We've covered our fair share of provocateurs over the course of this column, but for the next two weeks we'll be looking over the career of easily one of the most notorious and controversial directors of the 20th century, Catherine Breillat. Breillat began her studies in the arts as an actress before turning to writing, having her first novel,l'Homme facile, published when she was only 17. After making her screen acting debut alongside her older sister Marie-Hélène Breillat in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, before returning to writing and eventually directing several years later.
Citing Ingmar Bergman's films Sawdust Tinsel and Winter Light as her main inspirations for becoming a director, Breillat saw her first screenplay produced as a film in 1975 before stepping behind the camera herself the following year. Since the very beginning of her career, her filmshave come under fire for their explicit sexuality and for, more often than not, giving her female characters a sexual agency usually reserved for male characters. If the sex and nudity in Breillat's films seems excessive, it's often there to illustrate the power a woman has in any sexual dynamic. They have what the men in the film want, and Breillat weaponizes their sexuality accordingly.
This is not to say that her characters are sexual deviants. Breillat often portrays sex in a way that some have considered pornographic—an accusation hurled at her from the very beginning of her career—but it's often far too subdued and focused on the sort of long takes for which pornography has never had the patience. In 2001'sÀ ma soeur!, Roxane Mesquida andLibero De Rienzo have an extended dialogue scene—spending close to 15 minutes in bed with their genitals exposed—with only one setup and a handful of cutaways to co-star Anaïs Reboux watching them, the sort of thing you would never find in pornography.
Still these accusations follow Breillat because she is constantly poking the bear, so to speak. She cast Italian pornstar Rocco Siffredi in two of her films and her work often features unsimulated sexual acts and underage nudity. But as she says, this is what separates her from the pack...
"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."
Closer in spirit to Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini—whose Salò counts Breillatamong its mostardent defenders—than her French contemporaries, Breillat used provocative sexuality to pull herself away from the pack as opposed to ahead or behind it. She operates in an almost completely different sphere than the filmmaking world, an island unto herself, and that seems to be the way she prefers things to be.
Catherine Co (1975)
While I normally don't include films not directed by the person we're covering, in this particular case, it's important to include Breillat's first produced screenplay because of all the seeds sown here that grow to fruition as she turns to directing. The film's director,Michel Boisrond, would never make another feature film after this, turning to the world of television instead, and Breillat nicely picked up the ball from him and ran. Skin queen Jane Birkin stars as the title character, a lady of the evening who seeks toincorporate herself and her business.
Just two years earlier,Birkin exploded with sexualityin a skinsational sapphic hookup withBrigitte BardotinRoger Vadim'sMs.Don Juan, and Breillat and Boisrond capitalize on that burst of heat in her career. Like many a Breillat protagonist, Catherine exploitsthe men around her, specifically by picking up business savvy from all of her high-powered clientele, and then robbing them blind, much like the strippers in this year's Hustlers. And just like in that film, her business venture begins to get a lot of attention from both sides of the law.
Though the film is slight compared with the rest of Breillat's work, Birkin helps elevate it to something a bit more substantial. Even in its best moments, however, you have to wonder what was sacrificed from Breillat's script to make the film more overtly comedic.Birkin is radiant and bubbly in the film, showing why she was such a beloved sex symbol of the time, and showing off her perky pairand plump rump in several sexy scenes...
A Real Young Girl (1976)
Breillat was nothing if not assured in her talents and wasted no time in jumping behind the camera the very next year for her directorial debut AReal Young Girl. Even the title comes off as a snarky dig at any male directors attempting to accurately convey the female experience, and the film itself is the kind of thing any respectable male director would have backed away from slowly. The film centers around the sexual awakening of 14 year-old Alice—played, mercifully, by 21 year old actress Charlotte Alexandra—as she discovers the joys of masturbation and has strange sexual fantasies involving earthworms.
Set over the course of a summer, the film follows Alice as she spends her time away from boarding school masturbating a whole lot in strange and exotic places like beside the train tracks...
She also goes for a bare-assed bike ride to see if that does anything for her...
She soon falls for the hunky handyman her father hired and begins having some of the strangest sexual fantasies ever committed to film. Her fantasy involves her and the handyman at the beach, with Alice sticking a bottle in her bum, feathers in her crack, and one of the most creative uses of an earthworm in cinema history. See for yourself...
Things like this reside perfectly in the realm of a teenage girl's fantasies. We all thought about some pretty strange stuff when we were teens, and Breillat taps into the psyche in a way that no one else would dare, frankly. She also brings her characters to a very dark place in the third act when a man exposes himself to Alice at a carnival, leading her to imagine what her father's penis looks like (YIKES!), and then eventually making her way around to a mutual masturbation session with the hunky handyman. Though even that takes a turn for the dark when he attempts to assault her and is then killed by a trap Alice's father had set for a boar.
