It’s all about the allure, not the lurid

So convinced are we that the French are the symbols of everything naughty that we give our passionate kisses French nationality and excuse our “French” when we use a four-letter word in English.

And because the French feature naked adult bodies on television, topless women on magazine covers and billboards and unembarrassed sex in (non-pornographic) films, we tend to generalize that every French love story comes with X-rated illustrations.

France is certainly a more liberal country when it comes to allowing filmmakers, broadcasters and publishers the freedom to show not only bare human bodies but that awkward universal tangle known as sex.

But just because the French have the right to show everything doesn’t always mean that they do. For every high-profile flesh fest -- the controversial Catherine Breillat’s “Romance,” Patrice Chereau’s “Intimacy” or Virginie Despentes’ “Baise-Moi,” the explicit film version of her eponymous novel -- there is a love story that relies on long looks, a slight show of the slip and the sexually suggestive power of words to tell a story about love.

It might be testament to the French reverence for love as a sacred human experience -- and sex as a matter, often, of unremarkable human need and animal attraction -- that some French filmmakers go out of their way not to include that inevitable climax between their on-screen lovebirds.

Patrice Leconte’s “Intimate Strangers,” which opens Friday in the U.S., is a self-proclaimed “sentimental thriller,” an off-kilter love story of opposites who meet by accident and methodically steamboat down the river of adult love. There is nary a kiss in this film between Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) and William (Fabrice Luchini), but each moment is a study in mysterious, restrained chemistry that is intellectual, emotional and physical.

This is Leconte’s favorite territory -- the murky shadowed landscapes where strangers stroll before jumping into each other’s arms. He calls his cinema a cinema of suggestion -- and one need only look at his “The Girl on the Bridge,” in which Vanessa Paradis and Daniel Auteuil fall in love without ever laying hands on each other, or “The Hairdresser’s Husband,” a study in protracted desire, to see his vision of the most filmic aspects of sex and love.

“When I went to the U.S. recently for the promotion of the film,” he says, “I met a lot of journalists who seemed shocked by what they called a trend toward not even erotic but basically pornographic films in France. And I said, ‘Really?’ I mean, there are always a few,” he says, citing Breillat, Gaspar Noe’s “Irreversible” and Robert Salis’ recent study in adolescent gender confusion, “Grand Ecole.” “But I don’t think it’s at all a trend. I think it’s true that in France we are a lot less restrained, and the laws are more permissive. In the U.S. there are lots of filmmakers who want to show things but who don’t have the right.”

Recent restraint

In French films, sex is generally considered less a sport than an art, and the French on the whole are likely to focus on the sensual aspects of human sexuality. That is, when they’re not poking lighthearted fun at it.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amelie,” the most popular French love story in recent memory, features one (not very French) kiss at the end of the movie, when the girl finally gets the boy. The sex in the movie concerns anonymous couples climaxing simultaneously in various parts of Paris; habitues of the cafe in a comic restroom tryst; and a ceiling view of Amelie beneath an unsuitable suitor. But the most important love scene finds her lying in bed, maternally cradling her true love’s head against her heart.

Yann Samuell’s “Love Me if You Dare,” which was released in the United States this past spring, is a romance in which the leads are seen only in one sloppy teenage kiss -- but the sexual tension is maintained through the end. Sophie (Marion Cotillard) has unromantic functional sex with her husband, not with her best friend and lifelong love, Julien (Guillaume Canet).

“I was certainly conscious of that,” Samuell says. “In effect, I wanted to show a love that was platonic -- because their vision of love was this kind of permanent seduction that was very intense. But what’s really funny is an American journalist made a remark to me that [the audience] had come out of the film asking themselves, ‘Were there sex scenes in that movie? I would have said yes, but then I realized there weren’t any and that it was extremely sensual and sexual without having any sex scenes whatsoever.’

“At the screenplay level, when you write, you have to ask yourself, ‘What can I do to show how intense this love is without showing it?’ ” he continues. “It’s really a challenge writing the script to never ever allow them to consummate their feelings. There was a version in which I amused myself by letting them sleep together, but in fact I found it didn’t work at all. It wasn’t at all the same story -- it was more an ordinary love story. I wanted to say that love is above all an affair of the soul -- not the body.”

“I find that often a sex scene in a film is so completely expected that it ends up coming across as flat on screen, as a bit gynecological,” says director Anne Fontaine, whose film “Nathalie” will be released in the United States in September. “It’s not that sex scenes shock me, it’s that they often bore me.” In Fontaine’s story of a middle-aged couple whose passion has wilted, a bourgeois woman (Fanny Ardant) hires a prostitute (Emmanuelle Beart) to seduce her husband (Gerard Depardieu) and tell her all about it. This story of infidelity, the bonds between women and the problems of a long marriage does not have a single sex scene, deriving all its erotic power from words.

Mistaken impression

In his review last February of Lucas Belvaux’s trilogy of the relationships between interlocking couples, “On the Run,” “An Amazing Couple” and “After Life,” the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane concluded by insisting that “... one has to be impressed by any body of work that runs for more than 340 minutes yet, despite being set in France, features no sex whatsoever. I thought it was required by law.”

Lane is cheeky. But his humorous kicker also reveals the larger truth that those from the famously puritan territories of England and America (though our fair land has an enormous porn industry) see the French as sexual operators and exhibitionists, with the film catalog to prove it.

After hearing the British critic’s quote about his sexless movie, Belvaux chuckled for a minute. “I think it’s pretty funny,” he says, “that outside look. I think that French cinema talks much less about sex than the American cinema.”

Nevertheless, Belvaux says that he has no desire to use his country’s artistic freedom to show the act: “I resolved the question a long time ago, when I made my first film,” he says. “I don’t want to expose actors -- I was an actor for a long time, and as an actor, I’m very ill at ease in that kind of scene.

“It’s a personal position. On the whole, I have nothing against it. I just don’t want to make films with sex scenes in them, so I don’t. Maybe someday if I make a story in which they are indispensable, I will. But they are rarely indispensable.”

Nevertheless, Belvaux says French journalists have often asked him how he can make films about the relationships between men and women without showing them in bed.

“People always ask how I manage to avoid it,” he says, “but I just don’t see what it adds. I think on the contrary the fact that there aren’t any sex scenes makes it more interesting -- it provokes a feeling in the audience that something’s missing, a feeling that exists for the character as well.”

“The cinema is the art of the image, so we could say that cinema is made to show things,” Leconte says. “But I think the art that was made to show things is best when it doesn’t show them. To be able to suggest the mounting of desire, with the looks, the silences, the gestures, the postures -- that bowls me over. In movies and in life.

“I prefer to plant things in the heads of the characters and allow them to communicate those emotions that are sensual and sexual. I find it more troubling. The shadowy zones are more evocative than those that are fully lit.”

Then he brings up the famous French adage that the best moments in a love story happen during the promise-filled climb up the staircase. “It’s good when we arrive in the bedroom too,” he says. “But it doesn’t concern me anymore as a filmmaker. On the staircase is where we can dream.”