CATHERINE BREILLAT: “Pornography doesn’t really exist. It’s the invention of a puritanical society, what produces pornography as such is the way our society looks at the product: this feeling of obscenity exposes women and reduces her capacity to occupy positions of influence in our society. We live in a pornocracy (as opposed to a democracy). Women have two kinds of power, historically: as the courtesan and as the whore. The courtesan seduces men without giving them sex, exterminating the man without giving him a single taste of her body. In our society, women are condemned to be either courtesans or whores.”

Catherine Breillat’s films spring from a defining paradox: to denounce men’s privileged exploitation of the female body as an object of consumption/penetration and to retain the male body as a space of female sexual satisfaction. This fulfillment is, however, always temporary. It must never last. The female subject, if wanting to preserve her independence, must always rule out the trap of monogamy that locks the woman’s body under a single male’s slave belt. From the spasmodic instances of impossible reciprocity of Sale comme un ange (1991) to the cold-hearted and calculated elegance of Brève Traversée (2001) to the disturbing appearance of cock-brutality in Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur!, 2001), Breillat draws an unequivocal diagram of love, lust, desire, and (lack of) guilt that prescribes a simple, and yet, provocative anthem: the ephemeral is the only guarantor of jouissance. Female desire is always flowing, unbound, defiant in relation the heteronormal thirst for fixity. The female body breathes her revenge through the transgression that contingency opens up and encounters its fulfillment away from the prison-house of articulate language.

BREILLAT: “Rossellini asked me once a question: ‘What do you think you can add to the view of adolescence in cinema being a woman?’ My answer was: ‘The male’s gaze. The man is who throws this gaze but the woman is the one who knows it.’”

Her latest film, Anatomy of Hell, is, in her own words, “like throwing a gaze to that that cannot be looked at, a theorem of obscenity. Something I’m not fully sure that really exists. I show things that cannot be shown, I attempt to discover that that no wants to discover.” We might indeed not want to discover it. If her previous films, like the controversial Romance (1999), construct a carefully woven different concept of “sexy cinema,” revealing the Puritanism that condemns the view of male and female genitalia to the offscreen space of mainstream cinema or the falsely named marginal space of pornography, this new effort is a senseless fiasco that instead of provoking or transgressing the dominant views on sexuality, bores the spectator to death. Anatomy of Hell tells the story of a woman (Amira Casar) that, after failing to commit suicide, offers a strange deal to a man (Rocco Siffredi): she will pay him for looking at her where she cannot be looked at, for four nights. The man accepts. Slowly, their bodies and psyches start deciphering each other in the lonely confines of her isolated house. Breillat too often devolves into silliness: Casar extracts a tampon out of her womb, dissolves its blood in water, and shares an uncanny toast with Siffredi, drinking the “water of life,” in her own words. Later, Siffredi delivers the line, “All stony matter is inert” with Sylvester Stallone-like poise.

BREILLAT: “I always have difficulties working with a male actor that has to become like an adolescent, completely in my hands, when we are shooting. Rocco doesn’t have all the characteristic learned vices of trained actors. He is like clay. He belongs to me. My first novel is narrated in first person, from the point of view of a male character. Never until working with Rocco had I felt such a control over the male body.”

For some, Breillat might have pushed the limits of provocation she established in her previous narratives, for others, Anatomy of Hell is nothing but a self-indulgent “fuck you” to Puritanism that, wrapped in its own silver plate of delinquent transgression, renders an empty spectacle of female and male nudity. What could have been a twisted exploration of voyeuristic desire and exhibitionist lust becomes, through Breillat’s clumsy storytelling devices, a cold, hallucinatory trip into the realm of perverted psychological games. Breillat refuses to involve the spectator with a reliable entry point into the self-centered universe that unfolds before us.

BREILLAT: “I have both been praised and attacked by feminists. My discourse is feminist but also against women. I prefer to call it a feminine cinema. It is a discourse that should make men run away but the purpose is the opposite: to retain him… It’s a feminist cinema because it is from the point of view of women since there are certain things that are forbidden for women. I want to show these things, explore them beyond their limits …Is the provocation in my films intentional? I don’t focus on provocation. We live in a world in which there are many moral laws that people are obliged to conform to. Cinema allows us to have a transgressive weapon to break these rules. … My provocation is innocent. I started writing when I was 17. I wrote a book that was prohibited for people of less than 18 years. I was forbidden to read the same book I had written. If you consider that this is a provocation, this is what I do.”

All quotes from Breillat at the Cinema Jove Film Festival in Valencia, Spain, where she received a career award.