Masochism in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste & Catherine Breillat’s
Romance
Jon Davies, 2003
“It is the common business of sacrifice to bring life
and death into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness
and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown. Here life is mingled
with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite.
Nowadays sacrifice is outside the field of our experience and imagination
must do duty for the real thing” (Bataille 91).
Romance (1999), directed by Catherine Breillat and La
Pianiste (2001), directed by Michael Haneke are both recent French films
by acclaimed and experienced auteurs that provoked extreme controversy by
explicitly representing their female protagonists’ sexual masochism.
In this paper, I will critically examine how these two films employ different
formal and narrative strategies to represent the contentious subject of female
masochism, which is primarily conceptualized through the maternal.
These films use their protagonists’ masochism to critique normative female
sexuality (in Breillat’s case) and urban upper-class alienation (in Haneke’s
case). In the rational Europe occupied by Haneke’s and Breillat’s characters,
women’s bodies are subjected to daily indignities and traumas. By making
a spectacle of this violence through their characters’ extreme sexual masochism,
the directors are engaging in a critical practice. Deleuze sees masochism
as a sexualized aggression turned upon the self (91). He states that
in masochism, “[b]y scrupulously applying the law we are able to demonstrate
its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to prevent
or to conjure” (79). He believes that masochism is a means of achieving
pleasure by using punishment to not just resolve anxiety and guilt, but to
distort and parody them as well (ibid.).
Masochism has been discussed in many different ways, though
I believe that Jessica Benjamin’s interpretation, in conjunction with Deleuze’s,
are the most important to keep in mind. According to Benjamin, masochism
presents “intense pain [that] causes the violent rupture of the self, a profound
experience of fragmentation and chaos” (61). She also suggests that
“the violation of the body is a transgression of the boundary between life
and death, even as it breaks through our discontinuity from the other” (63).
Self-willed abuse represents in masochistic narratives a “search for an elusive
spiritual or psychological satisfaction” (56). I believe like Benjamin
does that masochism, and its partner sadism, are ultimately about recognition,
not just of one’s partner, the Other, but of the role of power in one’s world:
“[We should not] undo our ties to others but rather... disentangle them...make
of them not shackles but circuits of recognition” (221).
The protagonist of La Pianiste is Erika Kohut,
a middle-age piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. La Pianiste
explores similar themes as Code Inconnu, as Erika’s behaviour is presented
as a sort of case study into the effects of bourgeois urban isolation on
an individual psyche. Haneke presents her sexual masochism as a pathological
sublimation of her repressed emotions and abusive relationship with her mother.
This is is contrast to the sex-positive point-of-view that sees masochism
as simply one of many ways one can have sex, deriving pleasure from safe,
sane and consensual subjection and pain. It seems that every one of
Erika’s scenes of “perversion” are represented as effects whose causation
lies in the traumatic events of her personal life. It is after she
gets into an argument with her over-protective mother during a rehearsal
that she goes to the peep show to watch porn and sniff soiled kleenexes.
It is after the young and adoring Walter Klemmer is accepted into her class
against her will that she mutilates her vagina with a razor. And it
is after Erika jealously watches Walter console her neurotic student Anna
that she puts broken glass in Anna’s coat pocket and has sex with Walter
for the first time. Despite the director’s problematic pathologizing
of masochism, his film presents her wounded subjectivity and masochistic
desires through interesting uses of diegetic space, colour, and intertextual
sound which in some ways subvert his moralistic tone.
One of the most notable characteristics of La Pianiste’s
form is how Haneke structures diegetic space. Doorways are used as
symbols of access (or lack of access) to physical and social spaces.
There is a notably high occurrence of shots of Erika coming through doorways,
including the very first shot of the film as she returns home to her enraged
mother, to the very last shot in which she leaves the concert hall after
her final self-mutilation. These shots, like most shots of Erika are
often centrally composed and severely symmetrical, emphasizing both her emotional
and physical rigour and the rigidity of the social, familial and physical
spaces that she occupies. Also, by positioning the camera in the space
before or after it is occupied by Erika, as if waiting for her arrival or
left behind after her departure, Haneke creates a menacing effect by drawing
our attention to how she is under surveillance by a point-of-view that is
never embodied by a character. This emphasizes our voyeuristic role.
The most effective example of this is after the vagina mutilation scene,
a sequence shot, where Erika leaves the room and shuts off the light, leaving
us in the dark and quite disturbed by what we have been forced to watch.
Here Erika closes us up into one of the many private spaces where she commits
her transgressions.
