Catherine Breillat Day

 

‘I am the pariah of French cinema. That can make things complicated for me: it is never easy to drum up a budget or to find a distributor for my films in France. Some people refuse even to read my scripts. But it also makes me very happy because hatred is invigorating. All true artists are hated. Only conformists are ever adored.’ — Catherine Breillat

‘In gonzo sex you see a camera man, and the camera man tells to the actors, ‘move like that,’ and a woman who is being screwed slides to the camera and asks ‘am I ok like this’ and they make fun… I think this is the high point of censorship. They are afraid of even a minimum of narrative. No wonder that the French cinema director Catherine Breillat, who tries to do precisely this both — emotionally engaging serious drama, plus full sex — cannot somehow really penetrate the big market.’ — Slavoj Zizek

‘(Breillat’s) filming and selling actors, rather than words, produces an argument that splits her Dworkinite theory into less passionate responsibilities that is seemingly at odds with the narrative. And her writing feeds off that exposure. Breillat is one of the few filmmakers who looks hard at what her films throw back at her. Her work is extremely self-referential but not blind to the salesmanship, collegiate dialectics or feminist lore she seeks to expand beyond Unica Zurn and Shirley Mills.’ — Peter Sotos

‘The central preoccupation of Catherine Breillat’s work is the sexuality of women. That is, in and of itself, no major accomplishment. How many male directors, by contrast, are not in some way preoccupied with women? Of course, the preoccupation with female sexuality in most forms of cinematic production is marked by exhibitionism rather than introspection; it reassures where it could tear apart. Her films are uniquely concerned with a woman’s understanding of her own sexuality. Although, Breillat’s films tread a very fine line between exhibitionism and introspection—she admits that they are, after all, always about sex—they do so under the guidance of a fundamental difference in conception. In Breillat’s own words: “I take sexuality as a subject, not as an object.”

‘However, the films are also sexually explicit; contrary to Breillat’s assertion, sex is an object as well as a subject in her films. Moreover, the sexual acts on display in Breillat’s films are not only explicit, they are often unsimulated, a characteristic of her films that has contributed to her unflattering (in my view) international reputation as the auteur of porn. For Breillat, the visual display of sex is inseparable from the representation of the consciousness of her female characters. The representation of sex is also central to the development of her visual style—a level of innovation that has been grossly overlooked in contemporary film culture. And herein lies both the challenge and the controversy of her work.

‘One of the unfortunate consequences of Breillat’s reputation as the auteur of porn is that it has obscured the much more interesting fact of her engagement with the history of modernist filmmaking. Breillat is a central figure in European film culture. In addition to her acting stint in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Breillat has written screenplays for directors such as Maurice Pialat (Police, 1985), Federico Fellini (And the Ship Sails On, 1983), Liliana Cavani (The Skin, 1981) and many others. Likewise, her own films have shown an interest in the expansion of genre, a major characteristic of European modernist filmmaking, as in her renovation of the policier in Sale comme un ange (1991). Moreover, Breillat is vocal about the filmmakers who have shaped her conception of cinema, consistently praising the work of figures such as Warhol, Pasolini, Oshima, Dreyer, and Bresson—all of whom can be felt in Breillat’s films in very interesting ways.

‘Breillat’s work is obviously the product of a major auteur. Her dismissal as the auteur of porn, then, speaks volumes. For one, it excludes her from the accolades with which her male counterparts have long been lavished, and to whom she bears a resemblance. But also, to deny the importance of Breillat’s work, to relegate her to a realm outside of art, would be to demand that art merely confirm our ways of thinking instead of challenging them. And this is, I would imagine, what Breillat had in mind when she told an interviewer, “I don’t really think about my audience very much.” The point, in other words, is not to satisfy expectations, but to confound them. And thus new ideas, new ways of seeing, can emerge.’ — Brian Price, Senses of Cinema

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Catherine Breillat @ fluctuat (in French)
Catherine Breillat Complete Biblography
Catherine Breillat @ Semiotext(e)
Catherine Breillat @ IMDb
Catherine Breillat: un cinéma du rite et de la transgression (in French)
Catherine Breillat on Oshima’s ‘In the Realm of the Senses’
CB interviewed about ‘The Last Mistress’ @ Bright Lights Film Journal
Break My Body: Catherine Breillat’s ‘The Last Mistress’
Catherine Breillat: ‘I Love Blood’
CB discusses ‘The Last Mistress’ @ Nerve

 

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Interview
from Senses of Cinema

 

I want to ask you initially about how you began as an actor, and then you moved on to writing and directing.

No, I began writing a novel. In English it was called A Man for the Asking. In France it was called L’homme facile. I wrote it at sixteen years of age, but it was forbidden in France for anyone under eighteen. So it was illegal for me to read the book I had written.

