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In the French director Catherine Breillat’s film “Fat Girl,” from 2001, two adolescent sisters go on summer holiday with their parents near the seaside. The older sister, Elena, is thin, beautiful, and somewhat weak-minded. The younger sister—the fat girl of the title—has a plain face and a sharp tongue. Elena begins to date an Italian university student, whom she picks up at a café. One night, the young man, who is studying law, tries to convince Elena, who is a virgin, to have sex with him. They are in the room she shares with her sister. First, he tells her about his sexual exploits as he smokes—resting an ashtray on her abdomen, on top of her sheer nightdress. Then, sensing her reluctance, he says, “It’s dumb if I have to go with another girl, a girl I don’t love.” A series of quietly terrible sex scenes follow. This is a rape, Breillat shows us, carried out not by physical force but by calculation, aided by a social architecture that encourages the girl to capitulate to him.
The film is an excruciatingly exact observational study of male power. It is also a pitiless account of how girls and women come to hate each other, because of how they let their behavior be warped by that power. As the law student coaxes the older sister to give herself up to him, the younger one lies in her bed with her sheets covering her face, not quite obscuring her eyes. She seems to see through the scene to its putrid core, and yet she does not intervene. Is this because she knows her sister will be angry at her for interfering? Because she wants to witness—to participate in—a scene that compels her? Or because she resents the entry that Elena’s beauty grants her into the world of male favor?
Wanting to be desired by a man, resenting a girl who successfully makes herself the object of desire—these are not particularly beautiful feelings, but they are archetypal feminine ones. As such, they are emblematic subject matter for Breillat, who has been transporting women’s most ecstatic and ugly experiences onto the screen for fifty years. In doing so, she has often enlisted imagery that is, even for European art films, shockingly direct—in addition to sudden explosions of violence, she has shown menstrual blood, masturbation, rape, and an infant’s blue head emerging from a woman’s vagina. And yet, if Breillat’s films are often disturbing, it is thanks less to their frank imagery than their insistence that sexuality is a perennial engine of unsettling possibilities, from transcendence to debasement.
I met Breillat in the fall of 2023, when she was in town for the New York Film Festival, where her movie “Last Summer” was showing. (The film became available to stream on the Criterion Channel on December 1st.) Breillat, who is seventy-six, has luminously white shoulder-length hair. She spoke slowly, lending her smiling expression an air of patience and amusement. In 2004, she had a stroke, which paralyzed the left side of her body; she has not entirely recovered, and walks with a cane. Like the characters in her movies, she dresses with an exquisite sense of proportion and color. That day, she wore a black dress beneath a cashmere cardigan of deep burgundy, and an amber ring on her finger.
The impression of Breillat created by her films is that of a person who is unafraid of—who perhaps even delights in—confrontation. In a review of “Fat Girl,” the critic J. Hoberman called her “France’s foremost bad girl.” In public, she tends to speak freely, and often beyond the limits of the advisable. In a 1999 conversation with Daphne Merkin, published in this magazine, she said that she wanted her films “to bring my audiences to the things that they would normally find immoral and reprehensible. I find those things just the opposite.” In a 2015 interview with the Museum of the Moving Image, she said, “I say things that shouldn’t be said and I love doing it. You can also say that I am a pedophile because I am madly in love with filming young girls; I am a necrophile because I adore shooting death.” More recently, she told an Australian newspaper that she thought the use of intimacy coördinators, who work to insure that actors are treated with sensitivity during sex scenes, is “stupid and disgusting.”
The remark was especially noteworthy since Breillat has been accused by two of her lead actresses, Caroline Ducey and Asia Argento, of mistreating them while filming explicit scenes. According to Ducey, who published a book about the experience last year, Breillat, while shooting “Romance” (1999), allowed Ducey’s scene partner—a nonprofessional actor—to perform real cunnilingus on her, despite the actress not having agreed to film unsimulated sex. Argento said that, among other things, Breillat was dangerously negligent during the filming of a scene in the historical drama “The Last Mistress” (2007), in which Argento had to choke her co-star. (Breillat denies both actresses’ characterizations of her conduct.)
When I spoke to Breillat, she compared intimacy coördinators matter-of-factly to “cleaning ladies.” I expected her to be more pugilistic, but she spoke about most subjects with a bemused smile. She wanted to tell me about her upbringing in rural France (“the sticks”); about other films she wants to make (her next will be based on “the perfect crime,” which she discovered in a police blotter); about her directorial style (demanding, but aware enough of her actors’ limits so as not to “massacre their grace”). The only time that she bristled was on the subject of her reception. Critics “usually don’t want to understand that I’m a romantic, when I know I am,” she told me.
