Georgia Rule, Romance

Georgia Rule (2007, Garry Marshall)
What fond memories I have of the acting in "Overboard," the comic exaggeration and artifice in Goldie Hawn's performance, is regrettably tempered with Marshall's weirdly and alternately sensational and conservative world-view and at the same time lack of overall point of view. Lindsay Lohan's character says she was molested when she was young, and throughout the movie we're not sure if we believe her or not, she keeps changing her story and characters flip-flop with their own minds. That's strange enough for a Hollywood entertainment, and it's stranger still when Lohan wrestles with a pre-teen boy only to point out that he's "hard," before venturing on a fishing trip with a local stud where she provides his first glimpse of a vagina. It's very hard to swallow a drama where the only sane character is a veterinarian who treats people, which uses a was-she-wasn't-she sex abuse question to bring home family values.

Romance (1999, Catherine Breillat)
I would say that this is the gentlest Breillat film that I've seen, and in this case the gentleness includes images of erect penises, hairy pubis, ejaculate, and a newborn exiting a vagina in close-up. To act in a Breillat film must be something, because so much of the words are given to us in narration. The acting, and for this film it's coming mostly from Caroline Ducey, relies heavily on the face, in looking, and in the placement of the body, as in the graceful poses she assumes when being tied up. Breillat is a serious philosopher, much like Bergman in the statements that get made in her films, a poet of the interior thoughts rarely expressed. In her explicitness, which is never sensational (though it may accurately be labeled bold), she invites us to a greater degree of intimacy and a kind of collaboration with her as we notice and react to the private realm she exposes to us. There is a major lack of judgment on her part, to the degree that what may come across as shocking, even degenerate behavior -- much adultery, even a form of prostitution decided on a whim -- is viewed with sensitized eyes. While her plot would sound illogical if explained -- a partnership that includes rigid refusals of sex -- it, as well as her anarchist streak which is brought out in the finale and complimented with a quick poetry, exists in a world that makes sense, not particularly emotionally, or even really philosophically or sociologically; it makes sense in a more active, inner way -- biologically.