(Our society) is founded in the backwash of hypocrisy. .. in a society of guilt. By looking at it I'd like the guilt to disappear. When it is no longer sin, I believe we will be freer with ourselves and more loving to others because we'll love ourselves more.
Interview with Catherine Breillat on the Anatomy of Hell disc
Having just seen Anatomy of Hell I've had a kind of epiphany with regard to my thinking about Breillat. I've been a bit unsure about how to take a lot of her films, and though I'll explain how I've decided that she is an interesting director, I can completely understand the ambivelence that a lot of people have about her and I don't think Anatomy of Hell will go towards changing many people's ideas. I had been looking at Breillat's films as 'a characterless character study' as stated above, but character is not what Breillat is interested in. They are cyphers, facilitating the plot as I said in my previous post. I am not sure however that Breillat has no idea of what she is wanting to say (she does herself no favours in the Fat Girl interviews, but in the Anatomy of Hell interview she is able to go deeper into her ideas and is much less harsh, making it definitely worth a watch). I am starting to see that her work is exploring and developing ideas as she goes along and for that reason I wouldn't be willing to dismiss her body of work at this stage.
The reason for my greater willingness to appreciate her work is that in Anatomy of Hell I am seeing themes that had been there in a lot of her work, including Fat Girl, which I had not picked up on before. Also I read
this Senses of Cinema article about Romance which says:
A scene in Romance that does indeed offer a "graphic display of female genitalia" in unflinching close-up is the climactic scene devoted to childbirth. This scene, naturally, does not rate a mention in the OFLC's list of pertinent moments in the film requiring comment, justification or adjudication. But why not? And what is so natural about this exclusion? The classifiers must have considered the scene (if they consciously considered it at all) as a 'clinical' depiction of a normal - and inoffensive because 'non-sexual' - bodily function. Yet it is precisely the system of these differentiations and distinctions - between the sexual and the non-sexual realms, between what is banally physical and arousingly physical, between an 'innocent' or clinical gaze and an eroticised or perverse one - which Breillat's film puts so thoroughly and vertiginously in question.
The film's 'hardcore' fantasy scene is the centre of this exploration. Like Ruiz's set-piece, it stages a dissociation or a contradiction directly inside the image. Triggered by the experience of a line of medical students spreading her legs and then looking and feeling inside her body, Marie imagines a brothel for pregnant women. Here, the upper half of her body (and the bodies of other pregnant women) is in one, clinical space, with presiding doctors and men holding their partners' hands. But it is also, in a spooky architectural plan, a circular space; and on the other side of the wall, the lower halves of these prone female bodies are being 'serviced' by a hot and sweaty band of masturbating studs lining up to insert their members in the 'anonymous' vaginas presented to them. As an intense, truly 'transgressive' picturing of a psychic fantasy, the scene plays out all the confusions - I mean both the discrepancies and the similarities - between 'anonymous', casual, 'lawless' encounters and 'intimate', socially sanctioned unions, a site of confusion which the film traces and probes in every scene (supremely via the figure of the school principal whose bondage rituals lead to an unexpectedly tender, light and formal relationship of care and trust between himself and Marie).
The 'split' marked by the wall between two starkly contrasted realms of social and psychical reality - between two images of what is conceivable and imaginable as constitutive of reality and experience - is mirrored by the violently visible join between two orders of representation. On one side, the fictional, the naturalistic, the staged and acted; on the other side, the pornographic, with its faceless 'body doubles' engaged in real, live sex acts. But where exactly is the obscenity, the freak-out here - in the action on the outer rim of this imaginary circle, or in the split, the distinction, the abstract 'X' which itself forces such a hallucinatory dissociation?
This distinction occurs again in Anatomy of Hell in the sequence where Amira Casar talks about inserting a tampon, how it is similar to a penis, but is sterile and functional, as far from sexual connotations as it can get. "I can push it in like that. To the tip. Without feeling anything, no sensation of pleasure at all. A very ordinary gesture. Look, there's a whole device to make it look complex. So one can insert it, without touching oneself, keeping your virginity intact."
In these sequences, the two films are trying to show the audience the artificial nature of sex imposed by the rules of society that through sanitising genitalia makes them seem dirty, not to be talked about. Condoms and tampons are important functional devices, Breillat is not suggesting that they are not important, but she is looking at them from the point of view of making the implicit values ascribed to them by society explicit.
This is the clinical, genitalia as functional organs view. Fat Girl shows the other societal allowance, that of socially acceptable sex between the 'prettier' girl, with defined limits of for example anal sex 'keeping virginity intact' before the final vaginal penetration (I kept thinking of that rather crude baseball term of getting to second or third base while watching - well defined limits which the boy knows that he has to push up against a little further each time, a societal ritual in which both the boy and girl know their part, the girl submits slowly, too fast and she might be seen to be slutty, too slow and she loses him). What Breillat is trying to show in Fat Girl is how sex itself is not obscene, sexual organs are not obscene. It is the
value that society places on them that
is obscene (One very funny example of societal values and obscenity comes up in the cover image of Tartan's release of Anatomy of Hell, in which Amira Casar is shown wearing a slip, when in the film she is completely naked! Perhaps Tartan did not realise how funny that would be considering the theme of the film!) These values are mostly disseminated through the culture, so in this sense Breillat's films are playing a dangerous game, similar to Pasolini's Salo, of exploring how far they are playing a part in representations of sexuality (are they another packaging of sex to sell a film, or are they beyond that because they reject the societal and cultural notions of certain barriers in portraying sex?).
Anais in Fat Girl shows her detachment from society (already present in her lacking in societal definitions of 'beauty') by refusing to want to loose her virginity in the 'classical' way, as exemplified by her sister. The deep, emotional way in which Anais reacts to her rape, and in the scene in the swimming pool, is well contrasted with the real and acceptable but shallow and manipulative sex in the bedroom.
In that sense the rape is the 'punishment' of Anais by society (as much as the mothers death is society's punishment for her lack of care for her children, and the prettier sister is killed because she has 'gone too far too soon', or for her naivete in society's eyes) - but because Anais rejects its power over her she wins out, and through her initiation moves beyond the need for protection by societal forces (the police, the parents, the boyfriend, the bigger sister). She is on her own now but equipped to deal with society with unclouded eyes.
In that sense the rape is only considered obscene because society has declared it so, while the sweet talk is just as insistent and has the same result for the prettier sister. That I think prompts Anais's hostile reaction to the police - they have run to her aid, the way that they did not do to her sister.
I don't exactly condone this as a realistic view, but I think if you see the film not as documentary realism, or the way films normally present 'real' events (as I think Narshty might have when he speaks of the seduction as the only good scene in the film), but as an
abstraction in which events are literal to the characters but meant to be taken metaphorically by the audience (similar to Salo), then it is an interesting exploration.
after Hollywood. It was prompted by (a) the fact that you disliked the film partly because you did not feel any empathy for the characters and mostly your (b) your ‘don’t buy it’ recommendation. Maybe you didn’t like it, but that doesn’t mean that other people will feel the same. ‘Sex is comedy’ did nothing for me, but I really liked Fat Girl. 
