Post Coitum

The first image in the French film Post Coitum is of a female cat in heat, writhing on the floor with animalistic abandon. Cut to a fortyish woman writhing in bed, rubbing her hands all over her body and beseeching an invisible lover to return to her. It's not exactly a flattering study in contrasts, but it's not meant to be: Post Coitum is unflinching in its depiction of the exultant highs and the degrading lows of amour fou. On the surface, it appears that Diane (Roüan), a successful book editor with a loving husband and children, is in control of her life. But an impetuous affair with a beguiling twentysomething engineer with the looks of a dark, pre-Raphaelite angel turns her life upside down to the extent that she's willing to sacrifice everything to sustain it, even after it's over. Why this recklessness that, to the objective mind, defies logic? Is it because she's experiencing something akin to a mid-life crisis? Is she unhappy? Or is she just hot for this guy? As frustrating as it might be, Post Coitum doesn't provide any answer to the central question of “Why?” simply because the inexplicable can't be explained. After all, passion is no ordinary word. Two subplots -- one involving a blocked writer's efforts to create a passionate female character, the other involving the sensational murder of a man by his wife of 43 years in retribution for his infidelities -- serve as interesting counterpoints to Diane's emotional descent, but they don't illuminate it. As Diane crumbles in the wake of the affair's end, her increasingly irrational behavior becomes more and more difficult to watch -- this is Fatal Attraction territory. (If you've been there yourself, it's probably all the more discomforting.) For Roüan, the director, co-screenwriter, and lead actor in this ride on love's roller coaster, Post Coitum must be something of a labor of love -- she really throws herself into it, both figuratively and literally. It's to her credit that she's not made this into a vanity production. Think of what one of her American counterparts -- say Barbra Streisand -- might have done with the same subject matter.