Breillat’s films depict the lives of women who lack full self-knowledge—who become, for one reason or another, briefly or for extended periods, strangers to themselves. In “Romance,” one of her most controversial films, a young schoolteacher whose boyfriend stops wanting to sleep with her pursues increasingly extreme sexual experiences. The titular lover of “The Last Mistress” is a nymphomaniac obsessed with a man she also hates. “Last Summer,” her latest film, follows a woman in her fifties who has an affair with her teen-age stepson, a relationship that shifts in register from lust to play to intimidation and back again. “Last Summer” shares with many of Breillat’s other films the presence of a romance with a significant age difference, a female character whose decisions bring her to the outer reaches of social sanction, and a scrupulously neutral approach to the transgression it depicts.
Breillat’s films are defined by an immaculate attention to visual harmony. She likes to give her characters signature color schemes—cotton-fluff white and lipstick red for the girlfriend in “Romance,” bronze and burgundy and black for the protagonist in “The Last Mistress”—and place them against backdrops lit with a slick, smooth light. Within these finely wrought landscapes, human beings experience extreme physical and emotional carnage. And, though much of this misbehavior is carried out by men, they are by no means the sole perpetrators.
In “Last Summer,” Breillat’s protagonist is a family lawyer named Anne. At fifty or so, she lives in a leafy, affluent suburb of Paris with her husband, who is an executive, and their adopted twin daughters. When the film opens, Anne is counselling one of her clients, a teen-age girl who has accused a boy of rape. “The defense will try to portray you as a world-class slut,” she advises. “Whatever is said, keep calm.”
Anne’s existence initially appears devoted to the maintenance of calm. She has a deep closet of shift dresses, like a politician’s wife. The cream-colored interiors of her very clean house are brightened by light that streams through high, smudgeless windows. This sense of order begins to disintegrate with the arrival of her husband’s son, from his first marriage, a lanky, floppy-haired seventeen-year old named Théo. When we first encounter his presence, it’s through a mess he leaves behind in the living room—clothes strewn across the floor, an ashtray overflowing on the couch. At the beginning, Anne attempts to rein him in with stern parental authority. But soon he begins to elicit playfulness from her, and a genuine magnetism develops between them. Breillat sometimes compares her approach to “entomology.” Because she does not squirm, she can get up very close.
As a girl, Breillat was bold but sheltered—the former perhaps a consequence of the latter. She was born in 1948, the second child of a doctor and a housewife who met in medical school (Breillat’s mother never practiced), and she grew up in the small town of Niort, a commune near the Atlantic Ocean. With characteristic bluntness, she told me that she and her older sister, Marie-Hélène, got their periods and developed breasts early on (for Breillat, by the age of eleven). The two were effectively confined at home by their parents. “My father would say we were ‘dangerous to ourselves,’ ” she said. “For our parents, we were ‘ticking bombs.’ ” Inside, the girls read their way through the family’s books, after which they were granted permission to visit the municipal library once a week, where Breillat encountered writers—such as the Comte de Lautréamont, the Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller, and Marivaux—who would shape her sensibility.
Breillat, despite her parents’ warnings, did not grow up frightened of sex or of sexual violence. Like the children in “Fat Girl,” her family spent summer vacations near the sea. When the girls were young teen-agers, she told me, at night, they would “jump out of the window and climb down the wall and hitchhike to Biarritz, to go out and be in the night clubs. You can see how naïve and innocent we were—we would hitchhike, we had no idea of the risks.”
One night, when she was fourteen, Breillat saw a performance by a well-known ballet dancer, who invited her to his dressing room after the show. The two talked for hours. Breillat went to a night club afterward. The proprietors, pleased to see bright-faced girls, would always usher her and her sister to tables of wealthy men. That night was no different, but when Breillat arrived she had a terrible headache. The man she was placed next to offered to take her to his hotel, where, he said, he had aspirin. She agreed, and he escorted her to the Hôtel du Palais, a grand nineteenth-century resort built on the beach. As soon as they walked into his room, Breillat told me, “He threw me on the ground and tried to rape me. He said, ‘You look like a woman, so you will undergo what a woman must undergo.’ ” Breillat described the ensuing confrontation as a three-hour-long “battle,” in which the man tried to undress her, without success. Eventually, she managed to force him to take her back to the night club, where, in front of his friends, she demanded that he give her a ride home. “I wasn’t afraid—I’m never afraid—and it didn’t destroy my sense of innocence, because I came out as the victor,” she told me. “I treated him like a dog.”
