The Films of Catherine Breillat

“Unbecoming Sexual Desires” by Liz Constable

Constable, Liz. “Unbecoming Sexual Desires for Women Becoming Sexual Subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (199).” MLN. 119:4 (2004): 672-695. JSTOR. Web. 8 Sept. 2010.

About: In Constable’s article she proposes that “Breillat is using the filmic medium to refine Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of the constitutive link between the words and images representing women’s sexuality, culturally imposed shame, and young women’s emerging experience of sexual subjectivity and erotic intimacy” (676). Constable focuses primarily on Breillat’s film, Romance.

Quotes:

”In interviews, Breillat criticizes France and French society itself for their failures to generate what Tolman calls a discourse of desire for young women, and she situates her films’ thematic focus here: observing and representing how this absence affects young women’s self-construction as sexual subjects and how it shapes their explorations of the different spaces and forms of intimacy” (Constable, 675).
—This relates to my discussion of language in Romance – Marie’s inability to construct a sense of self due to the absence of a “discourse of desire.”

“…her work narrates the tactical use of the body to reunite the body with alienated subjectivity” (Constable, 675).
—I like this use of the word “tactical,” as there it implies agency and the confrontation of something, in this case the social coding the represses women. It also echoes Delleuze’s argument for belief in the body as the only cure to the postmodern, schizophrenic condition.

Constable connects Breillat’s discussion of shame and female sexuality to Simone de Beauvoir: “…Beauvoir’s philosophical and sociological discussions of shame’s effects on young women and her insistence that confidence is in oneself depends primarily on confidence in one’s body” (676)
—Overcoming shame through confidence in and a connection to the REAL body.

 “As both Beauvoir and Breillat emphasize, self-conscious shame emerges in young women as a result of a repeated failure to acknowledge the real bodies they inhabit, through an absence of response to their feelings as emerging sexual subjects” (Constable, 677).
—Shame as a failure of recognition is also emphasized in Liza Johnson’s article.

“…Breillat argues cinema could, and should, be formative for young women, and that its images should play a generative role for them as sexual subjects” (Constable, 678).
—Cinema as capable of providing a new, alternative image of the sexual self.

“Breillat’s films, like Beauvoir’s writings, have often stirred indignant, angry responses from viewers and critics on the ground that both portray what critics most frequently designate as emotionally and sexually masochistic female subjects” (Constable, 679).
—Comments on critical opposition.

“…Breillat points us to the indispensable primacy and temporal priority of the other in the development of female sexual subjectivity” (Constable, 679).
—The female sexual identity as formed only in relation to the “other”/male.

“What we call sexual subjectivity depends upon another’s recognition of, and response to, one’s own need to have one’s own experience identified and known as sexual” (Constable, 680).
—Constable points to Paul’s failure to recognize Marie’s sexual needs as detrimental to her sense of self.

“The internal paradox here, Breillat’s film suggests, is defined by the understanding that non-acknowledgement and non-recognition, together with their embedded shaming disavowals (shaming by omission and exclusion), nevertheless impinge on women’s self-construction as sexual subjects” (Constable, 681).
—Paradoxical because it is the absence of something that inflicts harm and stunts the development of self.

Constable uses the term “psychic impingement” to describe the “overbearing social codes tantamount to social violation, prior to any act of literal violation” (681).
—I like this term, “psychic impingement” and the idea that it parallels and precedes physical, sexual violation.

Constable refers to Lauren Brelant’s concept of “institutions of intimacy” and writes, “the societal inducements that promote ‘institutions of intimacy’ also edge into apparent meaninglessness the more unpredictable forms and spaces of attachment through which intimacy suggest itself, obscuring their potentialities through making people consider the recognizable ‘institutions of intimacy’ as the only meaningful ones” (682).
—Scripting of sexual norms puts limitations on an individual’s experience of erotic intimacy.

“Gilles Deleuze sees vicarious experiences of another’s shame as powerful catalysts that provoke people into political philosophical thought” (Constable, 683).
—The power of representation in cinema to transform belief and provoke thought/action.

