Buyers must know that in a better world than this one, the ill-fated NC-17 rating – concocted by the MPAA in the 1990s to denote “adults-only” screen material, nobody under 17 allowed – could well have been deployed for French director Lou Jeunet’s erotic period piece, focusing on the intimate, oft-unclad lives of a famously sensual group of Parisian writers in the late 1800s.
Pierre Louÿs (Niels Schneider), a libertine poet-novelist with a side hobby of photography, professes nonbelief in love as it applies to marital fidelity. But he is in favor of passion, and he maintains an album of naked women he claims to have conquered. Pierre especially covets the beautiful Marie (doe-eyed Noémie Merlant), only to see the girl married off instead to his wealthy, nice but hopelessly dull (practically sexless, it seems) friend Henri de Régnier (Benjamin Lavernhe), in a financial arrangement with Marie’s father.
After dabbling with an exotic, high-profile mistress (Camélia Jordana) imported from north Africa and enjoying growing literary success, Pierre does indeed rendezvous with the married Marie regularly, not only for bedroom antics but their own nude photo sessions, even coming to a sort of accord with unassertive Henri to allow the affair to continue. Ultimately, in a subtle ending, Marie gains her own measure of power, permanence, and value, by getting published herself (albeit under a male pseudonym).
In tres French fashion, filmmaker Jeunet does not take a very judgmental approach to the infidelity but she does make clear that, even under the free-love doctrine, women in this high-collared, tight-corseted Victorian milieu are very much treated as objects—to be swapped and sold and objectified as the men determine (significantly, when Marie wants to take photos of Pierre’s genitals for a change; he steadfastly refuses).
The script draws from the actual writings of these historic individuals, literati whose notoriety for North American viewers and readers is probably meager compared to scandalous contemporaries such as Colette or Oscar Wilde. What may strike modern viewers more (besides the filmmakers' sneaky use of an electro-chill music soundtrack) is the role still-image photography plays, as its own sort of mass media, even social media when the technology was still only a handful of decades old. A worthy addition to foreign-language collections, with a strong advisory over sexual content and graphic nudity that would not make this suitable for public screenings.