The explicit "Romance" (1999), about a woman's need for erotic love, "achieved the considerable feat of shocking France," Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times.
Reading arousing literature, whether it is a mildly explicit romance novel or "Fifty Shades of Grey," helps women to create fantasy-type thoughts that get the mind away from life's pressures.
A typical winner might be a three-hour Turkish adaptation of Chekhov, a Thai journey through reincarnation, or (clutch those pearls) an explicit French romance between two women.
For instance, from France, "Fat Girl," Catherine Breillat's follow-up to her controversial and sexually explicit film "Romance," tells of two sisters in their early teens, one pretty and eager to lose her virginity, one fat and resentful.
Jovovich gained attention for her role in the explicit 1991 romance film Return to the Blue Lagoon, as she was then only 15.
Krantz's novels read like Harvard Business School case studies on the retail experience, filtered through gauzy, if sexually explicit, Harlequin-style romance..
Known as the writer-director of cerebral, sexually explicit films like "Romance" (1999), "Fat Girl" (2001) and "Anatomy of Hell" (2004), Ms. Breillat insisted that nudity and sex have no place in her favorite childhood fairy tale.
Despite the lack of explicit descriptions of romance elsewhere, the Bible does have one book that can be understood as extolling the virtues of romantic love, a work known as Song of Songs or The Song of Solomon.
Modern women are not necessarily looking for pure erotica, where the story revolves solely around sex, but want something more explicit than a traditional romance novel.
The effect intensifies as Collins's directions grow ever more explicit regarding the troubled romance of the couple whose lives she's filming: "Now dim the light... On second thought, kill it, he won't come in before morning".
Having achieved international notoriety with the explicit shock tactics of Romance and Anatomy of Hell, agent provocateur Catherine Breillat branches out with Bluebeard (2009, New Wave, 15), a reimagining of the classic fairy tale that plays like a thematic companion piece to the altogether more controversial A ma soeur!