“Humiliation, degradation, and pain precede in more significant ways than they can be said to define the sexual behaviors viewers see on screen…surrender, as distinct from submission…offers the transformative experience allowing humiliated subjects to un-do frozen psychic options, ideals, and ideas about their needs, to unlock the frozen repetitions of the same psychic patterns and affective responses that would otherwise merely reenact, rather than transform, the scenarios of the original humiliation” (Constable, 685).
—Marie’s humiliation freezes her into a fixed pattern, which she can only undo through sexual surrender to Robert.

“…experiencing shame or humiliation entails taking a self-critical look at oneself from within a dynamic of looks. At least three looks are engaged: that of the viewer, the self as viewed, and the actual or imagined look of the viewer through whose eyes the self undertakes this critical self-interrogation” (Constable, 686).
—I like the way Constable has laid out this triad of looks.

“Potential catalyst of interior dialogues, shame can construct a subject-in-relation over a lifetime, a subject-in-relation whose substance is formed as the sum of cumulative choices, decisions, and acts through a transitive process of becoming…” (Constable, 686).
—“Subject-in-relation” is a concept also discussed by Ann Radaway in “The Ideal Romance” where women can only construct a concept of self through relation to a male partner.

“…humiliation can become the catalyst for legitimate rage…” (Constable, 687).
—Marie not only finds herself through sexual surrender (s/m with Robert), but vents her anger at Paul for his failure to recognize and react positively to her needs.

“…shame-as-process…freezes the transitivity of relational subjectivity, and reduces subjects to a paralyzing mortification of self-estrangement: self-as-stasis. When power structures operate through more systematic use of shaming mechanisms, the feedback loop deforms, rather than informs, the subject, and fuels an internalized self-doubt whose impacts are psychically deadening for the subject” (Constable 687).
—I like Constable’s distinction between the two types of “selves” and her explanation of the feedback loop.

“…Breillat’s representation resides in the way she shows the frequently overlooked dimension of agency that depends, for its coming into being on the reception of emotions by others, not just for their expression” (Constable, 688).
—In other words, up-take of emotion by others is also necessary, not just expression of emotions.

“[Paul’s] masculinity…depends upon a paradoxical seduction of others, exercises in order to better repel them, and is embodied, ironically, in the vestimentary coding of the feminized matador. What better way to use the codes of cinematic mise-en-scene to point to the internalized contradictions of one particular enactment of masculinity? (Constable, 690).
—This is an excellent observation. In most of Breillat’s films, an attractive, “pretty boy” character, obsessed with proving his masculinity is also overly-conscious of his ability to attract women—he both attracts and then repels. He uses the trappings of clothing, dance to lure women. He is, in a sense, a “tease” and his mask can be paralleled to the made-up face of a beautiful woman.

“Within this framework, relationality and intimacy resemble nothing more than bouts of stop-and-start power struggle to prevent oneself from feeling dependent while enthralling the other. Emotional dependency amounts to mortifying and humiliating defeat, while enthralling the other equals ‘honorable’ victory” (690).
—This kind of power struggle exists in nearly all of Breillat’s films and reveals the ways in which ‘institutionalized intimacy’ as it is scripted by dominant ideology traps couples in a battle, which cannot end in victory, but merely co-dependency or death (real or metaphorical).

Constable makes a distinction between “an undeniably masochistic submission to reified (or frozen) ideas of one’s desire (intolerable humiliations), and, on the other, a surrender through which a subject’s needs are reconstructed as relational artifacts as a result of being “read” or “acted on” in a certain way (transformative surrenders)” (Constable, 691).
—Surrender allows the individual to experience scripted intimacy as a construction and to reconstruct new “relational artifacts” that will free her from her psychic paralysis.

 “[Emmanuel Ghent’s] perspectives are quite radical in their implications, because he suggests that for certain (previously humiliated) subjects, the controlled surrender, or dissolution of self-other boundaries, is at times the wished for experience that allows such subjects to exhume parts of the psyche that have been buried through the excessive compliance they enact on a daily basis” (Constable, 692).
—I love Constable’s concept of exuming the psyche, which has been buried through habitual compliance. It shows the great hurdle women potentially have to overcome in order to reverse the effects of a lifetime of conformity, whether conscious or not.

“French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’” by Downing

Downing, Lisa. “French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre.” French Cultural Studies. 15:264 (2004): 265-280. French Cultural Studies: Sage Journals Online. Web. 8 Sept. 2010.