Breillat is often accused of being too brutal on her characters, and this is one shining example of that. While there is a supreme love for Alice that Breillat brings to the proceedings, there's also a tremendous amount of suffering heaped upon her. This isn't to say that traumatic events don't happen in real life, sometimes in rapid succession, but it is a trick she will return to time and again, allowing you to fall in love with a character only to break your heart later by putting them through a series of traumatic events.
Nocturnal Uproar (1979)
Breillat's muddiest film of the time, at least in terms of what it's trying to say, is her final film of the seventies and her last film for nine years, Nocturnal Uproar. The film begins with what can be assumed to be Breillat channeling her own experiences as a female filmmaker into the character of Solange (Dominique Laffin) who is ostensibly happily married, but sleeps around constantly. The only problem is that the subplot of Solange struggling to make her latest film is shoved aside a little less than halfway through and the film shifts focus exclusively to her love life.
Andy Warhol fixture Joe D'Allesandro co-stars as the American actor appearing in Solange's new film, with whom she has her first extra-marital dalliance early in the film. Sadly the only content we have from the film on our site at the moment is a single still of the two in bed...
D'Allesandro is also, strangely, the only male character in the film to disrobe for sex with Solange. This is kinda the original CMNF flick in a way and it's certainly a conscious choice on Breillat's part, taking the puritanical view of sex on film to task. Unfortunately, the rest of the film isn't as pointed, and just sort of limps along as Solange bedhops. The sex in the film isn't as raw or explicit as you'll find in her other work, and it's far too aloof to make any of its points in a salient way.
36 Fillette (1988)
Following a nine year directing hiatus, Breillat was back behind the camera for another of her signature "coming of age or just plain cumming" flicks, 36 Fillette (orJunior Size 36), which refers to the ever-increasing bra size of the film's 14 year-old lead character Lili—played by 18 year old Delphine Zentout. In stark contrast to Alice in A Real Young Girl, Lili's passions aren't relegated to the realm of fantasy. She is actively seeking to appear older and more cultured than she is in hopes of losing her virginity.
Or so she thinks until the moment comes, when Lili attracts the eye of aging lothario Maurice (Étienne Chicot), who takes her back to his place. While they spend the course of the evening on the cusp of having sex, Maurice eventually determines that he can't go through with it and she wanders outside where she loses her virginity to an inexperienced and tremendously awkward guy her own age.Also in contrast to her 1976 directorial debut, this film's events unfold over the course of a single night, rather than an entire summer.
As the "will they/won't they" drama unfolds, we get several nice looks at Zentout's ample breasts, taking careful pains to show that she never looks uncomfortable in Maurice's company...
Compare those pics with the ones of her when actually gets around to losing her virginity and you see how Breillat is really one of the only female filmmakers of the time to depict this scenario realistically without being graphic about it. Zentout's face speaks volumes about the pain of the first time for many females, particularly if they're partnered with someone equally inexperienced...
Dirty Like an Angel (1991)
For her next feature, Breillat put men front and center for the first time in her directorial career with this tale of an older detective named Georges (Claude Brasseur) who breaks the law to protect his childhood friend Manoni (Claude-Jean Philippe) after he commits a crime. Georges assigns his novice partner Didier (Nils Tavernier) to watch over Manoni's wife and children while all of this goes down, but in the meantime, Georges finds himself becoming closer with Didier's wife Barbara (Portuguese beauty Lio), eventually starting a torrid affair with her!
While the character of Barbara still has a tremendous amount of agency as a female character in a man's world, she is not front and center here. Sheoccupies the same space as any generic cop's wife in any run-of-the-mill Hollywood effort, not even entering the picture until thirty minutes in. The film certainly proves that Breillat is not quite to one-trick-pony many of her detractors like to equate her with, but she still manages to suffuse Barbara with enough empathy to keep the audience on her side as the men around her destroy themselves.
Like the lengthy period of time spend in bed with a nude Maurice and Lili in 36 Fillette, Breillat really begins leaning into the long takes around this time in her career. You can find some relatively lengthy shots in her early work, two to three minutes a piece, but Dirty Like an Angel's first sexual encounter between Georges and Barbara runs nearly five minutes without a cut. Breillat makes the intimacy agonizing, as you watch Lio run the gamut of emotions from pleasure to guilt. Breillat gives Barbara a conscience, something completely devoid from her male characters, and though the scene is sexy for obvious reasons, it's also intense...
Perfect Love (1996)
Men are pigs is sort of the thesis statement of Breillat's next film, Perfect Love, about a young man named Christophe (Francis Renaud) involved in a relationship with the olderFrederique (Isabelle Renauld), but who can't commit to her and, more importantly, just can't shake his circle of misogynistic male friends. The film opens with Frederique dead and the police attempting to piece together the crime, a framing device as old as detective fiction, but one that works well in this particular context.
This is probably Breillat's least sexually explicit film, with French beauty Isabelle Renauld showing nothing below her breasts in the film's trio of sex scenes. In fact, Breillat spends more time with Christophe and Frederique in post-coital talking mode than she does with them making love.