Throughout the film, Haneke focuses on the fragility and
tenuousness of these private spaces. In both La Pianiste and Romance,
there are virtually no shots of the female protagonists on the street or
outdoors, and when there are, the characters are usually alone. The
overabundance of claustrophobic interiors in both films echoes the emotional
introversion of the two protagonists. There are many spaces in La Pianiste
where both physical and visual access is limited to outsiders, though the
threat of a breach is always present. Erika’s workplace, the Conservatory,
is itself an archetypal private space, where students must sacrifice everything
in order to get by, and those who are allowed within its walls are carefully
selected and regimented. The private spaces where Erika’s desires manifest
themselves including the drive-in theatre, the video peep show, Erika’s room,
the piano studio, the coat room, the locker room and the washrooms at home
and at school. Another example occurs when Erika and her mother arrives
at Walter’s home for the recital early in the film, she shuts him out of
the elevator even though there was enough room for him. As she ascends,
we hear Walter rushing up the stairs, and we see him as the elevator passes
each floor. The effect is humourous as he mockingly following their progress
upwards, but seems more sinister in retrospect considering his later behaviour.
This scene clearly shows Erika’s coldness and cruelty in relation with others
(notably those younger than her, her students) and her lack of emotions.
It also acts as a microcosm for the home space that she shares with her mother
that Walter will later penetrate successfully, with violent results.
The elevator scene is echoed near the end of the film
except it becomes mother who is locked out of the space where Walter and
Erika are together. In fact, this is Erika’s ultimate fantasy according
to her letter, to be tied up and locked in her room with her mother outside.
At home, Erika’s oppressive mother is consistently trying to invade her private
space, to the point that they sleep in the same bed every night. Erika’s
mother is invasive, controlling, and authoritarian. Their relationship
is fraught with power games and abuse. We never learn the woman’s name,
she is important to us only for being The Mother. One particularly
salient aspect of Erika’s fantasies is the shame and fear that they would
cause her mother. Self-abuse is a way of attacking the most precious
gift her mother gave her, life, a form of sacrifice and revenge that makes
spending too much money pale by comparison. This revenge is most evident
in the scene where Erika jumps on her mother in bed and begins molesting/attacking
her relentlessly, proclaiming her love one moment and breaking down in tears
the next, “shamelessly” stating “I saw the hairs on your sex” in order to
embarrass her further. This scene is both a complex and profoundly
charged representation of the traumatic relations between parent and child,
but also an act of vengeance against the mother. Benjamin sees the
question of dominance and submission as rooted in childhood, where normally
one must go from complete dependence on the mother to becoming an independent
entity (52). In Erika’s case, her mother has prevented her from achieving
independence, a phenomenon that Benjamin feels occurs more in mother/daughter
relationships because “[t]o the extent that the mother has sacrificed her
own independence, the girl’s attempt at independence would represent an assertion
of power for which she has no basis in identification. The girl’s sense
of self is shaped by the realization that her mother’s source of power resides
in her self-sacrifice” (78-9). Benjamin goes on to suggest that submission
is the very citation of the “maternal attitude” (79). This would seem
to be the situation in La Pianiste, where mother and daughter are trapped
in a cycle of sacrifice and submission which Erika takes to their physical
extreme. It is no wonder that the sexual pleasure that she seeks offers
no opportunity for procreation but instead is fixated on destroying or perverting
the body of Erika, daughter.
Erika’s relationship with her mother is echoed by that
of her student Anna and her mother. Anna’s mother mistakenly states
that she has made sacrifices for Anna’s musical success, and Erika, in perhaps
her most humane moment, corrects her, stating that it is her daughter who
has made the sacrifices. We get the sense that Erika’s success has
been partly the result of her mother’s unrelenting domination and pressuring
of her (at one point she says “no one must surpass you, my girl” and later
“all those sacrifices for this?”), that her mother does not appreciate the
sacrifices that Erika made to succeed, nor the sacrifices which she enacts
on her own body throughout the film. When Anna’s mother states that
“she’s hardly attractive, talent is her only attribute” we get the sense
that Erika’s intentions for attacking Anna were not only based in jealousy
but were also an attempt to use physical pain to save her from the emotional
pain of a life of sacrifices and abusive maternal pressure. The bodies
of Anna and Erika are also linked by their overabundance of bodily fluids.
Anna’s attack of diarrhea and frequent mucus-inflected crying link her with
Erika’s vomiting, bleeding, coughing and urinating in the film. Also,
when Anna’s mother says “whoever did this should have his hands chopped off,”
she is repeating the phrase said by Erika’s mother at the beginning, in reference
to Erika hitting her. In the film, having one’s hands chopped off is
not only the punishment for maternal abuse but also for damaging the hands
of another pianist, the supreme act of destruction. As Erika is being
beat up by Walter at the end, she yelps “don’t attack my hands.” Also,
it is Anna whom Erika is replacing in the final concert, and their two mothers
sit together in the audience.
