When a Teaser Leaves You Enamoured: The Build-Up to Want It
When Curiosa was to be released, there was much excitement from the followers of historical fiction, biographical novels, and erotic films alike. The trailer, however, suggested much more than just romance: hints of clandestine passions, elegant Parisian locales, erotic photography, and the daring to contemplate the philosophy of sex at a time of repressive civilization. Articles pointed out that Marie de Heredia was going to be more than just a passive woman, crossing the boundaries of dominant representations of the body and modesty. The andros were expecting a tapestry of elegant scandal, a visual treat replete with seductive emotional undercurrents, and creative costume drama.
Having just ended a bout of more serious roles, Noémie Merlant was anticipated possessing the capabilities to make the character more than just an object of visual pleasure. Being cast as Pierre Louÿs went on to further Lou Jeunet’s expectations that he would bring to life the delicate magnetism interwoven with moral dissonance that the character necessitated. Critics have pointed out that the film had drawn from real life elements, the romantic letters and photographs, and had indeed gone deep into the archives to reconstruct Marie’s life.
Bodies, Mirrors, and The Price of Transgression
While watching Curiosa, one is able to witness the life of Marie de Heredia, daughter of poet Jose-Maria de Heredia, and appreciates the inner conflict she has between a romantic relationship with poet Pierre Louÿs and the obligations such a relationship encumbers such as debts, social standing, and the responsibilities of a family. In the marriage with Henri de Régnier, she gets security, while he, despite being indefinably dull, is pragmatic. Pierre Louÿs goes to Algeria to recover and after returning with Zohra, he has an obsession with erotic photography. Zohra is also slowly entering this world of eroticism, where she encourages, explores, and writes. She is not only a mistress but the creator and conspires with him in his erotic education.
The film is able to portray Marie’s life while capturing the world of symbolism. The camera, separate from the tool of photography, becomes a confessional, a mirror, and an object of sin. The pose of Marie de Heredia is one of both agency and vulnerability. The nude body in Curiosa is not always essential about seduction, but ownership- the body in the picture not only belongs to the one in the picture, but ‘who looks, who decides, and who frames the picture. The process of photographing and the act of capturing a moment symbolizes much more than mere the incorporation of light and shadow, exposure, and the removal of the ornamentation to expose the raw form of something.
Another motif concerns letters and their literary pseudonymies and pseudonymes. Marie adopts the male name of Gérard d’Houville for publication and dons the disguise of gender for voice. This suggests equipollence for her of desire, art, and identity. Her voice has to be masked before it is heard. The triangle—Marie, Pierre, Henri—is not only a matter of romantic intrigue, but also represents impulse vs. duty; art vs. respectability; public self vs. inner self.
Besides, Zohra’s presence adds a dimension of exoticism and the desire of an outsider. She is “other” in terms of culture, skin, and geography. She represents both liberation and objectification. Her relationship with Pierre is both an erotic adventure and shadowed by the colonial gaze. The film leans toward self-Orientalism, invoking clichés of “Orient” beauty, but using Zohra to draw Marie (and through her, Pierre) toward new modes of erotic and visual exploration.
What the Characters Lose, What They Find
Marie experiences an agonizing journey. Initially, she is passive, trapped in a form of social purgatory. She enters a marriage, not for love, but for the sake of familial obligation. However, with Pierre and Zohra, she slowly starts to fight for minute periods of autonomy, Writing and posing, and exploring erotic desire in both language and image. But these gains come with guilt, jealousy, shame, and societal pressure. Even as her voice is ‘amplified,’ it is only in echoes—public gossip, whispered letters. She gains the gaze, but loses comfort in some ways.
While Pierre is charming, imbued with a certain reckless abandon and provocative, the film shows a more fragile side to him. His attentiion and beauty, his ego, the betrayals, and his inability to have a clear grasp of Marie’s longing. He also fails in making her the focal point of his art. Henri offers a more stable counterpart, but with him also comes emotional distanced. He is the more secure option Marie decides to pursue, but also the one that entails the loss of yearning.
What the soul desires in contrast to what is expected of us is a theme of a greater society. Freedom, while beautiful, is not without a price.
Whenever Fiction is Inspired by Real Events
In another interview, actress Noemi Merlant noted it is common for women to internalize how to construct their identity from other people’s wants, acting long before determining their own desires. To her, nudity in film is not intended to cause outrage, but rather, serve a purpose, where the setting is secure and the goals are unambiguous. This, in turn, changes how we view Merlant in Curiosa. It is not simply for show; rather, it is the result of her new understanding of the body, the idea of representation, and consent, as espoused in her interviews.
In the latter role, it is precisely this bifurcation, in the world of ‘sensitive artist’ and ‘lonely romantic’, that structures the pre-history of the main character. Schneider is said to carry this bifurcation as well to the next film. This is how he makes Pierre more complex; the prosthetic expectations of charm, flamboyance, and a lusciously immoral disposition are brought in by the viewers as soon as he arrives. This is where we see, and maybe this is where the film makes Pierre’s role more cunning, how Pierre is sometimes accompanied by the schizo love of the monkey, and in the silliest moments, the gaze of the audience is tricked into linear complicity by the romantic, Pierre gaze.
