What setsFredaric Fonteyne's Une Liaison d’Amour (The End of the Affair) apart from any other movie about two people (Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez) having a sexual rendezvous? It’s not just that it’s French (although it is hard to imagine such sophistication and honesty taking place in an American film) but that it is very adult and emotionally revealing. The movie opens with an off-camera interviewer asking "she" and "he" about their months of anonymously meeting for sexual pleasures after their affair has ended, but it started with a conversation:
A Conversation
“Why don’t we make love?” she asks him in a Paris cafe´.
“I thought we were doing that?” he says in response. “Every Tuesday and Thursday for the past three months.”
“No,” she says. “I mean make love the normal way.”
“You mean missionary style?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.
The Hook Up
They hooked up through an ad she placed in a magazine and when they finally meet in person, she is obviously in control. “Shall we go?” she asks after some light conversation about how she is much prettier than he thought she would be and he is shorter than she thought he would be.
“Go where?” he says.
“To the hotel down the street. I booked a room.”
We then follow them to the hotel as he pays with a credit card and they walk, single-file down a red plush hallway to their room, he unlocks the door and lets her go inside. Then he follows, the door shuts behind them, and the camera remains in the hallway.
“And how was it?” ask the offscreen interviewer who is writing an article about love affairs and talking to each of them separately.
“Good,” she replies quickly.
“Good,” he says after a pause. “I guess it was good. I really can’t remember that well. I know we talked after we left the hotel.”
And then we see two strangers who have just been intimate with each other emerge from the hotel and walk purposefully down the street as if each one is late for an appointment. At a corner, they pause and exchange a few words before she heads down the subway and he goes to his parked car.
It must be this way—each party in an affair having different recollections of events and timing—of conversations and expressions—of intentions and assumptions.
“It was so much easier to talk with him,” she tells the interviewer. “Neither of us needed to impress the other to try to get them into bed. We’d already been to bed, and it was very liberating. We could just talk.”
Rules
But one of the rules of this game is that they don’t talk about themselves. They are meeting for only one purpose—sex. And none of the baggage that goes with their pasts or futures needs to be exchanged. They just live for today, or, more precisely, for Tuesdays and Thursdays. Even after months of meetings, they really know nothing about each other.
Director Fedaric Fonteyne and screenwriter Philippe Blasband have created a revealing and poignant film about a game that could have turned into reality if the players had only stopped acting like they thought the other one wanted them to be. It works because of the subtle and beautiful interaction between two powerful actors. Nathalie Baye is the 50-something woman with a lovely face that hides her feelings most of the time and is afraid of being watched when she has an orgasm. “I grimace,” she tells him. “It’s horrible.”
Sergi Lopez is the somewhat younger man— more romantic than she— who refuses to wipe the tears from his face as if pretending they are not there will make them disappear. “I like real women,” he tells the interviewer. “She could have had a child, maybe even two children. But I like that. She is still beautiful.”
A Warning
We know from the start that the affair is already over and wonder if the film would have been better if we did not know the end before we see the beginning. Perhaps we would have liked to wonder if the sex turning into love” theme might have a chance to blossom and grow. Perhaps a relationship based upon fantasy is doomed from the start. Although, if this were true, then why would people ever believe in living happily ever-after and vow to stay together until “death do us part?”
You should be warned that the camera does not always stay in the hallway when the bedroom door is closed. We follow the lovers into the tackily decorated blue room on three different occasions: Once, where the passion begins in the hallway before they are even through the door; Another very intense and very realistic session of lovemaking “beneath the sheets;” and a third, delightful sequence in a huge French bathtub which starts with his suggestion: “There are other things to do in a hotel room than just go to bed.”
C’est la vie.
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