Erika’s transgressions remain private; If her desires
were publicly known, her career would suffer. Whether cutting her vagina
in her bathroom, pissing next to a car where kids are having sex (her voyeurism
echoing her mother’s), viewing porn and sniffing soiled kleenexes, placing
broken glass in Anna’s pocket, or orchestrating sex with Walter, she is closed
off from the world, physically as well as emotionally. The threat of
being found remains, even when mother is away. As the film progresses,
she seems to desire public awareness of her transgressions, perhaps growing
tired of being enclosed and restrained. She states in the locker room
that she doesn’t mind if she and Walter are caught, and in the final scene
we are led to believe that Erika will attack Walter at the concert.
As the masses of people including Walter rush past her into the auditorium,
she loses her chance for public transgression and directs the knife at her
own shoulder. Jabbing herself without witnesses, her face registers
resignation and disgust, as she ultimately fails to break out of her self-enclosed
world.
Diegetic space is often fragmented during the piano performance
scenes, beginning from the opening credits. This is most apparent in
the recital scene at Walter’s home where Erika and a man play but despite
the many different shots we do not get a sense of the space as a whole until
the end of the scene. The audience however is shown in a single unified
shot. Later we will often see a point-of-view shot of the person playing,
or a shot from behind, but less often are the hands and face of the musician
in the same shot. This emphasizes the alienating disjunction between
the musician’s body and soul, a dualism ascribed to patriarchal female sexuality
and explored further in Romance. The musician’s body and mind must
be subjugated and disciplined to the musical instrument for the enjoyment
of others. Erika’s cruelest master is thus her piano, which would explain
why the film is named for the instrument she has mastered even though she,
and not her music, is the focus of virtually every scene. The act of
performing is essentially a sacrifice of the self for the enjoyment of others,
a submission. At one point, Erika’s mother refers to the “instrument
fetish” of Walter’s father even though music plays far healthier a role in
the Klemmer family than in the Kohut household. The link between music
and masochism is emphasized further by Erika’s conversation with Walter about
Schumann nearing the point of losing his mind, as Erika’s father had before
dying in a mental institution. She states “it’s being aware of what
it means to lose oneself,” suggesting that music, like the physical pain
of her masochism, can bring one to the limits of consciousness and sanity.
In Erika’s first sex scene with Walter in the school washroom, the acts occur
outside of the frame, their bodies are as fragmented in this love scene as
those we see performing on the piano.
As in classical melodrama, Erika’s private desires manifest
themselves through visual excess, notably colour. While the entire
film is overwhelmingly in warm tones such as brown and red (her dark blue
bathroom is one notable exception), as we are witness to more and more of
her masochistic activities the colour red takes on a specifically symbolic
role. While the drive-in snack bar is perhaps the first bright red
space, the most jarring example occurs immediately after Erika has been chased
by the kids she has spied on at the drive-in. There is a cut to her
bright red wardrobe, red dresser and her mother in her omnipresent red housecoat
as she throws Erika’s clothes on the floor. After Erika returns home
and they fight - apparently father has died again? - there is a cut to an
usher in bright red putting up red posters for the recital at the conservatory.
Soon after, when Anna’s hands are cut after her recital in the red auditorium,
Erika states (ironically?) “the sight of blood makes me ill” and runs up
a bright red staircase to the bathroom in which she and Walter will first
erotically engage. Later, in the scene where Walter is in her room,
after following her and her bright red hat home, she seems to smile for the
first time when they block the door - and thus mother’s access - with the
large red dresser, which gets pushed into the center of the frame when Walter
storms out. Finally, when Walter breaks Erika’s nose, and the blood
pours all over her white nightgown (reminding us of her vaginal blood violating
the pure white bathtub), it signals the end of any relationship between them
for good.
There are several moments where the colour white is used
to signify a form of sublime escape from Erika’s life. During her classes,
Erika can’t seem to take her eyes off of the window, which we primarily see
only as a glowing white screen with nothing outdoors visible, the complete
opposite of the deep black of the piano. More important is the scene
when Erika runs out a door from her painful interaction with Walter in the
hockey locker room onto an outdoor skating rink. As the camera watches
her fragile body stumble out onto the ice, the blinding daylight reflected
on its surface has the force of divine transcendence. This is the most
beautiful shot of the film, and it occurs perhaps at the moment of Erika’s
greatest debasement.
As in all of Haneke’s films, television and video are
employed as ironic counterpoint to the feelings and words of the characters.
