I am a long time fan of Breillat. I can think of no other artist in the cinema who gets sexual truth on to the screen in anything like her league. I think that is why she is often criticised for being closer to pornography than art; there is graphic truth and artistic truth in her work and she fears neither. There are always characters who are young and feral in her work, and eros is never far from age and thanatos, in a Freudain sense. So often in her films have I identified with all those themes. Sex as a kind of blood-and-power sense of struggle is more often a masculine conception, such as in the work of Bataille, and typically women civilise this out of men in my experience. Breillat seems to understand the male side profoundly better than most men, and here is the strength of her work: she tells men about women from the viewpoint of her women, who can inhabit the skin of male desire in an extraordinary way, but not so as to civilise it.
So here we have Catherine B. filming ugly exteriors and interiors with a masculine eye, unconcerned by brute spaces, bad lighting, garish interiors and a brief romanticism of dance and waves. We are not sure who is seducing whom. We can feel the boy's teenage heat. I remember. I now know women who believe they are in mid-life decay who might be tempted to be mistress, mother, big sister and school teacher all at once to a boy, if they could get away with it. Is someone lying, and must this always be? Catherine whacks us over the head with this , not for the first time, as she brings her film to a close. Life goes on and nothing's closed, just snapped and broken and shoots again will come. I'll remember the ending more than any other more predictable ending, but critically, I think that is because Catherine cheated me a bit, and created narrative lies. I don't mind though. I'll still go back to her when I need a harsh lesson about sex and love. Seduction as destruction and reconstruction, as nature's femininely mythologised spirit envelops and endures.
The performances are fantastic, and again that must be testament to Breillat's talent, as she does these two actor pieces so well in her work.
So here we have Catherine B. filming ugly exteriors and interiors with a masculine eye, unconcerned by brute spaces, bad lighting, garish interiors and a brief romanticism of dance and waves. We are not sure who is seducing whom. We can feel the boy's teenage heat. I remember. I now know women who believe they are in mid-life decay who might be tempted to be mistress, mother, big sister and school teacher all at once to a boy, if they could get away with it. Is someone lying, and must this always be? Catherine whacks us over the head with this , not for the first time, as she brings her film to a close. Life goes on and nothing's closed, just snapped and broken and shoots again will come. I'll remember the ending more than any other more predictable ending, but critically, I think that is because Catherine cheated me a bit, and created narrative lies. I don't mind though. I'll still go back to her when I need a harsh lesson about sex and love. Seduction as destruction and reconstruction, as nature's femininely mythologised spirit envelops and endures.
The performances are fantastic, and again that must be testament to Breillat's talent, as she does these two actor pieces so well in her work.