Afterglow

Post Coitum explains what women want

The Brattle Theatre's International Festival of Women's Cinema, in mid May, should rescue us, because with the exception of Sally Potter's recent The Tango Lesson, we've hit an arid time for feature films concerning the lives of women -- for example, Marleen Gorris's fumbled Mrs. Dalloway.

Meanwhile, welcome to Brigitte Roüan's Post Coitum (opening at the Kendall Square), a French work co-written by and starring its director, which is the most sparkling "women's picture" to arrive here in many a month. It's a heartbreaking, audaciously sexual and emotional tale of an extramarital romance that sizzles then fizzles, seen from the vantage of the adulterous, chance-taking wife.

"I fall in love only every 15 years," explains Diane (Roüan), a stylish, Paris book editor in her early 40s. The time 15 years before led to marriage, and she's mom to two nice teen boys. Her trial-lawyer husband, Philippe (Patrick Chesnais), is a kindly man but distant, and he and Diane love each other now in a nonphysical way.

Fifteen years have passed! Time for Diane to wake up! She does via a crazed affair with Emilio (Boris Terral), a handsome and much younger engineer. Filming herself bowled over by Eros unleashed, Roüan shoots love scenes that are courageously frank and lusty. Maybe it's erroneous to posit a distinct "woman's point of view," yet it seems that Roüan shows how a female feels the boiling passion of lovemaking.

Then Diane is dumped. Her marriage is a shambles; she's half-dead from pain and humiliation. She's Anna Karenina crushed. The only hope: a certain high cliff on a Greek island, from which the legendary Sappho supposedly leapt.

"Even Greeks don't know about it, what's called the jump of Lefkas," Roüan told me when I interviewed the modest, approachable actress/filmmaker at a wine party at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival. "The story is that the next person who jumps won't die but will be cured of the sorrow of love. I wrote the scene thinking of Jeanne Moreau's leap in Jules and Jim, not The Piano. When I saw The Piano, I shouted, `My God, she's jumping!' For my film's sake, I prayed that Holly Hunter would stay under the water!"

In making Post Coitum, did she conceive of men and women as being essentially different about love?

"We are different animals, but we have the same feelings. I have broken-hearted men to my house who cry all the time. I share love stories with them, but I don't know everything about them. You could spend your life studying men, like an entomologist studying ants.

"I do know that for me, my love career has been more rich and important than my cinematographic career."

In Post Coitum, Diane acts on her anguish at being left, as she tosses on her bed, pushing her hand down deep on her crotch. She revenges herself against Emilio by leaving a turd on his doorstep. Are those "womanly" things to do?

"A man's sexuality is outside. He would have masturbated. Diane's lack of her man is inside of her, so she holds the part they don't share anymore. But the shit at the door, I got that true story from a man: `If you make me feel like a shit, I'll shit.' From psychoanalysis, it's the gift of a child."

There's one last element that seemed perhaps a "woman's way" of seeing, when Roüan framed her shots in Post Coitum to isolate, and almost fetishize, certain parts of Emilio's face, arms, hands. "I intended to show the young man piece by piece," Roüan agreed. "The mouth, the fingers, the dimple, the way he walks. I loved him with the camera the way my character loved him falling in love."

In contrast, Diane is self-conscious at being naked with Emilio because she's so much older. "She's afraid that she's not pretty enough, not good enough. But Emilio's not only handsome, he's delicate. That's why he opens the door to let in just a small light. She feels okay then, he's made her comfortable. She has an orgasm like that and cries out 'Thank you' because she is so grateful."

I ask Roüan about a scene I adore, in which the desperately unhappy Diane goes to a park and everyone there is a lover of some sort: some adolescents, two gay men, an old couple with locked hands on a park bench.

"I don't do things to be clever, but when I was pregnant, I walked about and seemed to meet only pregnant women! When I had broken legs, I met people with broken legs! So everyone that day -- young people, dogs, older people -- is in love. As for that old couple, Diane feels she'll never have that kind of tenderness, for she'll never have love again in her life."

In real life Roüan is divorced, close friends with her ex-husband, and the mother of a teenage boy who plays Diane's ponytailed son in the movie. "But I don't believe in marriage and weddings. I don't know people who met at 17 and are together at 60, though it does exist. Also, I don't know what Diane will do after, and I don't want to know. I expect she'll write a book. As for reuniting with her husband: I've met people who've quit their relationship for five years, then married and had a baby. Anything can happen in life."