An absurd situation, so you began writing and then you took up acting?

A little, very little acting, it was when I was very young, twelve, about that time. I wanted to become a moviemaker, director, a writer, singer, actress, but, in fact, my two real passions are literature and cinema. I wanted to be behind the camera, not in front of the camera. My sister became an actress, yes, because of me, and she was successful as an actress in France.

I have read quite a few interviews with actors who have worked with you. They have enormous admiration for you and loyalty. I am interested that you say you work behind the camera, and you prefer that, so how do you work with your actors; what is you role?

It’s like a …a translation of me…

A transference?

Yes, but I don’t know how I do it. Suddenly I feel this urgency and I have to make something. And, I have success but I don’t know how. I think I am very tactile so I create very precise choreography. I talk with the actors a lot, but when I directed this sort of big spoof, which is Sex is Comedy, I asked Anne Parillaud, who I worked with on this film and who is a big star (because I think that I was too demanding with her), so I asked her if I was, am, too méchante (nasty), aggressive.

Never, she said to me. You never tell me what I have to do, just what I have to be. Always I ask my actors to propose something and when they have finished I say to them, that is exactly what all the other actors would do in this text so it’s not interesting. They have to propose to me something else, something that surprises me. It is very boring for me if they do exactly what I have written. If they do that, I have just published a scenario, like a novel. So, if I shoot the scenario it will be because there is something else in the script and they have to convince me of what this something else is.

That they find within themselves?

That they find in their passions.

Do you rehearse your actors a lot or do you work more spontaneously on the set?

I never rehearse. If the first time is good, I always keep the first take, even if it is contrary to what I want. If it is not good, I cannot shoot it again, because what I want is grace. I don’t like work—it’s a joke of course, but work is ugly, work always appears, your have to have grace. For me a good “shoot” is what I call a magic shoot. Everything is perfect, completely. The way we shoot, the way the actress plays, how it is framed, the time, and the musical time—that is a magic shoot. For me, I always want to have this and it’s completely marvellous. There is some kind of magic. Magic happens.

You shoot very fast too?

Yes. And I think more and more quickly, especially the last two films I made, Barbe bleue and La belle endormie. La belle endormie was shot in costume and in nineteen days.

That is surprisingly fast for costume dramas.

Yes, like that, you are never bored. How can I say? You are always under pressure to do a scene because you are directly exposing others. It is best when you are in danger—a mise en danger—and you have to respond.

It sounds as if your shoots are very intense, but everybody is there in the moment creating something.

Yes, and then you cannot have one hesitation, to get what you want, so that it’s like une fleche, an arrow?

Direct?

Yes, exactly. I want this more and more now because I am, in fact, very sick. When I’ve finished shooting a scene, I always have a little bed that follows me around and while they set up the lighting for the next scene, l sleep.

Now my health is so bad that it is very, very boring to be awake because it’s so difficult for me. It is difficult for me because I am hémiplégique (paralysed on one side). If I don’t do a movie, I am not passionate and then I am just an infirme, a handicapped woman. But when I make a movie I can do many things I cannot normally do. When I shoot actors I always make the choreography with my body and now, even when my body is completely handicapped, I can, because of the passion, the passion drives you, I can do what I should not be able to do.

Writing novels is quite a solitary process.

For me, cinema, in fact, is my first passion. In the beginning it was the novel and poetry and cinema, but I am not sure I am a great novelist. (laughs)

But you write the scripts for your films?

Yes, that’s true. In English, the script is very, very important, but for me it’s just the fantome of the movie. It’s just something very efficient to work with for the movie, but it is not the movie. It is the ghost of the movie.

I finished La belle endormie and my assistant saw it two days ago to see if the mix was good and everything was right for Arte. My assistant was very, very surprised. Even when you have a script and even when your assistant is there during the shoot, when you bring everything together in the mix, what you end up with is something else. I think the frame is very important, the direction of actors too, of course, but also the story—the script? It’s better if you have a good script but, in fact, I always change my script. Sometimes, even while I’m shooting I ask the actor or even a little child that I had for Barbe bleue to do something during shooting, a completely new scene. That’s cinema; it’s always alive.

Going back to your upbringing, I’ve heard you mention that you had quite a strict, catholic upbringing, and I wonder about your artistic life as a kind of rejection of that orthodoxy. For example, critics often talk about Anatomie de l’enfer (Anatomy of Hell, 2004) as being a film that re-addresses issues around religious symbolism.

Anatomie de l’enfer for me is not against religion. For me it is a theorem to explain and prove what is “obscenity” because every time censorship prosecutes obscenity, they can never say what it is. So I make a théorème, like a philosophical théorème, or half philosophic, half mathematic, and, of course, I fall on the evidence that obscenity is… a dream ideal. And, of course, not a catholic one. In fact, at the time I was making this film my assistant, who is Jewish, said to me, you are very courageous to make a film that is against the Torah.

