Some thought it might just take the Golden Lion Award at the recently-held Venice Film Festival. But Une Liaison Pornographique (A Pornographic Liaison) managed to come away with only a Best Actress performance by Nathalie Baye - and a few brickbats from film critics, despite the film's early impressions.
Baye earned her award portraying half a nameless couple who meet at a hotel each week to actualize a mutual erotic fantasy, the nature of which remains a mystery to film viewers who never see into their room actually. The 31-year-old Belgian director Frederic Fontayne directed the film.
A week ago, the response of Italian critics had festival observers thinking the oblique film a prime contender for the Golden Lion Award. But the conclusion seemed expressed best by Godfrey Cheshire, a film critic from the independent New York Press who attended the festival, and who calls Une Liaison Pornographique "a ferociously banal 'erotic' melodrama aimed at female audiences…so old hat that it'll probably do solid business in the U.S."
Zhiang Yimou's Not One Less took the Golden Lion - the film is about a 13-year-old substitute teacher - while Zhang Yuan's Seventeen Years earned him the Director's Prize.
