An Affair of Love (1999)

The greatest movie ever made..!

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

In a few years they made two movies that had similar plots: "Intimacy" and this "A Liason Pornographique". A man and a woman meet once in a week for one simple reason: to have sex. No love, no feelings... just sex. "Intimacy" was more pessimistic and dark, and maybe "A Lisaon" is more frivolous and absurd, and it looks more like a romantic comedy. Also the narration is pretty artificial: a fake interview with the main characters and a series of flashbacks.It's a pretty nice reflection on how much we complicate things such as love or sex. It's been filmed in a modern style and it has a "trance" soundtrack that it will sound old fashioned in a few years.*My rate: 6/10

A movie about all of us - what we dream of doing, do for real or envy others who do it. The mere meetings of the couple are the fantasy. It's an everyday matter to experience a blind date, but it's a one-to-a thousand chance that it will be so perfect. Its perfection makes the ending so tragic. I was to a great extent shocked by the anonymity, in which the couple exists. And how can "he" realize that he doesn't know neither her name, nor her telephone numbler, nor ...anything, after so many months of regular closeness?! This movie definitely moved me with the simplicity of the story and the tragedy of human misunderstanding. Again, I was fascinated by the beauty of European films.

I trust anyone who's seen this didn't have to delve much into it to understand what Fonteyne's message is. Rather simple I would say, no need to dissect it, what you see is what it really is, as Magritte said about his paintings. The two characters portray the life of probably many of us in today's day and age, a disposable society where there seldomly is time for feelings to be discussed, even though we'd like to. Their "relationship" (I've been too generous I think..) is ironically carried on "routinely" probably like everything else they did on a daily basis, just like many of us do.As we now meet on the internet, they met through a magazine ad, just to dare one another I guess, challenging one another to see who'd give up first maybe. Fonteyne constantly keeps his lens on the two of them, leaving everything else out of sight, almost as if he were afraid of one of them fretting the situation and escaping. They don't even know each other's name; they just carry on, consuming their rapport behind the red of their hotel room walls, a deep, intense red, as deep and strong as the attraction for one another.No matter how prone each of them is at the end of the movie to declare their feelings, they will eventually fail in the attempt to chip the red off the wall and carry some of it along in their lives. A strong sense of regret underpins the end of this sad -yet realistic- story. What we see toward the epilogue is a manic attention to the few details around them from a lighting perspective: The red walls and the bed sheets as their love slowly dissipates.

This little movie is simply sublime. I ran across it again when searching for more Sergi Lopez films. His range is simply amazing, from sensitive fantasy lover (as in this film) to the most dastardly twisted villain. I would be hard-pressed to think of any more talented male actor in European film today. I particularly liked him in "Dirty Pretty Things", due to its serious, thoughtful treatment of the pressures on immigrants. "A Friend Like Harry" was just great entertainment, humor of the darkest sort."Une Liason Pornografique" is still another type of film altogether. The French produce many interesting films on sex, some successful, some less so. This is of the best I can recall from my own 20-year love affair with European art films. Another recent French film that I can whole-heartedly recommend is Coline Serreau's Chaos, which took several years to cross the ocean to the U.S., but was originally released in 2001. Also Chocolat by Claire Denys, another quiet but piercingly accurate character study.