Earlier this week in our latest Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy column, we discussed the potential latent homosexuality of Mark Rylance's character in Intimacy and how his misogyny might actually be a by-product of his own self-loathing. Breillat makes no bones about that here, positioning Christophe's real problem as the fact that he can't admit to himself that his deep-rooted hatred of women stems from the fact that he actually loves men. His hyper-masculine pals all abhor the notion of homosexuality because they think that the only way to conquer it is by treating women like objects and becoming incensed at the notion that they themselves might actually be gay.
Again, Breillat is painting with a broad brush, but those broad strokes are the only ones that can be seen by a general audience. Things like this sometimes need to be spelled out in order to get the point across. Breillat wants to make sure that none of the similar angry young men in the audience could see themselves in any of these characters.
Romance (1999)
Here's where Breillat goes from a dirty, local secret that France had tried to keep hidden from the rest of the world, to an internationally acclaimed iconoclast who isn't shy about showing sex as it really is. The film centers around a schoolteacher named Marie (Caroline Ducey) whose love life is suffering due to a suffocatingly chaste relationship with Paul (Sagamore Stévenin). 11 minutes in, she Ducey pulls out Stévenin's real dick and begins fellating it, and somehow the dude doesn't get hard, eventually putting his dick away and telling her to stop...
Though the two appear to be a perfectly fine couple otherwise, it's clear that Marie is thoroughly dissatisfied with the lack of sex with Paul and soon seeks pleasure elsewhere. 17 minutes later, Ducey ends up going home with Paolo (played by the aforementioned Italian pornstar Rocco Siffredi), helping him get on a condom and then rolling over to take him from behind...
If you're keeping track at home, we're not thirty minutes into this movie and we've already seen Ducey handle two real penises, putting one of them in her mouth, so you can see why the knives were out for this film, particularly here in the US. Returning to Paul, she again attempts to get something, anything, going with him, marking her third encounter with a penis in under forty minutes...
The back half of the film is where things get really insane—and we start seeing a lot fewer penises. Marie's self-destructive sexual escapades soon land her in a sadomasochistic relationship with the headmaster of the school where she teaches...
This being a Catherine Breillat film, things don't end well for Marie as she gets assaulted in a stairwell and concludes the film by going for a graphic gynecological exam which was only topped on film recently by François Ozon with The Double Lover...
Romance stirred up a firestorm of controversy, passing uncut by censorship boards in Europe, the UK, and elsewhere around the globe. Here in the US, the already short film (99 minutes) was cut down to 84 minutes and slapped with an R-rating that ensured pretty much anyone in the US who wanted to see it would wait until it was available uncut. Thankfully the film was mostly overshadowed by the release of Baise-moi several months later, a film with much more explicit and violent sex, and one which objectively had a lot less going on beneath the surface than this film does.
Fat Girl (2001)
If you're a child of home video and an avid consumer of all things Criterion Collection, this was likely your introduction to Breillat, as it was mine. Her only film released as a part of the collection to date,2001'sÀ ma soeur!or Fat Girl as it is known here in the States, may not be her most controversial or her most explicit film or even her most derided film, but it is certainly all of those things. The film's central relationship is between two sisters, 15-year old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and 13-year old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux, the titular portly female), who establish a bet at the beginning of the summer to be the first to lose her virginity.
While Elena romanticizes the notion of sex, Anaïs thinks it will be better to just lose her virginity to someone she doesn't care about so she can move on to better lovers. In keeping with her romantic ideals, Elena soon falls for Italian law student Fernando (Libero De Rienzo), who sneaks into the bedroom the two girls share one night. As mentioned earlier, he and Elena talk in bed for a long, long time, periodically cutting away to Anaïs pretending to be asleep but watching through her fingers—the image which would eventually become the film's Criterion cover.
Fernando pleads for sex, though Elena turns him down every time. Eventually, he threatens that he'll have to look for sex elsewhere if she doesn't put out. After seven minutes of back and forth, Elena eventually agrees tothe classic Catholic loophole, as it's known: anal sex. Roxane Mesquida, the latest in a long line of waifishly thin brunette Breillat protagonists, was 19 at the time of filming playing 15, and spends almost the entirety of the scene with her nightgown hiked up and her bush on display...
Not long after, he talks Elena into giving him a blowjob outside, and they all go to the beach together. At the beach, Fernando gives Elena an opal engagement ring, which causes Elena to have a change of heart and have sex with him that night, while Anaïs cries over losing the bet on the other side of the room...
As with all of Breillat's work, the film takes a devastating turn in the final twenty minutes, presenting audiences with perhaps her bleakest resolution to date. I wouldn't dream of spoiling it here. Fat Girl would be the first of two films for Breillat in 2001, but we'll get to that other film next time.
Join us again next week as we close out our look at Breillat's filmography with her final, to date, six films. If you're reading this after 11/22/19, you can click here to read Part II.
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
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Header image via Listal
All other non-nude images via IMDb
