Agent provocateur

French director Catherine Breillat continues to push the envelope -- and her audiences -- with two films, "Sex Is Comedy" and "Anatomy of Hell."

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct 15, 2004 | The descriptive word most often draped around French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, almost like an apologetic bunting, is "provocateur." Her admirers and her detractors alike must acknowledge that she likes to push the infinitely stretchy skin of the envelope: What other filmmaker has ever shown us a blood-soaked tampon used as a teabag, turning a glass of water into a pinkish elixir that two characters, a man and a woman, drink in order to cement their own holy communion?

That's the image that almost everyone who sees Breillat's newest picture, "Anatomy of Hell," will remember most vividly, perhaps with revulsion, perhaps with puzzlement or admiration -- or any combination of the three. But to describe the scene as baldly as I just did negates the wonder and audacity of it: The beauty of the sequence isn't that it's so gracefully presented we forget to be queasy; it's that Breillat treats our queasiness itself with respect, an allowable response that's as much evidence of our humanity as the bloody tincture in the water is.

Breillat is a provocateur, but she's the plain brown kind: Her particular brand of provocation is markedly lacking in showmanship. She doesn't serve up that bloody tampon as an existential shockeroo, left to lie there, limply, at a philosophical dead end: She wouldn't insult us by being so maddeningly vague.

Perhaps because Breillat is French, she's often thought of (by Americans, at least) as one of those "wordy" filmmakers obsessed with heady ideas -- in short, an arty windbag. But Breillat is the exact opposite of a windbag. Her great distinction as a filmmaker is that she's so obsessed with specificity that she worries abstractions until she's made them concrete. When she sets out to make a movie about the mystery of womankind, and the fear, revulsion and confusion it has inspired since the beginning of time, she doesn't waste time dilly-dallying with metaphorical brushstrokes.

To put it another way: What could be less abstract than a used tampon?

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The vagaries of foreign-film distribution are such that Breillat's two most recent pictures are being released almost simultaneously in the United States: "Sex Is Comedy" (2002) is a fictional account of the filming of the central sex scene in Breillat's 2001 "Fat Girl," and it is, as its title suggests, something of a comedy. In "Anatomy of Hell" (2003), a young woman is brought back from the brink of suicide by a gay man who happens to catch her just as she's slicing her wrist with a razor. ("Why did you do that?" he asks her with blank incredulity. "Because I'm a woman," she replies, as if he'd asked her why she'd raised her umbrella in a rainstorm.) Recognizing him as an impartial audience -- in other words, a man who has no interest in her sexually -- she invites him to spend four nights with her, to "watch me where I'm unwatchable." She'll even pay him for it. Her instructions to him are "Just say what you see."

The two movies are distinctly different in tone and visual style, but the tensile intellectual cabling that connects them is pure Breillat. Breillat wrote the scripts for both films, although it seems as if, for her, writing and filmmaking are so entwined they're practically inseparable. Although she obviously works through her ideas with discipline and vigor before she steps behind the camera, those ideas are never stiff and bloodless by the time they reach the screen: Somehow, their molecules are still buzzing, having gained life rather than lost it in the transition from page to moving image.

Next Page: The actor, the actress and the prosthetic penis

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