Modern Maestros: Catherine Breillat

Robert here, with another entry in my series about great contemporary directors.

Maestro: Catherine Breillat
Known For: movies about sex
Influences: Chantal Akerman, Bertolucci
Masterpieces: Fat Girl
Disasters: Yes there are some films of hers that are disasters, perhaps Anatomy of Hell most of all. But you can't make an omelet...
Better than you remember: Fat Girl, The Last Mistress and Bluebeard (which conveniently will be the subjects of this post) are the good ones
Box Office: 1999's Romance broke a million.
Favorite Actor: Has made three films with actress Roxane Mesquida

Sex is complicated. In general, as a society we've decided to react to this by compartmentalizing sexuality into concepts that are easier to understand. There's the obscene or pornographic, the safe and loving, the dangerous, the forbidden, the passionate and so on in ways that seem to attach each separate sexual experience to a single emotion. Movies reflect this and create narratives around it. Virginity is to be kept by girls, lost by boys, sex without love is ultimately unfulfilling, desires often doom us. I don't mean to suggest that we're still stuck in a world defined by Victorian morality. We've come a great ways since then. But still, a happy ending usually means a wedding, not an orgy, because quite frankly we're not comfortable rooting for characters for whom an orgy would be a happy ending (and you might already be considering me some kind of pervert for suggesting it could be a happy ending). Catherine Breillat wants to tear all that down with a wrecking ball. Her films constantly seek to redefine our comfort levels, and demand that we question our preconceived notions about what a character's sexuality says about them.

Many of Breillat's films are sexually explicit, or at least explicitly sexual. Films that attack such subjects with such explicitness traditionally yield mixed results. Sometimes the audience becomes distracted by their prurient or prude sensibilities, sometimes the film gets distracted by it's own desire to shock. In other words, sometimes it's our fault and sometimes it's theirs. Breillat may have been doomed to forever have been "That French woman who makes movies with porn in them. Whatever." had she not broke through with 2001's Fat Girl. Consider the challenges issued by the film's plot. (Fat) Anais and her (pretty) sister Elena both dream about the loss of their virginity (could an American film pull this off without painting them as "tramps" or "troubled"?). Elena wants her first lover to love her. Anais wants anything but. When the movie ends, only Anais has gotten what she wants in the most foul way possible. Yet we the viewers can't really accept that her wishes have been filled. It's not possible. Why couldn't she have wanted love? We'd have been comfortable with that!

Since then, Breillat has put out two more great films. 2007's The Last Mistress in which Breillat utilizes a period piece to ponder how our misguided instinct to paint the sexually adventurous woman (brilliantly cast, wonderfully portrayed, thank you Asia Argento) into a devilish caricature still persists, and 2009's Bluebeard, in which the classic fairy tale is updated to make the murderous title character into a pretty lonely guy and his innocent bride into a rather petulant child. Each time she demands the audience ask of themselves: Who is the sinner? Who is the saint? Who deserves love and who deserves the consequences of their actions? The questions, seemingly endless are difficult and if you like difficult questions (and sex) you're bound to like Breillat's films. If not, you may find yourself happily retreating back into a world of simple sexuality, where sex for love is the ultimate goal, sex for lust is a forbidden but understandable diversion and people's sex lives remain properly hidden between their sheets. But Catherine Breillat will not be in that world, not unless she's swinging a wrecking ball.
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Losing It In Style

Adam of Club Silencio here going off the deep end. This week saw the release of Roman Polanski's Repulsion on glorious Criterion DVD and Blu-ray. As per usual we're given a beautiful print of the film with a scattering of insightful extras. And the film itself has lost none of its power; a razor-sharp story of a manicurist whose foundation is cracking alongside her confining London flat. The film has become such an essential horror film throughout the years that it becomes quite simple to see echoes of a pert and psychotic Catherine Deneuve in the many films that have adopted Repulsion's structure and style -- usually in an attempt to peruse the psyches of their damaged protagonists. It begs the questions: do male directors somehow break the misogynist critique by having these women undone by dastardly, dirty men? And do blondes really have more fun?