At one point a documentary about horses on the TV will echo the “mare in
heat seeks ardent successful stallion” in the porn magazine ad Erika catches
her student Fritz reading. In the scene at the drive-in, Erika and
the kids she watches are not paying attention to what plays on the big screen
while at home, her mother is too distracted worrying about Erika’s whereabouts
to watch her TV. Richard Combs points out that TV is used to emphasize
“the closeness, the punishing mutual dependency that holds Erika to her mother
and in which she loses herself” (26.) Also, our first overt sign of
Erika’s non-normative sexuality is the grainy close-up video imagery of hardcore
porn in the peep show, one of several instances of startling close-up TV
shots.
This is one of many jarring juxtapositions of high and
low culture in the film. When we see Erika enter into a shopping mall
and then into the sex shop, or when we see her at the drive-in’s snack bar
surrounded by hyperactive teens as opposed to the disciplined Conservatory
students, we know immediately that something significant will take place
because the contrast is so great. This is due both to Isabelle Huppert’s
excellent performance as Erika which registers the disjunction through her
obvious discomfort, and to the choices of music for the soundtrack.
For example, the classical music of Erika’s rehearsal with her trio continues
as she walks through the shopping mall and into the sex shop, the music overlapping
with that of hardcore sex when she enters the peep show, and then stopping
completely. As this scene goes on, classical music overlaps the peep
show again, this time the theme that begins “the dogs are barking” which
is from the scene that follows. This song is repeated many times in
the film, and it narratively represents the potential musical success or
failure of Anna, Erika’s doppelganger. If one reads this piece - entitled
“In the Village,” a section of the Winter Journey with music by Schubert
and text by Wilhelm Mueller - in its entirety one finds what could be called
Haneke’s filmic creed. The text is written from the point of view of
a figure who is leaving his town, a place where people only seek pleasure
in their dreams and not in reality, which can be seen as a phenomenon in
the postmodern West. The protagonist’s question “why should I linger
among the sleepers?” could be the motto of any of Haneke’s alienated characters
who either express their suffering through extreme repression, bursts of
unmotivated ultraviolence, or both.
Haneke subtly suggests that all romantic relationships
contain elements of domination and submission. The entire relationship
between Walter and Erika can be seen as a mind game. There are many
shots of Erika listening to Walter play, and remaining extremely stoic and
poker-faced as he attempts over and over again to impress her. They
exchange looks repeatedly during a concert. He seems to be able to
read her almost immediately, and he toys with her mercilessly. He is
keenly aware of her problems, stating “Allow yourself feelings for once,
forget your mother” and later he asks her mother why she does not allow Erika
to have a lock on her door. At the moment when Erika pulls out her
box of ropes and chains and begins to open up to him about her desires, their
roles switch irreversibly. Erika becomes much more sympathetic and
communicative while Walter stops being playful, energetic and enthusiastic
and becomes unpredictable, damaged and abusive. In the moment where
she vomits and tells him not to look (and later after washing states that
she is “clean as a baby”) she is profoundly vulnerable, and his abuse, often
invoking the terms “sick” and “dirty” are very damaging to her. His
attempts to indulge Erika’s fantasies are too full of rage, bitterness and
disgust to be pleasurable to her. For Erika, being punched in the face
in a controlled and consensual erotic situation is far different than being
punched by Walter in a state of fury. Erika’s masochism is ironically
too active to be the passivity that Walter desires, as is evidenced by his
raping her. His childlike demeanour hides his machismo: “you can’t
get a guy going and then take refuge on the ice... You can’t humiliate a
man that way.” Walter’s use of the term “ice” refers literally to the
skating rink onto which Erika escaped. Erika’s masochism seems perverse
to Walter, but he also cannot understand how she can impose such instrumental
rules and restrictions on a human relationship.
All of Erika’s transgressions are performed like cathartic
rituals. To be involved with someone else, she must impose a contract.
The ritual and the contract are both important elements of masochism according
to Deleuze (58). As he states: “The masochistic contract generates
a type of law which leads straight into ritual. The masochist is obsessed;
ritualistic activity is essential to him [sic], since it epitomizes the world
of phantasy” (81). Erika’s masochism is marked by her intense degree
of control and the specificity of her organization and planning, epitomized
by her letter to Walter which shatters his affection for her. This
is the rational, carefully constructed contract that she would like Walter
to participate in. Walter’s reaction resembles that of someone witnessing
sex for the first time as described by Georges Bataille: “He would think
she was sick, just as mad dogs are sick...Sickness is not putting it strongly
enough, though; for the time being the personality is dead” (106).
When Walter greets Erika pleasantly in the final scene after attacking her
the night before, it shocks her, yet this is the kind of hypocritical “keeping
up appearances” that Erika has made a life of as well. The scenes where
she relentlessly shames a young male student for reading a porn personal
ad out loud with his friends at a store would be one example.