About: This article discusses the recent trend in French filmmaking in which the boundaries between pornography and art cinema are blurred by the incorporation of realistic and/or real sex acts. She explores their distinctly postmodern, deconstructive qualities. Two of the films, which Downing examines, are Breillat’s Romance and Fat Girl.

Quotes:

Downing includes Breillat amongst French directors who have recently “spawned a genre of film that seeks to dismantle the prohibition regarding the exposure of the body and of ‘real’ sexual activity in narrative film, within a cinematic climate that has seen a concerted return to the tenets of realism in other contexts” (266).
—Downing places Breillat’s films within the larger context of new French extremist cinema. 

“I am interested in interrogating the extent to which they trouble value judgments about sexual politics, sexual exposure and aesthetics in a series of ways that might be said to belong to a postmodern cinematic mode. One might ask whether, rather than simply attempting to film the ‘real’ of sex in a ‘realist’ way (which already implies accepting the existence of a ‘real’ or natural sexuality), the films at various moments with varying degrees of success, attempt to grapple deconstructively with the same question concerning identity, gender, sex, desire, and subjectivity that preoccupy postmodern thought” (Downing, 268).
—This seems to echo Breillat’s own concept of cinema’s unique ability to film co-existing ideologically contradictory concepts. 

“The manipulation of the gaze, moreover, may go beyond simple gendered inversion, and may suggest instead such deconstructive strategies as plurality, decontextualisation and the sideways glance rather than the direct gaze” (Downing, 268).
—To look at Breillat’s films as deconstructive as opposed to ideologically singular is helpful and explains some of the difficulty critics have run into trying to read Breillat’s films as feminist manifestoes or, at the other end of spectrum, pornographic works promoting sado masochism.

“Breillat uses a series of techniques that trouble the straightforwardly erotic apprehension of the sexual spectacle, including a constant voice-over or intra-diagetic monologue musing on the ontological status of sexual pleasure and slow-paced camerawork which – in two memorable sequences – turn the cathartic psychodrama of s/m into a documentary-style exposition of advanced rope work and knot tying” (Downing, 269).
—In other words, Breillat disrupts an “erotic” reading of sexual scenes via voice-over and documentary style filming.

“The script dwells on the ways in which sexual enjoyment is not self-identical with the assertion of subjectivity but may rather be riven with shame and ambivalence” (Downing, 270).
—See my post on Liza Johnson’s article, “Perverse Angle” about shame in Breillat’s A Real Young Girl. 

“…the film reiterates familiar stereotypes, myths and culturally available ‘truths’ about gender and sexuality only to skew them and call them into question” (Downing, 270).
—Breillat’s film deconstructs gender and sexuality.

“As much as charting her sexual odyssey, the film records her progressive emotional separation from Paul, until, in the closing sequences, she is shown causing his death in a gas explosion, a dénoument which many critics have read as a fantasy episode symbolizing the death of her dependency’ (Downing, 270).
—An example where critics have read the ending of Romance as fantasy, although Breillat has stated this was not her intent.

“The way in which Robert’s womanizing mask progressively falls in the course of the film is exemplary of Breillat’s very suggestive concentration on the performativity of gender identity throughout” (Downing, 270).

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“The discrepancy between the exaggerated terms of this formula and the visual clues of diffident masculinity has the effect of making the macho mask a source of humor or ridicule” (Downing, 271).
—I like Downing’s concept of masks, which ties in nicely with Katherine Ince’s discussion of masquerade in Sex is Comedy. This emphasizes gender as performance on the part of the male characters.

“The only close-up shot of female genitalia stretched wide (what in pornography is known as the ‘split beaver shot’) focuses on Marie’s dilated vagina as her baby’s head crowns. In this non-sexual example of genital exposure, Breillat recuperates an image that belongs to female experience, but that has been co-opted for the masculine pornographic gaze” (Downing, 272).
—This is an excellent example of how Breillat seeks to reclaim the image of the vagina and sex as a whole in her work.

“The problem is that this creative birthing of her own narrative in images is presented as dependent upon Marie’s having given birth to a boy-child, fulfilling the Freudian parable of woman’s secondary narcissism…the film’s narrative logic seems to confirm rather than to disturb this redemptive myth, running the concomitant risk of reducing ‘the truth’ of female subjectivity to this one role” (Downing, 272).
—I disagree with Downing’s Freudian reading of the birth scene in Romance. As Breillat has pointed out in interviews, it is the birth of self through the birth of a child, a reclaiming of the body, which is significant. Also, this was Marie’s means of constructing a new image of self and not necessarily a universal solution to the problem of patriarchy.