Repulsion (1965)
dir: Roman Polanski

The final eerie frame lingers on a photo of Carol (Catherine Deneuve) as a child staring ambiguously into space, or possibly in the direction of her father. Repulsion never makes explicit whether Carol was a victim of sexual abuse and yet we're constantly faced with Carol's... repulsion... toward men. Their voices, their touch, their smell -- Carol's infinitely more at ease with the beheaded rabbit that's decaying in her living room. Even her apartment building takes part in a full on assault on her physical body. If these walls could talk... they'd say something smutty and grab your breasts. Carol's mind becomes a crumbling facade; a soft-spoken and elegant blonde woman is destroyed by some abstract primal fear. The question "why" really doesn't matter to Polanski, but much of the film's unnerving pleasure comes in the speculation of what could turn this lost little girl into an adult woman losing it with a straight-razor.

Images (1972)

dir: Robert Altman

Altman's film knowingly owes Polanski a great dept as we fall into the dark recesses of Cathryn's (Susannah York) broken mind. A children's author and her dull, hobbyist husband venture to their fantastical country home where we experience Cathryn's triple assault by her lovers (both living and dead), and witness doppelgangers of Cathryn at varying stages of her life... possibly. Her madness accelerates, but much like Repulsion, we're never sure where nightmare and reality meet, or if we've been behind Cathryn's corrupted gaze all along.

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
dir: Dario Argento

Undercover at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, inspector Anna Manni (Asia Argento) experiences the Stendhal Syndrome (a psychological fatigue caused by great works of art) and quite literally falls into the arms of the sadistic serial rapist she was trying to capture. Much like Repulsion, Argento places the narrative directly in sync with Anna's dissolving mental state. Unlike Carol however, Anna's initial response to her sexual revulsion at the hands of maniacal men has her adopting her very own masculine side in order to inflict harm on the men closest to her -- also she simplifies by just using a razor blade. Eventually Anna dons a blonde wig in an attempt to regain her femininity, but it becomes more evident that it's just a simpler disguise for her continual descent into madness.

Inland Empire (2006)
dir: David Lynch

Lynch's film unravels similarly with doppelgangers and ambiguously fractured mental states. Actress Nikki Grace's (Laura Dern) latest role has her transforming into a woman spurned by manipulative men, and transforming into another woman entirely. Susan Blue (Laura Dern), a prostitute worn by the streets and an abusive carny boyfriend, is confined to her dank apartment where we see her madness manifest in the form of strobe-lit screams and a theatre showing Nikki/Susan's life as it's happening -- to which Susan herself can only describe as a "mind f**k." Typical of Lynch, all of this is best left to the audience that is now left with their minds in comparable disarray.

All I can conclude is that this would make a wonderful movie marathon for anyone (man-hater or otherwise) holed up inside their apartment for questionable lengths of time. Ultimately these fine films are a reminder of the very fragile, unknowable state of the human mind. And a solid reminder to get out more.

Red Carpet Lineup (Festival de Cannes)

Oh yeah... it's on.


They've rolled out the rouge carpet in Cannes for the opening of the über film festival of film festivals, now in its 62nd year.

Asia Argento was a camera hog (I trust you not to be surprised) at the jury press conference in a white and black dress. Aishwarya Rai absorbed the light of every flashbulb on the croisette for the opening film, Pixar's Up. Jury member Shu Qi started the day in a simple champagne dress but switched to flowing teal for the opening ceremonies. We'll see the Three Times star next in the omnibus film New York, I Love You. Her fellow juror and NY... cast member Robin Wright Penn, recently interviewed in Gotham Magazine which went to press before Sean Penn filed for divorce, started Day One in a white pantsuit but switched to this shimmering gown later. She's starring in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee later this year. And finally... no Cannes event is complete without fashion icon, festival regular, Oscar winner and Film Experience goddess Tilda Swinton. She's currently on screens in both Julia and Limits of Control.

<--- Genius Isabelle Huppert is President of the Jury this year.

You can read some amusing speculative thoughts on Cannes opening day from Vanity Fair's blog, check out Anne Thompson's take on the promotions for the Up party, read industry types pontificate about what Cannes means or doesn't mean these days at IndieWire, and see a ton of photos of Aishwarya Rai photos at Just Jared.

Do you wish you were there?

Cheeky Willem Dafoe

In honor of the first still from the new Lars Von Trier picture, subtly titled Antichrist, that was making the blog rounds this week.

