The clip opens in a boudoir with the mostly naked and slightly
disheveled Clotilde de Marelle (Christina Ricci) lying in bed,
post-tryst, posing a question to her equally scantily clad lover,
Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson). Duroy is a self-made man of sorts, who
uses his wits and powers of seduction to rise from poverty to wealth,
from a prostitute's embrace to passionate trysts with wealthy beauties
in 19th-century Paris, where politics and media jostle for influence and
where sex is power and celebrity an obsession.
"What are you reading?" de Marelle asks Duroy.
"It's
a letter from my father. Every week he puts on his best suit and goes
to the priest and the priest writes a letter for him," Duroy reveals as
he gets back into bed. "And every week it's the same thing: 'Your mother
sends her blessings. [The] pigs have diarrhea, when are you getting
married?' My father's a peasant, he's never left his village. And he's
asking me for money."
"I'd like to see where you grew up," says de Marelle, who appears to be a young lady of the upper class.
"I'd like to see you there," Duroy says intimately before locking lips with de Marelle.
"Promise me something," she requests. "Don't bring your other women here."
"I don't have other women," he counters.
"All men have other women," de Marelle says, which Duroy refutes and the lady reacts incredulously.
"Honestly?" she says.
"Honestly and truly," he answers.
Despite
the sweetness and sincerity captured in this particular scene,
Pattinson has teased that his character gets himself involved with a
variety of female paramours. More importantly, in addition to his being
shirtless in a lot of scenes, there's also a lot of his bare bottom in
the film.
"I think there's a lot of my crack in it," he laughed
when describing the film to MTV news. "I think there's quite a bit of
nudity."
"Bel Ami" opens in Los Angeles, New York and select cites on June 8. The film will be available on VOD on May 4.