“While Elena invests in the symbolic significance of the loss of virginity, Anais states that she wants her first time to be with a ‘nobody’ and to have no sentimental association. In the shocking dénouement of A ma soeur, Anais’s prophetic wish is realized with black irony. Her virginity is lost when she is raped in a forest by the attacker who has just murdered her mother and sister before her eyes” (Downing (273).
—Downing reads this scene as “black irony,” but I feel there is a deeper meaning having to do with a kind of twinning between Anais and the attacker, although I am still struggling to form a cohesive reading of the film’s finale. Deconstruction may be a useful approach to addressing the scene.

“Anais’s decision to refuse the dominant meaning of the act of rape, as she has refused the dominant meaning of sexual love throughout the film, echoes Marie’s stark, defiant statement in Romance, after she is violate by the man who has paid her for cunnilingus: ‘je n’ai pas honte’” (Downing, 273).
—I also drew this parallel in my post on Fat Girl.

“The lesson of Romance, then, is not straightforwardly that the exposure of sex acts or the body on screen is radical, liberating or healing, but rather that the displacement of certain acts, certain images from the ideological frameworks in which they are locked by history and culture can exercise a mobilization of guilt, of shame and of damaging preconceptions about the meanings of gender roles and sexuality” (Downing, 273).
—This is an interesting observation. I’m not sure I agree, however, that the “displacement of certain acts” is what brings about guilt, shame, etc. but, rather, that these feelings are woven into the fabric of female sexual identity at a young age and are inevitable even when sexual acts occur within the “ideological framework.”

“The difficulty of viewing the postmodern filmmaking discussed in this article is that it is not always clear which ideologies are allowed to hold sway, precisely because this is a mode of representation that refuses any easy or comforting ‘truth’” (Downing, 278).
—Well said.

“These films, at their best moments, incorporate hardcore elements, but only to challenge and mobilize their meaning, using them not as ends in themselves but as a lens imported into a cinematic collage in order to show the narrative events from a different perspective…” (Downing, 278).
—Arguing against a reading of new French extremist films as pornographic.

“Pornography…is one generic version of the grand narrative of sex as our culture dreams it. Postmodernism for Lyotard favours instead ‘micro-narratives’ (petits récits). These are not totalizing nor do they draw on legitimizing discourses to lay claim to the truth” (Downing, 278)
—This is an excellent point, however, although Breillat’s films may not be totalizing, there seems to be a definite, over-arching agenda apparent in her body of work. It is possible, in Downing’s argument for a postmodern reading of the films, that she downplays the consistent themes, which reappear in many, if not all of Breillat’s films.

“These art films are not porn. Nor are they even art films about porn. Rather, they are attempts to disrupt, fragment or destroy the naturalized relationship between the voyeur and the desired spectacle in cinema” (Downing, 279).
—Downing astutely draws attention to the experience of watching cinema, the relationship between the filmmaker, the filmmaker’s work, and the spectator. This can explain why Breillat’s films are described as sexual, but far from titillating.

“Looks that Paralyze”: James Interview with Breillat

James, Nick. “Looks That Paralyze.” Sight and Sound. 11.12 (2001): n. pag. Wilson Web. Web. 8 Sept. 2010.

About: This article consists of an interview with Catherine Breillat following the release of A ma soeur.

Quotes:

“I have an absolute passion for adolescence because it’s a very dangerous moment in which we kill the child within while still rejecting the adult world. A young girl is like someone committing suicide – she’s someone who’s killing what she no longer wants to be” (Breillat).
—The violence inherent in Breillat’s description of the adolescent experience is matched in tone by her films about young girls, which reveals the complexity and fear bound up in this transition.

“There’s an incredible mixture in an adolescent girl of something both stupid and marvelous. And cinema is the medium in which you can best capture one thing and show its opposite simultaneously” (Breillat).
—Again, this quote expresses Breillat’s perception of the complexity of human emotion and cinema’s ability to capture its contradictions.

