Understanding Curiosa: The Poetics of Desire
Upon its release in 2019, Curiosa was more than just a French historical drama embellished with period costumes. Jeunet’s film, featuring Noémie Merlant and Niels Schneider, explored a fascinating interplay between art and love, and the defiant eroticism surrounding the two. The film focuses on writers, photographers, lovers, and voyeurs, while capturing the masochistic ache of being acknowledged and immortalized.
At the heart of the film is Marie de Régnier, played memorably by Noémie Merlant: the epitome of intellect, sensuality, and defiance. With Régnier, Curiosa recounts history in a personal, profound, and humane manner.
Conflict Between the Pen and the Heart
Curiosa’s depiction of Marie de Régnier occurs in 1890s Paris. Marie is the daughter of poet José-Maria de Heredia. The film opens with her in a love triangle with two men: Henri de Régnier, a socially accepted match and future husband, and the charming and passionate poet, Pierre Louÿs (Niels Schneider).
Marie admires Pierre’s fearless artistry. He recognizes in her more than beauty, but an equal — a muse and a partner. Their connection begins with private letters and exchanged poems, but soon develops into something more audacious: an artistic study in erotic photography. With an obsession for capturing beauty, Pierre focuses his camera on Marie, who relishes her role as model and co-creator in their intimate, private photographs.
Marie’s story is a reflection of many women’s lives during her time: the quest for autonomy in a world shackled by marriage and propriety. What starts as a fascination with Pierre’s uninhibited artistry becomes her personal defiance. In the last act of the film, Marie’s transformation is complete; she is no longer a muse, but an artist; no longer an object; a subject — she reclaims her image, her body, and her story.
The Real Marie Behind the Fiction
Marie de Régnier was more than a cinematic figure. She is a real French poet and novelist, a woman who published under the name “Gérard d’Houville.” In a world where artistic expression was ربstricted, she found ways to evade these restrictions, writing subversive texts under a male pseudonym and embedding her artistic longings into her texts.
Significant elements of the film derive from her letters and diaries. The writer and photographer of erotic literature, Pierre Louÿs, was one of her documented affairs. The evocative photographs of Louÿs and his muses, notably intimate and bold for the era, influenced the visual style of Curiosa.
Lou Jeunet, the director, saw the narrative through the lens of the contemporary and the historical, not as a period scandal, and focused on the autonomy of women and the creative tensions within the expression as they continue to contest the order. The character of Marie transcends her era as a symbol of a woman attempting to claim her narrative, her creative work, and her sexuality.
Noémie Merlant: Living the Character
Noémie Merlant saw Curiosa as a turning point. Having already gained praise for her role in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, she saw in Marie a reflection of her own self in terms of questions of identity, agency, and exposure.
Merlant researched the role with great intensity. She studied 19th-century poetry, learned the poses of early photography, researched erotic photography and aimed to grasp the emotional dimension of the photographs taken. In her interviews, she expressed a desire to convey Marie’s sensuality as a form of agency rather than in submission. She aimed to portray a woman who willingly chose her transgressions rather than one who passively endured them.
Her performance encapsulates the inner conflict she is experiencing. There’s hesitation in the posture Marie strikes for Pierre. There is desire and fear as she captures Marie’s likeness, and her eyes flicker with shame and liberation. It is not eroticism for its own sake, but an exploration on the relationship between intimacy and its possessive counterpart.
The role’s physicality — the stillness she had to maintain during the photoshoots, the breathy exchanges in the candle-lit rooms — required emotional discipline. Merlant had to achieve a fusion of opposites, portraying the vulnerability of a character while simultaneously asserting their inner strength, which she did with such remarkable subtlety that critics were silent in their applause. They recognized her as the “thinking sensualist,” a performer who philosophically eroticizes her work.
The Lens Between Love and Art
Niels Schneider, as Pierre Louÿs, is charming and infuriating at the same time. A romantic selfishly obsessed with his art, he is a man who cannot see the emotional damage his obsession takes. He prizes beauty above all, yet fails to see the other side of the coin. Schneider depicts Louÿs as a dreamer, spellbound by his own creation.
What makes the two electrifying is the unadulterated realism. Merlant and Schneider are said to have spent pre-shoot time together to study primitive photographic techniques. They came to appreciate the closeness needed for the role. Schneider claimed to have wanted the audience to experience Pierre’s love for Marie as both unfeigned and dangerously obsessive. Describing a man who can eternally capture a woman with his camera, yet, paradoxically, can never possess her.
Director Lou Jeunet, behind the scenes, managed the portrayal of eroticism with precision, care, and respect. The camera lingers not on the passionate affair, but on the aftermath — the silence, the trembling hands, and the tension that art cannot alleviate. Crew members have shared the warmth of Merlant and Schneider as improvisational photo sessions, allowing them to respond to each other’s natural presence. This became a source of authenticity to the film, and the emotions appeared lived in, as opposed to being staged.
When Audiences Fell Into the Frame
Curiosa received admiration and discomfort in equal measure — a similarity to Pierre Louÿs himself. Audiences in France appreciated the film’s sensual cinematography with the feminist perspective woven into the story. Some critics, however, found the pacing too meditative to the point of melancholy.
Nonetheless, the most profound responses were those from viewers who empathized with Marie’s quest for liberation. Numerous women expressed on various platforms that the film encompassed more than mere erotic appeal; it centered on the retrieval of the right to control one’s self-representation. With the prevalence of selfies and social media, the narrative of a woman attempting to articulate her identity through one’s own depiction felt remarkably contemporary.