The ice that Walter refers to and the skating rink which
Erika escapes to have symbolic resonance in Deleuze’s analysis of masochism:
“Masochistic coldness represents the freezing point, the
point of dialectical transmutation,
a divine latency corresponding to the catastrophe of the Ice Age.
But under the cold remains a supersensual sentimentality buried under
the ice and protected by fur; this
sentimentality radiates in turn through the ice as the
generative principle of new order, a specific wrath and a specific
cruelty. The coldness is both
protective milieu and medium, cocoon and vehicle: it protects
supersensual sentimentality as inner life, and expresses
it as external order, as wrath and
severity” (46).
In Deleuze’s view, masochism refers to male masochism, and the “cold-maternal-severe,
icy-sentimental-cruel” entity is the woman-torturer (37). In La Pianiste,
Erika is both masochist and sadist, she is this woman-torturer who enacts
pain on herself, and in Walter’s mind, on him as well.
In Romance, the division between the worlds of love and
sex are played out in terms of mise-en-scène, narration, and editing.
In Romance, the protagonist named Marie seeks sexual satisfaction after her
partner Paul stops desiring her. Like La Pianiste, colour is used expressively,
here to demarcate the world of love from the world of sex. The apartment
that Marie and Paul share is completely white, including all of the furniture,
household objects, walls, and most notably, the bed sheets. Marie’s
interior monologue, which dominates the film, begins in the pristine white
bathroom as she is brushing her teeth. The white space not only represents
Paul’s chastity - and an insane asylum - but also the barriers that he has
constructed around himself. The first night after their talk about
sex, Paul goes to bed in a pristine white t-shirt and shorts in order to
limit Marie’s access to his body, presumably for the first time. Marie’s
white outfits, like Erika’s earth tones, are notable for being fashionably
cold and muted, in stark contrast to their sometimes overwhelming desires
(though Marie will wear red as her journey progresses). Paul’s body
is represented as a classical male body: closed, smooth, impenetrable, a
statue. He works as a fashion model, posing as a matador with a woman
who is urged to be submissive to him in the opening scene. He is stoic,
rational, and uncommunicative. He coldly informs Marie that he has
lost interest in sex and is unable to have sex with her because he would
stop loving her. At one point in the film, Marie states that she can
only see absolutes, she cannot see shades of grey, which is emphasized by
the colour scheme in the film. Despite her pale, ethereal look that
matches the apartment, her body is the complete opposite of Paul’s, it is
represented as open and grotesque, soft, with gaping orifices. She
states: “I quite like disgusting things.” She needs and loves sex,
which Paul does not understand, thus their two bodies cannot be reconciled.
During the conversation where they fight about their sex life, they walk
out to the sea, and the camera stays behind, it does not follow them anymore
but watches them walk far away, establishing a distance between us and them.
In the very next scene Marie says to Paul “you only love me when there’s
a table between us.”
As opposed to La Pianiste, the sexual transgressions of
Marie are here primarily developed through her interior monologue and the
dialogue, and not through the camera’s observation. Her sexual explorations
are framed more as a journey than Erika’s fragmented rituals thanks to this
powerful subjective female voice. And instead of ascribing causation
to a cycle of maternal abuse and sacrifice, Marie’s developing masochism
is ascribed to her belief in a fundamental divide between love and sex.
As the film progresses, this chasm will be represented by a split between
her mind and her body. In her conversation with a trick she meets at
a bar late at night named Paolo, she does not respond when he confides that
his girlfriend has died, she only reacts when he states that he has not had
sex in four months. She is not interested in emotion with him but wants
to get straight to the physicality. Later, when she first meets Paolo,
whose name is a “foreign” translation of Paul, for sex, they are bathed in
warm reddish light, a colour motif that will repeat itself in the scenes
with Robert, her employer.
The effectiveness of the film comes significantly from
the editing choices. After making out with Paolo in a car, Marie runs
to work, which a straight cut reveals to be an elementary school classroom
where she teaches. I think many of us are initially surprised by the
juxtaposition of casual sex and school teaching, but this is no doubt intentional
on Breillat’s part. She is challenging our internalized assumptions
about sexually adventurous women, making it clear that loving sex and being
nurturing/maternal are not mutually exclusive, an idea that she will develop
to its extreme. In this scene, she teaches the children the verbs “être”
and “avoir,” which mean “to be” and “to have.” She points out that
you can be without having and have without being, which is the underlying
philosophy of the film. Marie’s pleasure comes from dissociating herself
from her own existence and becoming an object for others. One of the
ways this manifests itself for Marie is when Paul decides to have sex with
her if it will be to procreate, thereby linking in her mind pregnancy not
only with sexual pleasure but with loss of subjectivity.