Places Willem Dafoe's Ass Has Been

• Between Charlotte Gainsbourg's thighs
  (His thrusting seems to have woken evil naked tree spirits)
• snugly encased in Green Goblin gear
  
• on stage with the Wooster Group
• Between Madonna's thighs
  (His thrusting did not wake any latent acting skill)
• In bed with yellow fever on the set of Platoon

• In Prada
  
• Out of frame in The Life Aquatic
  (Wes Anderson's head-on horizontal tableaus allow for no backsides)
• In New York City
  
• Between Mary Magdalene's thighs
  (albeit only theoretically offscreen in the dream sequence way. For the Religious Right the new Von Trier movie will be the least of Dafoe's offenses)
• In Italy and Tunisia
  
• In Wisconsin
• Inside tuxedos at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Shrine Auditorium
  

• Directly behind Jude Law's new "bio-port"
  (this scene is not about what they're pretending it's about)
• In Hollywood
• In various yoga positions
  
• Between Asia Argento's thighs.
  (A distinction held by many silver screen asses)
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DIVA

Women (and sometimes men) with roomy charisma and acres full of flamboyant self regard often become favorite film characters. At the very least they provide us with indelible big screen moments. It's a neat trick of the narrative arts that people who would be absolutely maddening in real life are so loveable onscreen. There are a lot of self absorbed characters in fiction but there's something even more delightful about those larger than life figures who don't have time for navel gazing. They expect you to dutifully memorize their belly button while they strut their other stuff. They've got so much worth gazing at. So here's to the divas of the past year in cinema.

Like Philippe Petit of Man on Wire... his goo goo eyed girlfriend's narration (in subtitles) says it all.


I really wanted to include Sarah Jessica Parker reprising "Carrie Bradshaw" for Sex & The City. Carrie is everyone's favorite neurotic NY size queen (huge closets, endless shoes, lavish weddings and Mr. Big -- give them to her!) in this shortlist. Trouble was that she spent too much time in Season 7, excuse me ,in her movie worrying about her self absorption rather than revelling in it to qualify as Diva of the Year. Too bad really when her inimitable style, humor and offbeat charisma can turn so many heads.

click for the Divas of the Year

starring Julianne Moore, Asia Argento and more...

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Now Playing: Cute Robots, Sexy Assassins, Vegas Hookers

all links go to trailers

L I M I T E D
Elsa and Fred a romantic comedy from Argentina featuring senior citizens. What a concept.
<--- Finding Amanda Matthew Broderick is out to rescue his neice Brittany Snow from hooking in Vegas in this addiction comedy. And that's not a photo of Penny Lane from Almost Famous. The costumer was just referencing, I suspect. I wrote about this for Tribeca but, not included in that piece, is that when I met Brittany Snow I had to ask about her work on Hairspray. She told me she thinks she creeped out Michelle Pfeiffer. She was following her around the set, studying her, trying to imitate her body language as Velma so she could make Amber Von Tussle a sycophantic daughter who didn't have her own identity. (Yes, by all accounts La Pfeiffer is easily spooked. Skittish that one...)
Full Grown Men -an indie comedy about adults who haven't quite grown up with a fun cast: Alan Cumming, Deborah Harry, Amy Sedaris, Judah Friedlander and Matt McGrath.

Gunnin' for that #1 Spot a sports documentary
---> The Last Mistress -Here's the thing. I can't really recommend this movie, which is odd and stiff but I couldn't take my eyes off of Asia Argento who plays a courtesan who loves her unfaithful young dandy lover too much... (the plot is vaguely similar to the upcoming Chéri movie with Pfeiffer in the languorous courtesan role and Rupert Friend as the young straying dandy) I'm sure others have said it but I see Asia as more of a presence than an actress. I'm not sure what she does... and I don't see "great performance" in any of it but there's life force there. That's for damn sure.
Trumbo -a documentary on blacklisted Academy Award winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus)

W I D E
There's one for the whole family: Pixar's latest beauty Wall•E. There's one just for the adults: the gun happy action/porno Wanted (hey, it's a porno to me: Angelina and James McAvoy? bow chicka bow bow)


These two movies are hogging over 10,000 of the nation's screens (yikes) and they're both looking like real blockbusters. Expect talk of little else.
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