A fictionalized version of the scene appears in her début novel, “L’Homme Facile” (“A Man for the Asking”), which she wrote the following year. The book is a disjointed, experimental compilation of an unnamed man’s variegated erotic fantasies. (Breillat’s father had to sign the contract for the book, because she was still a minor.) Another version appears in “36 Fillette” (1988), her breakout film, which features a long sequence of a teen-age girl—an aspiring writer—who goes to the room of a middle-aged man in the Hôtel du Palais. There, “the protagonist is a Lolita,” Breillat told me. “Whereas me as a fourteen-year-old—as I said, I was naïve, innocent, I had no idea what was going on.” As she came to understand what had happened, she transfigured the night as fiction. “It was my dream to become a novelist, and what happened to me that evening furnished me material for my first book,” she said.
Breillat’s career has been extraordinarily productive. For twenty-five years, from the late nineteen-eighties to the mid-twenty-tens, she made, on average, a film every two years. Then, after 2014, she entered a fallow period. The film that preceded “Last Summer” was “Abuse of Weakness,” released in 2013, which stars Isabelle Huppert as a film director in her fifties, named Maud. The film begins when Maud has a stroke. Huppert wakes in bed one morning—her face in the center of the frame, surrounded by white sheets, like a princess in a pile of snow—to discover that she can no longer feel one side of her body. But the story’s main drama is Maud’s relationship with a con man, who becomes her primary caregiver and steals her money.
The story is based on the aftermath of Breillat’s own stroke, at fifty-six. While she was recovering, she saw a television interview with a con artist named Christophe Rocancourt, and decided that she wanted to cast him in a film. (In the movie’s version of this scene, Maud calls her assistant while watching the interview and says, “No repentance. I love it.”) When they met, they hatched a plan to adapt his life for a movie. He gradually became embedded in her personal life. She was lonely, and felt neglected by her children. Rocancourt asked Breillat for more and more money, even as he seemed to have stopped working on the script. He needed to pay loans back, he said; he was planning to buy a restaurant. She ultimately signed over more than seven hundred thousand euros. A few years later, Breillat sued Rocancourt for “abuse of weakness,” a French legal offense that involves taking advantage of a vulnerable person. Rocancourt was convicted, sentenced to sixteen months in prison, and ordered to pay Breillat five hundred and seventy-eight thousand euros. During the proceedings, her defense maintained that she had been suffering from cognitive difficulties. Breillat told the court, “I didn’t know how to refuse because he asked for things brutally, and, at that moment, I was desperate.”
When Breillat and I talked about her experience with Rocancourt, she had no qualms about casting him as a predator, and herself as a victim. In the film, the dynamic is different; the anti-seizure drugs that Breillat emphasized to me are never mentioned. Nor is Maud, whose emotions can be erratic, a particularly sympathetic character. Breillat registers the class imbalance between the two leads: Maud lives in a loft surrounded by books and art; the con man scoffs that she must think her cultural capital makes her better than him. Maud doesn’t quite seem to grasp the implications of the checks she keeps signing—with some difficulty, since, with the use of only one hand, she can’t stabilize the paper—but neither does she seem totally faultless. The film leaves it to the viewer to judge who, at different times and in different ways, is holding power over the other.
After “Abuse of Weakness,” Breillat struggled to find money for her films. She tried to make an adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast” (she has directed two other versions of fairy tales, “Bluebeard” and “The Sleeping Beauty”) but eventually gave up. She attributes her difficulty to the way that French newspapers and tabloids framed the Rocancourt affair. Their general attitude, she told me, was that “she got what she deserved, she was stupid, she behaved imprudently, it’s her own fault.”
Another reason for Breillat’s imposed hiatus may be her public statements about the #MeToo movement, which have led her to be publicly vilified as an enabler of sexual violence. Like other feminists of her generation who object to #MeToo, she seems to conflate it with its manifestations on social media, and with the notion (disputed among some of its advocates) that accusations of sexual misconduct by women against men should be accepted at face value. To me, she characterized her stance as being “against justice by hashtag.” Most infamously, in 2018, after Asia Argento became one of the first actresses to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, Breillat told a podcast interviewer that she didn’t believe Argento, remarks that were heavily criticized online. “There is real rape and real violence,” she said on the podcast. “If there’s anyone capable of defending herself, who’s not timid about sex, who does it a lot, and has lots and lots of desire for both men and women, it’s her.”