When asked about the “romancing language” in the film, Breillat responds, “It’s what I call sitcom, though I shot it more as if I was an entomologist. But in a sitcom you obey certain social codes” (Breillat).
—Breillat’s use of the words “sitcom” and “entomologist” are telling. They express the ways in which young people have adopted a superficial “romancing language” from television and that Breillat’s film can be seen as an almost scientific study of creatures (humans paralleled to insects) in their naturalized habitat. This expresses a distancing between Breillat and her characters. 

Discussing the final, dramatic scene in Fat Girl: “…I had no money for the special effects necessary to make the last scene look realistic. So I decided to show one violent moment and silence after it. No one had done that before. On set even the cameraman was saying, ‘Are you sure she shouldn’t scream or run?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s based on looks, looks that paralyze’” (Breillat).
—This decision, based on limited financing, connects Breillat to the larger tradition of new wave cinema, which dramatically (and necessarily) changed the way films are shot, largely due to lack of funds. Innovation, then, appears to be spawned, at least in part, by restriction. Breillat’s films could be seen to innovate in reaction to the obstacles presented by censorship and spectator expectations. 

When asked whether the final scene is meant to be read as fantasy or reality, Breillat answers, “For me it’s real, but then I ask myself why we read these kinds of news stories? The answer must be because they feed our imagination” (Breillat).
—I have included to this quote in response to critics who read the endings of Romance and Fat Girl as fantasy.

When asked why other filmmakers have picked up on similar subject matter in their films, Breillat responds, “The fact that I did it maybe revealed the desire to other film-makers. Sexuality has always been a huge forbidden area, but as soon as the repression was lifted it was obvious it was a good subject for artists” (Breillat). 
—Breillat obviously sees herself at the forefront of this movement in which sexuality is realistically depicted in contemporary cinema.

“A Woman’s Vision…”: Sklar Interview with Breillat (excellent)

Sklar, Robert. “A Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat.” Cineaste. 25.1 (1999): n. pag. Wilson Web. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. 

About: This article consists of an interview with Catherine Breillat following the release of Romance. An argument for Breillat as philosopher is well supported by her definitive theories on cinema and sexuality as they are related in this interview. (For this purpose, I have included rather lengthy quotations from the article.)

Quotes:

When asked whether men and women respond differently to Romance, Breillat said, “It’s very complicated…The reactions had more to do with social class than with age or gender. There are men who love the film, and I must say that I find them very brave. People who see the film in terms of a division between men and women would be looking at it very literally. The film does contain a symbolic level that people can mysteriously feel, and thus they don’t take it for or against themselves. The film in not anchored in daily life.”
—Breillat emphasizes the symbolic level of the film and that to see it solely in terms of gender is overly literal. 

“In the first bondage scene, the ‘bondage in the white dress’ scene, I wanted people to look at it as if they had walked into an initiation rite. The fact that he ties her up actually frees her from the fantasy of being tied up. It would be like a death that would allow her to be reborn…I wanted her to be exalted, transfigured, instead of being debased” (Breillat).
—This introduces the idea of sexual initiation and ritual, which is essential to understanding Breillat’s work. In this way, the actual performance of bondage allows Marie to exorcise the fantasy.

“I call the character of Robert a guide. He takes her to the other side of life, into a consciousness of herself. It’s a passage that takes place through a sexual initiation. But once she’s reached that stage…she’ll have left behind all her masochism. I think that masochism is something that women have learned rather than were born with. But they’ve learned it for 2,000 years, so it’s pretty hard to get rid of” (Breillat).
—This reconfirms my reading of Robert as a sympathetic “teacher” or “guide” character necessary for Marie’s transfiguration. It also gives a good explanation as to why Breillat depicts female masochism and shame in her films. Deleuze writes in Cinema 2 that one must believe in the body, in the flesh, and that it is cinema’s responsibility to depict that belief. In this sense, Breillat’s films can be seen as cinema which liberates by depicting belief in the flesh.