Marie’s masochism is conceptualized through self-annihilation:
“I disappear in proportion to the cock taking me, I hollow myself, that’s
my purity.” In Susan Griffin’s analysis of The Story of O, she sees
this archetypal S/M text as an “emblem of pornographic culture” which acts
to silence and destroy women (199). The most abominable aspect of female
masochistic narratives to her and other feminist critics is the negation
of the self: “Inside this quest we discover only emptiness...To exist fully
as a body is to cease to exist as a soul” (195). This is the essence
of Marie’s distinction between être and avoir. Griffin believes
that pornography is responsible for the body/soul - or in Marie’s terms cunt/face
- split in women’s minds, and that only consciousness and the search for
meaning, which masochistic narratives eliminate, can heal this rift (ibid).
I would argue that artworks do not all have to heal, but that they can represent
and critique phenomena - no matter how unpleasant to some - that exist in
the world. I believe that Breillat is trying to respond to feminists
who feel as Griffin does that “nonbeing is a fiction which exists only in
male experience. The self itself cannot experience nonbeing...the experience
of the loss of self is insanity” (197). Breillat’s film is working
in a tradition of culture-producers who see self-annihilation as a real effect
of eros taken to its extreme, and insanity as a subversive escape from our
rational slaughterhouse of a world, and she is suggesting that these are
as much female experiences, like it or not, as male. Where as in La
Pianiste Erika becomes fragile and vulnerable when she reveals her desires
to her love-object, Marie’s desire for self-annihilation grows hungrier the
more she expresses them. Perhaps Erika’s greatest flaw is that she
sought sexual satisfaction with someone who loved her, an attempt that fails
in Romance, which examines how a patriarchal culture can make love and sex
mutually exclusive.
The next relationship that Marie embarks on is heralded
with an almost religious annunciation by the mise-en-scène, a sort
of mutation of the skating rink scene in La Pianiste. In the form of
a dictation on the school black board, she writes a text about how dull and
ordinary life is in the bleak winter months (the perpetual whiteness of her
home with Paul) until the light bursts forth again and spring arrives.
At this moment of joyous renewal, the unassuming school principal, Robert,
enters the classroom to request her in his office. It is immediately
apparent that the red-shirted Robert will bring some sort of sinister satisfaction
to Marie, as we soon cut to the two in his house, an enormous gothic cavern
of dark red furnished interiors, a sensual world completely opposite to Paul’s
sterile, institutional modern living. If Paul’s world of modeling is
one of skin, then the homely Robert’s is one of blood. However, they
are both performers, Robert has made his home into a stage, complete with
red curtains. Unlike Paul and Paolo (whom Marie stopped seeing because
he was likable), Robert is physically ugly, as well as sexist and conceited.
One manner in which he asserts himself as master in these scenes is through
voice. Unlike the rest of the film, we hardly hear Marie’s voice when
she is with him, he has taken over. While his body is not as classical
as Paul’s, Robert still represents male reason and rationality through his
speech: he constantly tells her of his sexual conquests, his catalogued memories
of sex with thousands of women, including noted celebrities, despite his
unattractiveness. He is like the libertines in Sade, who persistently
measure everything and go on long tirades meticulously explaining their own
transgressions. As Linda Williams points out, Marie’s exploratory voice-over
is reminiscent of Sade’s practice of philosophy in the bedroom as well (21-2).
Robert’s banality and carefully regimented way of having sex increases her
sexual pleasure while there is never a risk of falling in love with him.
He believes that the only way to be loved by a woman is through rape, and
that sex is a struggle between beauty and ugliness, the divine and the trivial.
He positions himself as the father and mentor, treating
her and speaking to her like a child, but also reading to her the text: “As
the mother begets the son, the son begets the mother...he purifies her and
himself uno acto, he turns the Babylonian Whore into a Virgin.” While
Marie does not become virginal by the end, she does experience a sanctification
through the desubjectifying experience of childbirth, and she is impregnated
without semen, a “Virgin Mary stunt” as she calls it. She agrees to
be dominated, and the ritual begins. In Robert’s home we hear non-diegetic
music for the first time, and this gets louder as she is tied up. Like
the sex scene with Paolo, this scene’s importance is emphasized by being
filmed in a long take, which is rare for Breillat. This is Marie’s
moment of communion, and she breaks down in such a way that it is impossible
to separate her feelings of joy and pleasure from her feelings of violation
and pain, which is a credit to Caroline Ducey’s brave performance: her experience
of “slowly turn[ing] into dead flesh” is the divine that she will now continue
seek. Partly because of its dark chamber atmosphere and partly because
of the distaste we feel for Robert and his misogyny, it is very difficult
to tell how much time has passed. The structuring of time is both the
effect of Breillat’s and Haneke’s editing practices and a fundamental of
masochism. Deleuze states that “[w]aiting and suspense are essential
characteristics of the masochistic experience.” In La Pianiste, we
are constantly held in suspense when Erika is committing her transgressions
because we fear that she may be caught. This is emphasized by the vagina-cutting
scene, the broken glass scene, and the sex scenes with Walter being filmed
as sequence shots or long takes. These scenes, often recording painful
activities in a graphic way, explore waiting and endurance. Perhaps
the most intensely suspenseful scene in the film is Erika’s (and our) anticipation
as she watches Walter read her letter. In Romance, while Breillat
favours elliptical editing that does not make the audience wait, there is
a marked contrast between the long take sex scenes, and the telescoping of
time that occurs in Breillat’s typical montage style.