After our meeting in New York, I spoke with Breillat two more times, on video chat; she called me from southern Portugal, where she lives. In May, she sat in a light-flooded room, wearing a white sweater and forest-green glasses. By July, she was sitting outside at a café across the square from her house. Beneath a powder-blue sky, she wore a wide straw sun hat. During the last of these talks, I asked Breillat whether she stood by her statements about Argento, and she said that she was “very happy for the opportunity to clear things up.” Breillat told me that she had thought that portion of the podcast was off the record, and then that she “never doubted the fact that Asia might have been raped by Weinstein. It was more the circumstances of the relationship.”
Breillat told me that, when she went on the podcast, there had been no “serious reporting” about Argento’s story, only articles in tabloids. (Argento’s accusations were documented in 2017, in investigative reporting published by this magazine.) What Breillat thought strange, she said to me, was that Argento entered into a consensual sexual relationship with Weinstein after being assaulted. Breillat then related an inaccurate account of Argento’s allegations, saying, “Her story is more complicated than the others, because she later became his mistress. She was raped two times in the same circumstances.” (Argento accuses Weinstein of raping her only once.) “Anyway, the second time, she had been warned. It’s as though she had gotten a taste for rape in some way,” Breillat went on. “That you love someone, you’re raped, you hate the other person—it was novelistic,” she said. “It sounded like a myth, in a way, like a story that was being created.”
For a time, Breillat worked on a script called “Me Too, She Said,” based partly on Argento’s account of her relationship with Weinstein. Thinking about Argento’s experiences as fiction seems to have allowed Breillat to see the actress as a complex, three-dimensional person, motivated by the kinds of contradictory impulses that human beings are often motivated by—and which so many of Breillat’s own films have been devoted to documenting. She told me that she thought that, in the script, she could make the Argento character’s choices legible. “Not in hindsight—in hindsight, when you’re going back, then this seems totally obscure,” she said. “But in the moment that you’re in this, then yes, it could be understandable. There’s a French phrase: se laisser circonvenir, to let oneself be gotten around. One doesn’t want something, but one does it anyway.”
In “Last Summer,” even though Théo shows his interest in Anne openly, her capitulation is inexcusable—not only because he is still a child (though at seventeen he’s above the age of consent in France) but also because of her duty to him as a stepparent. At the same time, their attraction generates another reality, one in which she becomes his friend, his confidante, and even, sometimes, his sidekick. Breillat told me that she had particular trouble blocking one scene, in which the two have a conversation lying belly down on the grass. “In the end, it was so beautiful,” she told me. “Almost like they’re at the beach, him flirting with her without flirting with her.”
The visible age difference between the two never totally recedes—there is his petulance, her steeliness; his markless skin, the faint lines around her lips—but, as the film progresses, it stands out much less than their genuine chemistry. If their mutual desire is convincing, it’s due in large part to the leads’ performances, and the way Breillat balances the film between implicit moral judgment and sheer curiosity about what people are capable of feeling. In the end, Anne’s true crime, Breillat suggests, is not her relationship with her stepson but the actions she takes in its fallout to save her reputation. As Breillat told Télérama, speaking of Anne’s involvement with Théo, “She’s an adult and should be responsible. But we adults almost all retain a part of childhood and unreason. Otherwise, we are stuck in a living death.”
The film’s subtlety is also a credit to the dexterousness with which Breillat handles shifts in tone. The film is very dark, but it is also very funny. In one scene, we watch Anne’s staid husband, who looks to be somewhere between his late fifties or early sixties, deposit an enormous piece of lasagna in his mouth at dinner. Back in their room, he removes a stiff oxford shoe to reveal a vulnerable-looking foot. As they have warm, if listless, sex, she tells him a story about being “in love” with a friend of her mother’s when she was a teen-ager. “I thought he was so elegant. . . . I secretly despised his old age. . . . It disgusted me.” She goes on, “He was thirty-three. . . . I saw him as a pre-corpse.”
He repelled her—and yet she wanted him. This is the paradox of all Breillat’s films: sexuality is a force inextricable from the self, even as it compels behavior that annihilates the things—morality, rationality, love—with which we most deeply identify. Breillat has confronted this contradiction so often and with such depth that she seems, sometimes, to treat it almost lightly. When I asked her about her fixation on desire’s anarchic power, she told me, “It’s because I believe in it, because I observe a lot.” She went on, “And because it really is the most fascinating thing—when we’re in love, from one second to the next we go from being dressed people to undressed people. I’d never do that even if you gave me an empire, and yet it happens sometimes.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