The interdiction on images?

Yes, but I said no. It’s my ‘scene’ as I had never read the Torah. So when I was editing Anatomie de l’enfer I would go to the metro and I would read the Torah in the metropolitan, the subway, and yes, it was the same world because this world is…even if you are not Jewish, not Catholic, not Protestant, it’s an orthodox society.

So I made Anatomie de l’enfer because in Romance (1999) I didn’t go to the extreme limit because courage failed me—to really see sex in a movie that is not a pornographic one. In fact, I failed, Oshima did it, but with Romance, j’ai échoue, I failed. With Anatomie de l’enfer, there was only one subject. You cannot escape.

I want to ask you about the two things that always come up in relation to your work, sex and violence. You’ve already talked about issues around sexuality, women’s sexuality, and so I want to ask you about not just what you are trying to do in your films in relation to sexuality, but also in relation to society. I ask this partly because last weekend I met two women who were documentary filmmakers. They were making a documentary about 40 years of feminism in France, the MLF (le mouvement de libération des femmes). They said they felt a need to make this documentary because of the lack of interest—and urgency—on young women’s behalf and their sort of denial and rejection of feminism. They said they needed to make this film because things have improved but they haven’t improved greatly.

The times go backwards. It is horrible. We go backwards. In France, we are currently speaking about the liberty to wear the hijab, the thing is that some women in Islamic countries have no rights. Why? It [The hijab] is a symbol of something horrible. When you look at Benazir Bhutto, she was one of the guides of the Islamic republic, but she didn’t wear it like that; she wore something more normal like a scarf, something coloured. But it is not about death, it’s about life. This sort of religion is now about death, the death of women.

The Algerian women are completely dressed in white, but it is not a light white cloth, it is like the material for a catafalque. And now they say in France, the country of liberty, that I can wear the hijab, but I cannot walk in the streets with the croix gammée (nazi cross). It’s symbolic, the same symbol. Now in Afghanistan the women have no right to study, no right to work and so they are treated like beasts without a doctor, without a veterinaire. They even face lapidation.

You cannot wear a symbol as it is forbidden. It is not a question of religion, no it’s forbidden to have croix gammée and the hijab should be forbidden. Yes, a scarf like Benazir Bhutto, but not covered. It is ostensibly a symbol of the enslavement of women.

 

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Extras

Catherine Breillat on intimacy (French w/ English subtitles)

Catherine Breillat & Chantal Akerman discuss their work (French)

Catherine Breillat discusses Audrey Hepburn (in French)

Salò ou les 120 jours de Sodome. Présentation par Catherine Breillat (French)

 

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The first chapter of Catherine Breillat’s book Abus de Faiblesse (2009), introduced and translated by Dorna Khazeni

 

In 2001 when I presented a tribute to Catherine Breillat’s cinema at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, she had not yet made ANATOMY OF HELL her film adaptation of her novel Pornocracy. It was a career-defining film, some would say in the worst possible way. Many of her advocates turned from her, said she was too extreme and called the film unwatchable. Decidedly, it was unpleasant viewing, but it was also gripping, unforgettable. In it, she again attempted to work out the conflict of desire, vulnerability and violence.

It was after making ANATOMY, in 2004, while she was preparing to shoot her next film, based on the 19th century novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly, UNE VIELLE MAITRESSE, that she had a stroke. It paralyzed half her body. I happened to be in Paris and went to see her at Lariboisière hospital where she had been for about three weeks. “They told me I am not going to be able to walk. “Of course I’m going to walk,” I said, “I have a film to make.” She dragged her body through space by imagining its missing half, fell, broke bones, but carried on and made the film. Starring Asia Argento, the film premiered at the Cannes festival in 2007 and was a success.

What followed was like a chapter from a crazy daytime soap. Sort of. Catherine, still a cripple, forging ahead on sheer will-power, happened across Christophe Rocancourt, a known crook, who had served time for larceny and embezzlement, but who now, was purportedly reformed and in France, at least, a celebrity of sorts. He had published a memoir and was living in conjugal bliss with an ex-Miss-France, Sonia Rolland. Breillat decided he should be the star of her next film, tentatively titled BAD LOVE, alongside Naomi Campbell. Two years later, she found herself on the brink of destitution having signed her material wealth, a sum of about 800,000 Euros, over to Le Roc as she calls him in her book, Abus de Faiblesse. This book, in which she sets down an unflinching account of the story of her undoing, as unsparing towards her own conduct, as it is towards his, is a testament to her fierceness–in case there was any doubt, she’s not going down without a fight–and to her extraordinary ability to confront truth. The title refers to a clause in French law that protects the feeble from criminal abuses to which they may be more vulnerable than those who are not handicapped, ill, aged. The book’s publication resulted in Rocancourt being charged. The case, it is my understanding, is still pending.