After her scene with Robert, Marie’s voice-over becomes
more and more extreme in articulating her feelings of subjection and self-destruction.
She sees her body as an appendage, stating that she feels like lost luggage
after she has left Robert’s and Paul isn’t home. Marie’s breakdown
after being anally raped by a stranger (the first thing she yells at him
is “I’m not ashamed, asshole!”) clearly contains none of the ambiguous mix
of pleasure and pain of her breakdown at Robert’s dungeon. Like in
La Pianiste, the female protagonist emphasizes that masochism is not a desire
for rape. Marie seeks death, but on her own terms: “I want to be opened
up all the way, when you can see that the mystique is a load of innards,
the woman is dead.” When she returns home, the TV that Paul constantly
watches is playing a show called Love Affair, an ironic comment on her situation
with Paul, who expresses only cold indifference towards her.
Marie conceives her child during an act of domestic violence,
where Paul throws her to the floor during sex after she says “I’ll be the
man and you be the woman.” Punishing her with rage and disgust for
her suggestion of gender fluidity, Marie’s trading of her baby’s soul for
Paul’s at the end of the film is her revenge. From this point in the
film onwards, Breillat overtly makes comparisons between women’s role as
mother and sexual masochism or subjection. For Bataille, birth is inextricable
from death, one is both the affirmation and the negation of the other.
He believes that the feelings of horror and shame that birth and death arouse
in us are due to our disgust with the generative powers and the decay of
nature: “Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion”
(59). The act of childbearing is replete with associations with sexual
activity, degradation, violence and taboo: “Is it not itself a rending process,
something excessive and outside the orderly course of permitted activity?
Does it not imply the denial of the established order, a denial without which
there could be no transition from nothingness to being, or from being to
nothingness?” (54). Childbirth is also a reminder of the eventual necessity
of the parents’ death (61).
The scenes of Marie in medical environments are presented
as much more dehumanizing than her masochistic encounters with Robert.
They are scenes of extreme degradation played out in a sterile room quite
similar to Paul’s apartment. Laid out in this new white room for a
gynecological exam, she is mechanically penetrated by a class of medical
students’ hands: “I became a case study, a piece of meat, this is what happens
when you get pregnant.” The experience of pregnancy in the medical
system increases the disjunction she feels between sex and love, body and
mind. This is most overtly represented when Breillat cuts from a close-up
of a cumshot on a woman’s belly to a nurse squirting a similar-looking gel
onto Marie’s belly for an ultrasound. Also, at one point Marie holds
up a small mirror to her vagina, and then to her face, stating: “a cunt doesn’t
go with a face.” The effect is as surreal and disturbing as The Rape
painting by Magritte, partly because we rarely see the two features isolated
and juxtaposed, and also because the entire body and identity of Marie is
collapsed into these two parts. With this statement Breillat is suggesting
that the entire history of patriarchal domination of women is responsible
for the split that women feel between a cunt and a face, it is an effect
of systemic sexual objectification. The most outrageous and perhaps
overly didactic representation of this is Marie’s fantasy of a hellish brothel
where women’s top halves are indoors, treated to a pristine white heaven
of chaste love and affection, while their bottom halves are outside, protruding
from a red-lit hellish fortress where anonymous, dirty men fuck them without
a care. This scene emphasizes that Marie’s struggle is widespread,
and not only an individual problem. She is just one of many women here.
According to Barbara Creed, the womb has historically
been seen as something monstrous, which due to its generative capabilities
mark woman as grotesque (43). The womb is also abject in that it dissolves
the border between inside and outside, self and other (49) which is a stereotypical
characteristic of the grotesque feminine that Marie embodies. Creed
sees the popularity of house settings in horror films as representations
of the womb, and the overwhelmingly interior locations of both La Pianiste
and Romance, as well as their themes of motherhood, would lend support to
that claim (55-6). Creed analyses David Cronenberg’s film The Brood,
about a woman with an exterior uterus that produces mutant children who act
as their mother’s murderous army (45). Whether intentionally or not,
Breillat is engaging with horror movie narratives such as this of the “woman
as monstrous womb” in Romance, where birth is presented both as self-annihilation
for the mother and as deadly for the no longer necessary father.
