Romance

Romance (1999) is a French drama written and directed by Catherine Breillat — watch it online on iFILM. Marie, a young schoolteacher played by Caroline Ducey, shares her apartment and her bed with a man named Paul who simply refuses to be intimate with her. He is handsome, indifferent and entirely comfortable with the arrangement. She is not.

What follows is Marie's search for physical and emotional contact outside the relationship — encounters that range from tender to clinical to frightening. François Berléand appears as a man whose honesty about what he wants is, unexpectedly, more respectful than Paul's silence. None of it resolves the original wound.

Breillat made Romance as a deliberate provocation, but the film works best when read as a study in how desire curdles when it's refused acknowledgment. It caused significant controversy on its European release and still lands with the same uncomfortable precision it did then. Stream Romance (1999) online on iFILM.