“I’ve made films, written books. I’ve received blows, often. A stroke turned me into a semi-cripple, but of all the things that have happened to me… Christophe Rocancourt has been the most terrible.” — C. B., Abus de Faiblesse

In addition to writing the book, over the last two years she has made two feature films, the first and second parts of a triptych based on Charles Perrault fairy tales for Canal Plus. Her BLUEBEARD received positive reviews in 2009 and played major festivals internationally, while her latest, SLEEPING BEAUTY, just opened at the Venice International Film Festival to acclaim.

The indomitable Breillat.

Chapter One

That night, something happened. A natural event, ultimately. In my bed, as I slept, half of my body died. Without waking me, without making me suffer, this death passed like a feather.

Why that night? Had I lived differently over the previous days, had I slept somewhere else or with a man, would it have happened? Did it only take a few seconds, or did it take a slow and silent while?

No one knows.

When I woke, my left hand was a dead hand, the hand of my mother’s cadaver reaching out of a grey green tomb. It took me two hours, alone in my bed, to understand what was happening to me. What was befalling me. Two hours of watching the ceiling and concentrating. Trying. Trying to do something. Anything. With my self.

With my body.

I’d always felt cut in two horizontally across, I mean to say my head was separated from my body, my head came first and the rest afterwards. Now I’m cut vertically down the middle–it’s no better or worse. Lying down as I am, I feel the exact boundary between my dead body and my living body, a line from the top of my skull to the ends of my feet cuts me in two, like the wire that cuts butter.

*

I don’t look for known actors. I find them on the street. They have to be a burst of oxygen, prepared to give their all, a transparent bubble for the film. Afterwards, it’s too late, their presence turns into a job–a card trick. You have to find an actor just before cinema does, so you can throw him into the magic film can. So he becomes its prey, like I myself am. I can spot them in the street, sitting at a sidewalk café, and lift a finger towards them and say, “That’s him, that’s her, I’m almost sure.” I can come across my actor anywhere or anytime. A film is a sect, the sect of innocence and of passion.

When I met Christophe Rocancourt, one of the first things he said to me was, “My father was a gypsy and my mother, a whore.”

That night, boredom had slugged it out and won against time. The TV is what I call the devil. At my place, there’s a lit one in each room and I sleep in front of the devil. Waking up abruptly, in the box, I saw a man. A fellow, a crook, a thug. His remnant of a Normandy accent made him come off like a young peasant. But this yokel had a way about him, brusquely, he put the host in his place. I’ve always preferred thugs to TV hosts that sermonize to make money and build their image. But this fellow didn’t let them get away with it, he shafted the nighttime host. His arrogance appealed to me. Arrogance can be ruinous, almost no one can afford it any more these days. “I’m an ex-con, I got away with $35 million, I was supposed to pay it back, and I paid, so I don’t owe anything else…” This man wasn’t speaking with the dulcet modesty of a repentant, but in the clipped syllables of a thug. Not handsome, a yokel, a boor, he could be my protagonist.

That’s who he was.

The following day, I called my assistant, Milo, asking him to look for the man’s number: Christophe Rocancourt.

“Find him for me.”

“Why him?”

“Because he’s brutal. You know me, I’m under his spell… I have to meet him. For the film, I’m interested in him. I want him.”

Miko likes a challenge. This young man, whom I’ve forbidden from growing up, has been my first assistant for ten years, Cat Woman’s Dog. Nothing is impossible for my “lost soul,” as I call him, before kissing him on the mouth just to fuck with those who wonder if we sleep together. But he and I sleep with cinema: that’s the desire that gnaws its way through to our bones. So, Miko, laughing, set about on the quest for this new desire: Rocancourt, the thug.

My superb actor.

One detail bothered me, maybe it was just a media construct. In the TV segment, Rocancourt introducing himself had said, “Now I live with a woman in the 16th arrondissement.” You saw images from the Lisieux cemetery. Rocancourt had been born there, his father had died there… “Died like a beggar on a bench at the foot of the basilica.” A beautiful young woman walked among the tombstones.

“Your companion is Miss France 2000. Have you finally found happiness?”

“Yes,” he replied, suddenly leashed to convention. “We are going to start a family and I’ll soon be a father.”

This, this was not appealing.

I wanted a jerk. My character in Bad Love was a jerk who dragged a magnificent woman, a star, down on to his territory where he reigned, an illiterate sovereign.

Miko was quick to find a number. Through Sonia Rolland’s agent. She picked up. She and Christophe Rocancourt were evidently nesting together. The offer was not for her. Somewhat intrigued, but enthusiastic for her lover, she passed along the deal.

