization across cities, where disgruntled workers, symbolically castrated by capitalism and consumerism, wreak their childishly lethal revenge on the people and institutions that have oppressed them. The facile nihilism and political confusion of this development are, definitely, held up for our contempt, though it does offer an illicit excitement and complicity as well.
The film loses the plot (as does the eponymous novel by Chuck Palahniuk on which it is based) when it falls back on an older one: Jekyll and Hyde. The old Id and Ego routine disappointingly neutralizes the troubling critique of masculinity implicit in the earlier stages, and pathologizes the characters' opposition to late capitalism. It is also rankly implausible; it is hard to square the denouement with some of the earlier scenes. In the end, an effective and acutely funny satire (the jokes remain good right up to one of the final frames) dissolves into a cartoonish action movie, a polished rock-music-fuelled adventure which caters for all the desires it has previously excoriated. Where Romance imaginatively transcends boredom and conflict, Fight Club, for all its searing excitements, falls prey to the male nihilism that was its supposed target.