Where Less is Amour By Rita Kempley Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 6, 2000

Nathalie Baye and Sergi Lopez in "An Affair of Love." (Fine Line Features)

There is sex: This is, after all, a movie from France. But there is also lots of talking before, during and after the fact: This is, after all, a movie from France, where flesh frequently becomes Topic A for Les Chatterboxes.

It gives the principals something to do while they pose big questions about human nature: Sex? What's that about? And what about love? Where does it figure in the equation? Is there ooh without the la la?

The puzzlers in this case are a pair of attractive middle-aged Parisians, known only as Him (endearing Sergi Lopez) and Her (sensual Nathalie Baye). They entered into an anonymous affair to have kinky sex, then gradually fell in love. We never learn the exact nature of the kink, but as Her observes with a Gallic shrug: "What does it matter? It was an act of love."

The film, which begins months or years after the star-crossed romance ends, is really a post-mortem. The details pile up through documentary-style interviews that provoke flashbacks in their heads. There are negligible discrepancies in their recollections, but both "remember it well," as Maurice Chevalier once sang.

Every Thursday the couple met at the same cafe, retired to the same seedy hotel, did whatever behind a closed red door, agreed to return the following week and went their separate ways. Repetition set off the subtle progress of their courtship, a bittersweet duet convincingly, if unexcitingly, performed by Baye and Lopez.

"An Affair of Love," the second movie from Frederic Fonteyne and writer Philippe Blasband, is an adult film, from the lovers' cautious inaction to the actors' soft bodies. After half a lifetime of learning, the characters are too wary – or maybe too weary – to exchange their carefully controlled sexual fantasy for the messy realities of that other four-letter word called love.

An Affair of Love (80 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for sexual situations.