Marie’s body is transformed into an entity whose sole
purpose is to act as a vessel for her child, and for Marie, this is the greatest
gift she could be given. Procreation is conceptualized as a liberation
in Romance, unlike La Pianiste. Before she gives birth she turns the
gas on (note the white stove) at home and Robert picks her up in a white
car - which is perhaps signaling the doom that would befall her if she formed
a nuclear family with him. This is only the second scene to have extra-diegetic
music, a few seconds of electric guitars. They go to the hospital,
where she is told she must give birth without an epidural. The first
shot of her vagina is quick, and is a graphic match with that of her vagina
when Robert is fingering her in their sex scene, thereby connecting the act
of childbirth with her first experience of S/M. The voice-over states
“It’s incredible to create life... a woman isn’t one until she’s a mother,
nothing before matters.” This signals that she will be able to start
her life over from a position of zero, a state of nothingness that is a form
of purity, as Robert’s text had predicted.
The editing of the next sequence is perhaps the most symbolically
charged in the film. Marie’s baby is born in an extremely graphic sequence
that rivals only Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, emphasizing once
more the grotesque that she claims to enjoy so much. The baby lets
out a cry and Breillat immediately cuts to a short shot of the exterior of
Paul’s apartment (with him inside it) exploding, and then she cuts back to
a close-up and then a medium shot of Marie in bed with her newborn surrounded
by flowers, a private funeral ceremony for the two who survived him.
Robert, who was present at the birth, is no longer around. Paul had
to die in order for Marie to experience pleasure, and this pleasure was represented
by Breillat as reaching its pinnacle in the act of childbirth where her “vagina...explode[d],
expulsing my baby.” She sees the sacrificial act of having a baby and
naming him for Paul as making up for the fact that she murdered him, which
is explained in the final line, addressing whoever keeps track of souls in
heaven that her score is now even. The final scene of the film is noteworthy
in that it is the first to prioritize the colour black, only the horses,
the baby, and the trim on Marie’s dress are white. To emphasize how
Paul belongs to her past, the objects in the shot are distinctly antique.
This funeral, which Breillat juxtaposes with the birth of the earlier scene,
emphasizes Marie’s newfound “purity” and her liberation from Paul’s oppressive
ideal of romantic love.
Contemporary French cinema has many examples of films
that explore masochism and submission, notably Breillat’s early works like
Une Vraie Jeune Fille and Tapage Nocturne but also the work of Francois Ozon
such as Gouttes d’Eau Sur Pierres Brûlantes and Amours Criminels, and
of course such classics as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. These
narratives provide an opportunity to examine the extremes of human behaviour,
and the consistently fascinating interconnections of sex and death.
However, as is evident from Romance and La Pianiste, masochistic characters
can also be used to comment critically on the state of humanity in the West.
While I find Haneke’s tone problematic and Breillat’s themes a bit redundant,
I believe they, and their actresses, ultimately succeed in these films by
refusing to present the masochist protagonist as a knowable object.
Instead, the film itself becomes marked by interesting uses of colour, narration,
sound, intertextuality, editing, and diegetic space that add complexity to
the representations. These formal strategies suggest that the masochist
cannot be isolated and objectified, but that their very human desires and
fantasies are interwoven with the systems, whether it social worlds or filmic
texts, that they inhabit.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary
Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986.
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and
the Problem of Domination. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Combs, Richard. “Living in Never-Never Land: Michael Haneke Continues
the Search for a New European Cinema.”
Film Comment 38.2 (Mar.-Apr. 2002). 26-8.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty.
Trans. Jean McNeil. New York:
G. Braziller, 1971.
Griffin, Susan. “Sadomasochism and the Erosion of Self: A Critical
Reading of Story of O.” Against
Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis. Eds., Robin Ruth
Linden et al. San Francisco: Frog in the Well,
1982.
Williams, Linda. “Cinema and the Sex Act.” Cineaste 27.1 (Dec.
2001). 20-25.
Appendix
In the Village
The dogs are barking, the chains are rattling;
The people are sleeping in their beds,
Dreaming of things they don’t have,
Refreshing themselves in good and bad.
And in the morning all will have vanished.
Oh well, they had their share of pleasure
And hope that what they missed
Can be found again on their pillows.
Drive me out with your barking, you vigilant dogs,
Don’t let me rest when it’s time for slumber.
I am finished with all my dreams.
Why should I linger among the sleepers?
Winterreise / Winter Journey
Music: Franz Schubert, Op. 89 Nr. 1-24, Vienna 1827
Text: Wilhelm Mueller / Translation: Celia Sgroi