Miko said, “They’re in Normandy. They must be in love.” We lingered momentarily smiling at the thought, happy about the photo-novella.

And I called back.

*

In a dream, the dead hand takes hold of me and strangles me.

I wake up.

My hand is squeezing my mother’s cadaver’s like in a living dead film. I’m no longer dreaming, yet this hand remains on my neck like a dead bird. Time passes. I fall. I don’t know why I’ve fallen from the bed. I wait. I lose consciousness. I no longer know if I’ve lost consciousness. I try to get up. Time passes like a sheet. Hey, move your ass, lazybones! I feel the gravity of it, I remain stoic. The more grave it is, the more stoic I am. It’s neither a matter of my laziness, nor of my will. I’ll never be able to reach my cell phone, over there, in the kitchen, with all the numbers of those that matter to me and to whom I matter… Give up on pride, be sensible!

Those I love are phone numbers I no longer know. Why am I on the floor? Thank God, there’s the phone on the bedside table, a good old black ebony phone. The number for emergency services. I don’t know it either. By dint of the living half-body I drag myself on to the bed and call information. 12. I dial 12 and ask for emergency services.

“Ma’am, this is an emergency call. I woke up, my body’s half dead.”

“Oh, I can’t connect you to emergency services. You have to call their number.”

“Listen, I can’t. This is a cry for help. The left side of the body is dead.”

“You’re not dead since you’re talking…”

It’s enough to make you weep, or laugh yourself to death.

“If you can’t open the door for them to come in, what’s the point of my calling emergency services.”

She’s about to hang up on me, this great clairvoyant, proud of her pronouncements, stating the obvious, as she sits on two haunches well-separated by an asshole, I, meanwhile am separated by death and by life.

“Listen…”

She’s hung up.

12. Twelve. Dial 12. Stubborn, not dead.

“You have to send the emergency services! Don’t hang up, I woke up with my body half dead.”
Because suddenly I’m begging, because I’m sobbing, this young woman’s voice deigns transfer me to the emergency services.

“We’re coming straight away. Don’t worry.”

Two hours. A hundred and twenty minutes. Seven thousand two hundred seconds to get to the door downstairs. I wait. I have time to think. It’s really me to whom this is happening. I am living through a new adventure. I discover what used to happen to my sister so frequently–and not to me. My childhood without any illnesses. Asthma, staggering staph infections, or algodystrophies that I saw Marie-Hélène endure. And me… nothing! Nothing to explain my deviations, my refusals. Emergency services. I feel hatred, buried, dark. It’s over now, there will no longer be a big nor a little sister. No need to grind your teeth, my highs and lows don’t frighten me, if my half-living body does not die, this fiction will flow between the pages of my imagination. Emergency services. Am I sick? I am living, I’m on the edge. I think about Paul. Illness is not an interesting subject. If everyone recounts it, it’s because that’s where you end up in an attempt to save yourself. I don’t want to save myself. I think about Paul, I think only about him. My son is little, I don’t want him to see me like this. Paul spent the night at a friend’s. It’s ok. It’ll do. The ceiling of my room is a calm, deep screen on which my son floats. My heart is beating hard. My eyes follow lines of shadows without moping. I’m not dying. From time to time, I grip the dead arm with my living hand, the unknown arm that’s in my bed, and I shake it. I experiment with this new sensation which won’t last. Finally nothing has happened, I went to bed like you and woke up like me. Do you understand? Before, I felt cut in half horizontally, a head separated from the body, a head held high. This body that cannot be entirely mine, since the body is obscene. I had known that beforehand. Every living being possesses two hemi-bodies. Now I would know it too, and you, you do not feel it. To be normal, is to feel little.

Yesterday I was living, I was me, we were with Laure. The men, their boots, their jackets, arrive with my concierge. So that they find me quickly, I cry out, with all my might, “Here!” in a voice that to me sounds like that of a little girl hiding under a bed.

“HERE!”

 

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14 of Catherine Breillat’s 20 films

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A Real Young Girl (1976)
‘”A Real Young Girl” is a slice-of-summer-life flick which follows a 17ish school girl’s sexual exploration during a summer vacation with her parents on their farm. A brave and visceral character study, this first outing for controversial auteur Catherine Breillat spends 90% of the run examining the fantasies, autoerotic experimentation, and eventual heterosexual encounters of the girl who seems sexually fascinated with all things liquid. Though the film’s darkish undercurrents of sexual aberration do portend better things to come from Breillat, it is not particularly interesting as a stand alone piece. Circa 1976 with no apparent remastering, the audio/video quality is poor with color shifts and graininess. Not for those squeamish about graphic sexual content, this film should play best with those interested in psychosexual dramas.’ — =G=

