Agent provocateur

But Jeanne isn't out to humiliate him. What she needs to do -- and all of "Sex Is Comedy" is about the way she works this out in a caffeinated whirl, first in her head and then with her actors -- is to galvanize her actors so they're able to peel back every last protective layer. At one point, she begs her actress, "Dazzle me on the monitor, so I feel like an intruder." The actors' nervousness about the sex scene is natural, but it can't be allowed: It's the very thing that could kill the scene's meaning. "Fear of being obscene makes one obscene," Jeanne says at one point. "Emotion is never dirty or obscene -- it's grace."

Parillaud's performance is sharp on its surface and soft at its core. And if Jeanne truly is Breillat's alter ego, she is a pitiless self-portrait. Breillat has written this role without a scrap of vanity. We see Jeanne watching a scene on the monitor, demanding that it be redone over and over again. "We didn't see the cock -- it must show and not show," she hisses in exasperation, while the crew and actors flutter busily but helplessly, understanding exactly what she means but at a loss as to how, precisely, to deliver it.

But when the sex scene finally comes together -- it unfolds before us with an emotional intensity we couldn't have predicted -- we understand exactly what Jeanne, or Jeanne/Breillat, was after. And not even Jeanne herself (or, for that matter, Breillat) believes that she did anything so active as to "shape" the resulting scene. Rather, she willed it into a rough approximation of her original conception, as if she were bending a spoon with her mind. But she knows, as we do, that the actors have gone somewhere she can't follow. She can only watch while they do the bulk of the work -- but then, watching was the only reward she was after in the first place.

If "Sex Is Comedy" is an examination of the bond of trust between an actor and a director, "Anatomy of Hell" puts that bond to the test. The woman, the luminous Amira Casar, and the man, Rocco Siffredi (the Italian porn star who was so touching in Breillat's 1999 "Romance"), spend most of their time in a bedroom, although not necessarily in bed. We never learn their names, although we become intimately familiar with their bodies.

The man shows up at the woman's house -- it's perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the kind of desolate locale that's more likely to foster desperation than romance. He wears a chic, oyster-colored suit of some casually liquid fabric, a get-up that's clearly designed more to stoke his own vanity than to incite her admiration. When he arrives, the woman explains, vaguely apologetically, that she hasn't had time to undress. She eases out of her clothes and extends herself on the bed. He sits in a chair opposite her, annoyed and wooden. He has no interest in her; he doesn't want to be there.

But what unfolds during that night and the three that follow -- each night, the man arrives at the appointed hour in that rippling suit, each time looking slightly less like a spectator and more like a suitor -- is a peculiar kind of intimacy that transcends sexual preference. It transcends sex, period. The woman reveals herself to him in ways that she herself can't even see (at least not without the aid of a mirror). She shows him how she responds to his curious, if unenthusiastic, touch; she shows him how easily she can accommodate, and expel, a large stone dildo; and she shows him how she bleeds. Her purpose is to reveal to him, and to articulate for herself, the revulsion that women's bodies can incite in men -- revulsion founded in the fact that women's bodies, with all their hidden though penetrable corridors, are the ultimate plumbable-yet-not-knowable mystery.

The man proves her right. The woman reclines on the bed, an all-powerful odalisque, a nude drawn with two parallel hill-and-valley strokes. The man is unmoved by this bride stripped bare, and in fact, goes out of his way to berate her. He lectures her about her own vulnerability. ("The fragility of female skin inspires disgust or brutality. Women depend on one or the other.") When she apologizes that she hasn't shaved, he sneers that even removed hairs still exert their presence. Even shaved, her sex would look like "a plucked chicken." He remarks on "the sloppy, shapeless aspect" of her "hidden lips," and compares the moistness of her skin to "the skin of frogs." His zingers intensify to the point of feverish ridiculousness: "Frogs at least have the decency of being green."

But the more time he spends with her -- not just looking at her and touching her, but listening to her -- the more deeply he begins to understand her. "Anatomy of Hell" isn't a meditation on misogyny -- that's its most obvious reading, and, frankly, its laziest. Breillat uses this man and woman on a bed (sometimes only he is clothed, and sometimes the two of them are naked) as a way of exploring the meaning of women's bodies from social, political and personal angles, instead of purely sensual ones.

Next Page: The sexual essence of women is so foreign to men that revulsion is a part of their response to it

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