“Women need to reintegrate the idea that sexuality, the sexual act, cannot be what we are shown so complacently. We’re shown things that are allowed in porn movies and we’re told that that’s the way we ought to behave. Girls are raised for that purpose, which induces a behavior where you can find pleasure in shame. What’s important is to attain a vision of oneself – including a vision of oneself while making love. The taboos, prohibitions, and shame that surround women’s sexuality are necessary because they come from taboos. But at the same time, since these taboos and prohibitions must exist, they have to be transgressed. Transgression is the condition of their very existence. If they cannot be transgressed they turn into morality and censorship, which end up harming women. The words used to describe women’s sexuality, the censorship and shame that society inflicts on women, create a very schizophrenic condition” (Breillat).
—Breillat’s intent seems to be to offer a means for curing the metaphorical schizophrenia common amongst women. Transgression is necessary as taboos and prohibitions are part of the very fabric of society. 

“Porn films remove sex from human dignity. If you reintegrate sex in human dignity, then you can film sexual scenes, even scenes of sexual depravation. There’s always something self-destructive about sexual depravation that makes it very human. If you film sexual depravation while showing the self-destruction that accompanies it, it will be wonderful. When you really love someone—which is what we are always looking for, having sexual relations while being literally transported by love…you have to go through a series of obstacles, which is sex. In the beginning, sex is ugly, but the ugliness can be transfigured into something very transcendental and sacred. That’s the complete act of love” (Breillat).
—This is a good argument against critics condemnation of Breillat as a pornographer. Breillat’s films are not pornographic because they restore the human element to sexual relations. She sees sex as offering a key to transcendence, but that obstacles (the taboos, prohibitions, and internalized shame) must first be overcome.

“Cinema never films reality, it films only the director’s thoughts, the director’s vision, his/her way of looking at things. People don’t really understand that. They think that in cinema an image is an image, but that’s not the case” (Breillat).
—Here Breillat emphasizes the subjectivity of her vision, in a sense, pre-empting criticism that her films offer a universal point of view about gender.

In Romance, “[Marie] is on a mysterious quest where, as she puts it, in order to be able to look at herself in the mirror, she needs to get up in the middle of the night to go cheat on the man she loves with one she doesn’t. You can see she’s in a lot of pain, but at the same time she’s very determined” (Breillat).
—Here the idea of Marie as a heroic figure is presented.

“The voice-over [in Romance] took away the triviality from a language that flirts with obscenity…Obscenity does not necessarily equal vulgarity. It’s part of us. We own it” (Breillat).
—This quote also challenges critics who deem her films vulgar or pornographic. Breillat asserts that obscenity is part of human nature and that this must be accepted.

Explaining the change in pace during the final scenes of Romance: “Throughout most of the film, I had wanted the scenes to be slow because things needed to be established and understood. But once they were understood, well, a birth actually happens very fast. Life, on the other hand, is complicated and slow. First of all, it’s Marie’s birth we witness. It’s also the birth of the baby, but it’s primarily the birth of a woman into a whole being…She no longer needs a man and romance with a man to be complete. It’s alone that she finds self-realization. She no longer needs Paul to give meaning to her life. She’s the one who gives meaning to her life, by herself” (Breillat).
—This confirms my reading of the birth scene in Romance, however, her the nuance of Breillat’s language emphasizes that this is Marie’s interpretation of her experiences and is a reminder to take care when conflating protagonists with Catherine Breillat herself.

“Women’s major flaw is to ask men to bring them something that they don’t ask of themselves. They make men liable for themselves. She’s been on a journey that has allowed her to be constructed. She’s finally a whole being. No one believes that she’s a criminal and really killed Paul. Everyone sees its symbolical level” (Breillat).
—This quote is fascinating. Generally we look at the idea of constructed selves as a degradation, a distancing from our true, innate self. However, Breillat asserts that the constructed self is necessary and good when that self is constructed by oneself, as opposed to patriarchal society or individual men.

“This film is very symbolical but I did not do it intentionally. Plus, symbols are not meant to be explained. A film should always be read and understood on several levels…cinema is a mode of expression that allows you to express al the nuances of the thing while including its opposites. There are things that can’t be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed. That may seem very contradictory. Cinema allows you to film these contradictions” (Breillat).
—This seems particularly relevant in terms of literary theory where the author is in not necessarily fully cognizant of the meaning of his/her own work. It also emphasizes deconstruction as a valid approach to cinema – containing within itself contradictory messages, which co-exist.