Jeunet remarked about Marie’s photographs in archival collections and the shock of the nude portraits. Marie’s seductive gaze was a definite challenge to become a character and not a mere subject in her lover’s work of art. That archival picture is itself a reflection of the phenomenon: what history allows us to see and what gets washed away, neglected, concealed, or omitted. Jeunet’s decision to take a more loose approach, to integrate moments with a quasi-documentary style (letters, actual photographs for references) suggests that there were stories that needed to be told as much as there was to recover them.
Moments at Which the Promise was Almost Tipped Over.
The trailer early images: Marie against a blue strip of night in Paris with Pierre’s camera lens skimming moonlight over her skin as he quotes “poses that morality denounces.” These now-anecdotal moments foreshadow a film that attempts to deal with the palpably drawn lines of ethics and does. Fan discussions, however, seemed to more hopeful of sharper analysis. More struggles with the denial of the film, class, and colonial domination.
It has been brought to the attention of the critics that the film, while artistically beautiful, does, in some places, feel emotionally detached. The disconnect between Marie’s emotional chaos and what is depicted on screen is, at times, insufficiently explored. Some reviewers laud the costumes, the set design, the cinematography; others claim that the dialogues are too mediocre, that Henri lacks substance, that Zohra’s character succumbs to the exotic cliché instead of being given a fully developed inner life.
Another tension is pace: the film spans decades of yearning, betrayal and personal development, yet at times, it seems to dawdle a bit too much on the ornamental. The cinematographic tableaux of snapshots, poses, and seduction are at times more visually compelling than they are rich in story or emotional depth, and thus, over-mooded and under-narrated. The cinematic components: lighting, framing, and the costumes, are all strong. The use of daguerreotype, or early photography, in terms of light, focus, and grain adds a desirable texture. Some feel, however, that the light was more beautiful than the shadow – more about show than about excavation.
The camera lens becomes the character itself. When Marie is in control of the camera (posing, staging) she is part author. When Pierre, or others, looks through the lens, he frames (and sometimes, literally, cages) her.Mirrors and reflections: in rooms, on glass, in bodies of water. Marie sees these reflections when she contemplates how she perceives both society’s and her own perception of her. It suggests duality: subject and object.
Correspondences and pseudonyms: writing under a male pseudonym, the letters between Marie and Pierre become sites of both fantasy and resistance.
Things: the camera, the photographs, the jewelry or costume worn by Zohra, the fabrics, the lights, and the shadows — these are not mere decoration, but signs of desire that is concealed and exposed.
Cracks Behind the Scenes: What We Usually Don’t Hear
Selected for the part for the film “Casting,” Noemie Merlant was aged around thirty during the time of filming. Critics argued that the role that she was portraying, the ‘Marie’ of the story, did not fit her age due to the fact that she was supposed to be young, and did not capture the essence of ‘Marie’ in the story. But perhaps this was this was due her youthfulness paired with her naivete.
Andrew m.ershis’ explanation for the erotic photography scenes in the film were that Lou Jeunet did her best to light the scenes with the utmost care as to the respect due. For her, this required long gentle light, long filming, and for the nudity to be natural and not sensational. But she still left in enough of the taboo and voyeuristic elements to still shakeigu. The point of view goes agross diffently, More often, how often does the scene arouse, opposed to when it angers?
The period pieces and settings that assosicate cost the most to reproduce. The early photography lighting was recreated. The technical work of recreating Paris was the fin-d-siecle and the photograph studios that m.ershis spoke of. The budget, was determined by how much the locations were, to how many interiors were produced. Many exteriors were used, paired with the unhappy fact that the emotional parts of the film were in the bewteen rooms, differing boudoirs, and staircases. This adds to the feeling of the self envelopement: self enclosure, paired with the outer isolation.
Reception controversies: A portion of the audience claim that while seeking erotic freedom, the film privileges the male gaze: Pierre’s fantasies, his camera, “his Pierre’s imaginations,” and so on, more often than not take over the narrative perspective of the film. Zohra particularly, as “the other woman,” the other, is at times more represented in exoticism than in the full subjectivity of the gaze. Editorial discussions in reviews touch on the erotic sequences which tend to be more about the audience’s visual gratification than Marie’s experiencing the erotic.
Adaptation vs. Reality: “Curiosa” is “loosely” based on the lives of Pierre Louÿs and Marie de Régnier. Some letters, some photographs are real; much of the dialogue, and much of the narrative arc is dramatized and simplified. Real life was much messier and more ambiguous. The film smooths the edges for narrative coherence. This brings us to the issue of whether “Curiosa” is a reclamation of Marie’s feminine erotic autonomy or a romanticized fantasy of bohemian yearning.
To walk through “Curiosa” is to walk through a room dimly lit by candles: the luxury is apparent, but there are shadows, too. It’s a film of looking and being looked at; of secrets and the bonds of secrecy. It asks: who possesses desire? Who has the right to frame it — in language, in pictures, in social constructs? And it suggests that even when you cross, you are still watched, as it were, by the boundaries of society.
If you want, I can trace this film along Portrait of a Lady on Fire to show how the roles of Merlant construct a particular portrait of feminine desire in film, most particularly French film, and what that implies for the older, the younger, or the more neglected.
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