Overused and much misused, the word “provocative” has become a double-edged sword, especially when it’s swung in the direction of independent cinema. At its best, the genuinely provocative film — off the top of my head, anything by Bunuel, Shaun of the Dead, Holy Motors — shocks in order to expand our vision of the world it encompasses. At its most dispiriting, it’s an exercise in cheap thrillage, designed to goose a presumptively stuffy bourgeois audience while positioning a director as some sort of iconoclast. (Steve McQueen’s Shame comes to mind, along with Leaving Las Vegas.)
But faux provocation is found most commonly and, perhaps, forgivably, among novice directors bent on getting noticed — and Anne Fontaine has no such excuse. The French filmmaker showed early promise with the goofily anarchic 1997 comedy Dry Cleaning, about an ordinary couple who become obsessed with a drag artiste.
The movies that followed (Nathalie, Chloe) lean toward the merely naughty, and Fontaine’s latest, Adore, seems downright desperate to wave her fetish for “illicit” desire under our noses without having much to say about it.
Not having read The Grandmothers, the Doris Lessing novella that inspired the movie, I can’t say whether the source material bears more or less of the blame. But Fontaine’s treatment of this foray into cougar country plays like a romance novel from the genre’s bodice-ripping margins.