Trailer

 

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Tapage nocturne (1979)
‘Solange is a filmmaker. She is married and a mother. She enjoys occasional sex with her husband but also feels drawn towards a bisexual actor named Jim. This doesn’t prevent her from taking other lovers – sometimes as many as two or three in one night. Solange is looking for frenzied love.’ — MUBI

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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36 fillette (1988)
‘With boring regularity, Hollywood has churned out films focusing on teen-agers and their rampaging hormones. Yet Breillat’s 36 fillette is a different, and decidedly more adult, take on this theme. Breillat tells the story of Lili, a restless, alienated fourteen-year-old who attracts the attention of several men—and, in particular, a middle-aged playboy—while on vacation with her family. As the story unfolds, the question arises: Will she or won’t she lose her virginity?

‘What sets 36 fillette apart from other teen coming-of-age films is the way in which Breillat presents her lead character. Lili’s sexual curiosity does not lead her to boys her own age; instead, she is involved with males who might be her father. The focus of the story is on her, and not her potential sexual partners; she is depicted as being just as much of a sexual predator as any male. Despite her age and lack of sexual experience, Lili is no tentative, blushing innocent. Neither is she a sexual victim. She is instead an indecisive young woman whose fully developed body mirrors her craving for sexual initiation. As Breillat explores the social and sexual realities of the character, the men with whom she deals serve as mere props; they exist solely as a means for Lili to explore the power of her emerging sexuality.’ — Film Reference

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Dirty like an Angel (1991)
‘An early film from career-long provocateur Catherine Breillat, Dirty Like an Angel begins as a naturalistic character study focused on middle-aged cop Georges Deblache (Claude Brasseur) and his younger partner, ladies’ man Didier Theron (Nils Tavernier), situated amid the underworld milieu of the Arab and Caribbean immigrant community in Paris, and so treading on similar terrain to many of countrywoman Clair Denis’s films. But Breillat isn’t concerned so much with the immigrants and their marginal, outsider status as she is with the permeable, ever-shifting lines between cops, informers, and criminals. In Dirty Like an Angel, Catherine Breillat straddles the line between observational slice-of-life dramatics and the tumultuous sexual tug of war that dominates her subsequent body of work.’ — Budd Wilkins

Trailer

 

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Perfect Love! (1996)
‘A dissection of sexual conflict that is a touch too direct in the dialogue, but Breillat’s uncomfortable bluntness works more or less to convey her brand of feminism, her cynicism, and the tragedy of modern misconceptions of love and romance. As a companion piece to Romance, it feels like a continuation, like a second chapter addressing further ideas on the subject, distinctly less erotic and more focused on masculinity. Ultimately, it makes an ugly point about objectification in one of the most stomach churning examples of sound design out there.’ — Sally Jane Black

Excerpt

 

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Romance (1999)
‘Is Romance a film about romance, as its title slyly hints, or is it about love, or exclusively about sex as its censorship controversy suggests? Does Breillat render sex and romance as adversaries in the story of love? Or is the film really full of fire and passion despite its detached surface? Part of its appeal is that it provides no easy answers to any of these questions. Romance is a film that thrives on ambiguity.

‘In mainstream cinema, narratives of love do not usually play out this way. They are constructed around traditional romantic notions of longing and mutual fulfillment. Everything happens for a reason. Men take the lead. Women lose agency, accept passivity. Sex happens without negotiation, the natural progression of romance into lust, with a couple in silent, symbiotic agreement about what they desire from each other’s bodies. Satisfaction guaranteed, no talk required.

‘Breillat’s vision of romance is darker, more anguished than that. Romance is as cerebral as it is carnal. Characters talk a lot. Marie, in particular, talks to Paul and her successive lovers, and talks to us, the audience, with her internal, externalised voiceover. Through her, Breillat’s sexual investigation emerges as one partly concerned with dissecting the idea of the couple, and what it means to be in one, from both a philosophical and sociological perspective. Specifically, Breillat exposes the romantic fallacy of this entity as a wholly self-contained one, able to satisfy every human need.’ — Joanna Di Mattia

Trailer

Watch the entirety here

 

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Fat Girl (2001)
‘In Fat Girl Catherine Breillat focuses on a sort of coming of age story: fifteen-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and her sister Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) are vacationing with their parents in a town near the beach. Both have decidedly different views on sexuality, and different expectations regarding their loss of virginity.

‘Somehow both Elena (a slim and gorgeous girl) and Anaïs (who is overweight) deal with their own ennui in seemingly dispassionate ways. For Elena, it’s the illusion of love and the surrender of her sexuality; for Anaïs, her uncomfortable relationship with food and cynical views regarding sex. It’s a sometimes loving, sometimes bitter relationship where insults, fights and moments of true intimacy and sweetness overlap.

