It puts me in mind of something critic Peter Matthews once wrote about Julianne Moore's career - best (to my mind) turn in Todd Haynes» «Safe,» an indisputably
great performance, but one in which her character is so unnervingly muted as to be disorienting: «It's as if the actress and the filmmaker have entered into a
sadomasochistic contract whereby he binds her head and foot while she derives a perverse pleasure from being so bound.»
It may also seem a strange title for a film by Michael Haneke, the
great Austrian director best known in America for his Oscar - nominated study of the origins of German fascism, The White Ribbon; the surveillance thriller Caché; and The Piano Teacher, which was itself a kind of love story — the
sadomasochistic kind.