‘The universe of Catherine Breillat is not one where sex is glorified, nor is female subjectivity. Her feminism resides on the ability of portraying woman at their most loving, vulnerable, cruel, detached, and thirsty. This is arguably something radically different than mainstream ideas about feminism in its provocative representations of desire, sexuality, and eroticism. It is a call to arms against the status quo; it is decidedly unapologetic, sometimes barbaric, often bittersweet, and always remarkable.’ — José Sarmiento-Hinojosa

Trailer

Making of “Fat Girl”

 

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Brief Crossing (2001)
‘From the age of 17, when she wrote a novel banned for its “pornographic” content, French provocateur Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Romance, the also-banned A Real Young Girl) has been spinning frank variations on the theme of human sexuality. Usually, her films build to an explicit and crude deflowering or a long sexual negotiation, freighted with weighty issues of exploitation and power—a battle of the sexes that almost always ends with a clear loser. For Breillat, sex is never just sex; it’s a political arena in which men and women vie for advantage as much as they vie for pleasure, because the two impulses are often connected. Emotions are merely the consequence of desire.

‘By those standards, Breillat’s unheralded 2001 gem Brief Crossing is surpassingly gentle, a winning contribution to the one-night-only romantic tradition of films like Before Sunrise and Friday Night. Power and control remain an issue, especially in the piercingly sad coda, but in dealing with a young man’s deflowering for the first time, Breillat softens up to moments of real tenderness and innocence, revealing an attitude toward first love that’s uncharacteristically sensitive to both parties involved. This is a particularly notable achievement considering that the players are a married mother in her mid-30s and a doe-eyed 16-year-old virgin.’ — Scott Tobias

Watch the entirety (VO) here

 

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Sex is Comedy (2002)
‘”Sex Is Comedy” watches a French director as she attempts to film two sex scenes. She doesn’t have an easy time of it. Her actor and actress hate each other, and she and the actor are having an affair. She begins with a summer beach scene that is being filmed on a cold day out of season. Her crew is bundled up warmly but her actors shiver in their swimsuits, while she urges them to seem more sincere and passionate. Their hearts are clearly not in their work. When an actor’s body is there but not his soul, she believes, “that is moral ugliness.”‘ — Roger Ebert

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Anatomy of Hell (2004)
‘Anatomy of Hell plunges deep within the world of Catherine Breillat, which is a disturbing and sometimes darkly funny place to spend some time. It’s pretty easy to see why many critics hated this film upon its release; it is a straight-faced provocatation that condemns all men as being repulsed by women and on top of that it also contains some gross-out moments that recall the sleazy early days of John Waters. However, as a commentary on both Breillat and her films to date, this film is fairly indispensable and it contains some of the most startling images of her career. The film is based on her controversial novel Pornocracy.

‘Female blood is a recurring motif in the film, both with the woman’s early suicide attempt and later with her menstrual blood, the blood is useful for Breillat because it represents a way that the woman’s body stains the male body, leading to one of the film’s crucial images where a post coital Rocco strokes his blood drenched penis. The film positions this scene as oddly the most violent scene of the film and the blood is a stark contrast to what would normally be an erotic image. Another shocking moment of the film revolves around a soiled tampon which has been stuck in a glass of water as if it were a tea bag and then consumed. Watching the blood taint the pure glass of water actually forms an acute metaphor for the proceedings. If the female vagina is the star of the bodily horror of this film, the menstrual blood is the scariest ghoul in the haunted house.’ — bentclouds.com

Trailer

Watch the entirety here

 

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The Last Mistress (2007)
‘Perhaps the last thing anyone expected from French writer-director Catherine Breillat was a stately costume drama based on a musty old mid-19th-century novel. But The Last Mistress, in spite of its frilly couture and horse-drawn carriages, is no middlebrow Merchant-Ivory production. As Breillat herself acknowledges in the conversation below, the film, adapted from Jules Amédée Barbey D’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel, was a pet project that extends many of the themes that have interested her since the beginning of her career as a novelist and filmmaker. Completed after a devastating stroke that left her partially paralyzed, it is her first collaboration with Asia Argento, the now ubiquitous wild child known for chewing up lurid sexpot roles, most recently in work by Abel Ferrara (Go Go Tales) and Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate).

‘Passion devours and destroys in Breillat’s film, precisely because it is an irresistible, irrational force that the rigid morals of a prurient society cannot control or contain yet still manage to spoil. In that sense, the film is of a piece with the director’s art-porn provocations in advocating the liberation of love and sexuality — female sexuality, specifically — from the constraints of bourgeois moral law and public consensus. It is no accident that The Last Mistress is set in 1835, a time when the hedonism of aristocratic society was beginning to give way to the zealous, narrow-minded orthodoxies of a newly empowered middle class.’ — Bright Lights Film Journal

Trailer

CB discusses ‘The Last Mistress’

 

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Bluebeard (2009)
‘In Bluebeard, a sly rethink of the freakily morbid fairy tale, the filmmaker Catherine Breillat makes the case that once-upon-a-time stories never end. Divided into two parallel narratives — one focuses on Bluebeard and his dangerously curious wife, while the other involves two little girls in the modern era revisiting the tale — the movie is at once direct, complex and peculiar. It isn’t at all surprising that Ms. Breillat, a singular French filmmaker with strong, often unorthodox views on women and men and sex and power, would have been interested in a troubling tale about the perils of disobedient wives. Ms. Breillat never behaves.

‘All fairy tales have morals and the one in Ms. Breillat’s Bluebeard is brutal, suitably bloody and, like all good retellings, both similar to and different from earlier iterations. Like Ms. Carter, Ms. Breillat does not let women off easy: they are rarely if ever simply (or simple) victims. And to see Marie-Catherine as purely Bluebeard’s victim is to forget that she has a part in how the story not only ends, but also how it develops, for good and for bad. For her part, Ms. Breillat narrates the fairy tale three ways: in the period story, through the little girls and, finally, through the overall film. None are fully satisfying, but together they offer a sharp, knowing gloss on how our stories define who we were and who we become.’ — Manohla Dargis

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Sleeping Beauty (2010)
‘Catherine Breillat is fearless, and at this point in her career that’s almost taken for granted. Provocateur is the word that seems to come up most, as if critics can’t even find a more English word to depict her unique and challenging portrayals of sexuality and female independence. “Anatomy of Hell” pushed the envelope farther than almost any film of recent memory, while “Sex Is Comedy” and “The Last Mistress” are no less frank in their treatment of sexual politics. That’s why there seems to be a bit of confusion regarding her recent plunge into the world of fairy tales, as if making “The Sleeping Beauty” can be seen as a jump out of her incendiary milieu and into a more “family friendly” style. Yet that could not be further from the truth.

‘Breillat has now reached a point in her career when instead of breaking boundaries, as she did with “Anatomy of Hell,” she is simply creating worlds in which those rules and limitations do not exist. “Blue Beard,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” and perhaps soon “Beauty and the Beast” take the Renaissance fantasies of Perrault and bend the already mystical world of the fairytale into something completely new and entirely unencumbered. This provocateur has moved away from the “New French Extreme” to become the master of her own magical kingdom.’ — Daniel Walber

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Abuse of Weakness (2013)
‘Breillat suffered a major stroke in 2004 that left her close to death. In the film, imperious filmmaker Maud (Isabelle Huppert) suffers a massive brain hemorrhage that leaves her paralysed on the left side. There are echoes of The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, as Maud is left trapped by an unreliable body and unable to cope with everyday demands without the support of others.

‘Huppert is superb at capturing the physical impairment and mental anguish as Maud struggles with speech therapy and rehabilitation. The film has a dry, almost antiseptic air as Breillat relives these experiences with the spartan hospital walls and gleaming white of the doctor’s gowns combining to blind the eye.’ — Allan Hunter

Trailer

Excerpt from interview with Catherine Breillat about ‘ABUSE OF WEAKNESS’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, That sound would be explainable but wonderfully subtle. ** Nightcrawler, Hi. Yeah, that’s very true, agreed. Gold old art. The feet dragging is certainly understandable, and I know the vibe. Bet you’re pretty quick on your feet when you employ them, so probably no worries (yet). Scrapbooks! Big up on that prospect. Not only are they a great form in and of themselves, but they can really loosen stuff up too. What kind of scrapbooks are working on if it’s possible to characterise them? Well, I’m mostly working on getting the new film to place where we can shoot it, but there’s nothing creative about that stuff. I’m writing Gisele Vienne’s new theater piece, but it’s in a short lull at the moment. The next big project post-film is an audio only novel, but it’s already written and just has to be cast and recorded. And I’m fiddling with some short fiction, hoping to get enough to make for a collection, but I’m not sure if I can quite yet. Thanks for asking, man. Happy weekend btw! ** Bill, I try not to think about ‘Memoria’, ha ha. I did think about ‘Close Encounters’ at some point, which is kind of boring. Yeah, right, about the Gerrards. You have any stuff of note on the agenda for the next two (days)? ** Damien Ark, Ha ha. Hi, Damien! That was a new post, but if I’ve posted that video in another context before it wouldn’t surprise me one bit, yeah. How are you? What’s new? ** Okay. Quiet. I did a kind of modest, not so great post about Catherine Breillat on the blog ages ago, but not the full-fledged Day type of thing she deserves, so … I made one. See you on Monday.