Breillat discusses Paul as a sympathetic character: “He tells her that it’s like the myth of Circe in The Odyssey: one has to wait for things to happen naturally. When you force your destiny, you kill it. You prevent its birth. He gives her a key to understanding that she doesn’t take into consideration. It’s possible to defend this character even if emotionally the spectator is up against him” (Breillat).
—This discussion of Paul reveals Breillat’s sympathy for un-likeable, narcissistic male characters. They, too, are victims of dominant gender ideology.

“I like to make people accept things they deem unacceptable. You have to look at things the way a criminal lawyer defends a murderer, when he or she puts himself in the murderer’s shoes. When you make movies, you can manipulate your characters, give them an inside and an outside, like a piece of clothing. Whatever horrible things they can do can be understood by putting yourself in their shoes and making them acceptable. Cinema allows you to do that, and that’s great” (Breillat).
—This just reemphasizes the value in a deconstructive reading of Breillat’s films. Her works deconstruct society at the same time that they themselves are deconstructive. It is a warning against easy categorizations of Breillat as simply a feminist auteur or as having a singular vision, which is anti-man, or pro-woman.

“Perverse Angle” by Liza Johnson

Johnson, Liza. “Perverse Angle: Feminist Film, Queer Film, Shame.” Signs. 30.1 (2004): 1361-1384. JSTOR. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. 

About: In this article, Liza Johnson investigates “bad feeling” as capable of producing its own “unexpected desires” in her analysis of “critically powerful and usefully feminist films that take advantage of the expanded range that the contemporary moment offers for working with and through negative affect” (Johnson, 1362). One of the films she analyzes is Breillat’s A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille).

Quotes:

“[Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s] argues that negative affects function on a spectrum of engagement and disengagement and that interest and shame are intricately bound together” (Johnson, 1363).
—Sedwick specifically looks at shame and performativity in literature and raises the possibility that desire and shame can be seen as “bound together” in creative works.

Johnson quotes Silvan Tomkins regarding his theory on shame: “[it is a] specific inhibitor of continuing interest and enjoyment. Like disgust, it operates ordinarily only after interest or enjoyment has been activated, and it inhibits one or the other or both. Hence any barrier to further exploration that partially reduces interest or the smile of enjoyment will activate lowering of the head and eyes in shame and reduce further exploration or self-exposure powered by joy” (1363).
—This is a phenomenological explanation of shame and its consequential physical manifestations.

“Phenomenological criticism has proposed a more contingent model of embodied spectatorship, one in which a more legitimately intersubjective transfer of feeling is possible” (Johnson, 1366).
—Here Johnson is arguing that phenomenology may be more useful than traditional psychoanalytical analysis in explaining the spectator’s experience of witnessing shame on screen.

“…I want to think about the excentric desires that those operations of seeing and feeling can produce” (Johnson, 1366).
—I particularly appreciate this description of desire as “excentric,” or decentered as it acknowledges fluctuations and the un-fixed nature of desire as a whole. 

“…shame depends on a relay of looks that produces a moment of nonrecognition, a moment of understanding the self to be embarrassingly alone and isolated from the ego-stabilizing smile of the parent” (Johnson, 1367).
—Shame, then, comes from feelings of isolation born out of the parent-child relationship which is fraught with conflict and necessarily tied to differentiation.

“The shame response, still founded in a circuitry of looks, is defined by the loss of feedback rather than by a misrecognition that is founded and foundering in universal reinscriptions of sexual difference” (Johnson, 1367).
—This idea of a “circuitry of looks” is particularly helpful in discussing cinema with its reverse shots and Deleuzian “affection images,” as well as drawing attention to the ways in which paternalistic psychoanalysis mis-reads sexual differentiation as misrecognition as opposed to a loss of “feedback.”

Johnson discusses Sedgwick and Tomkins’ interest in the “blazons” that signal the experience of shame: blushing, downcast eyes, etc. Tomkins writes of the social scientific measures of shame by the “extent to which they look down, attempting to chart the intensity of shame by the ‘apparent horizon level’ for a given subject” (1367).
—Again, phenomenology is particularly useful in its ability to scientifically gauge shame’s association to physical manifestations, which can be depicted through cinema.

“How might an averted gaze resonate with looks that can also be characterized as singular, resistant to or against normativity, confounding the erotics of looking usually marked by the reverse angle, producing a language that sees from and hinges on an antiromantic, perverse angle?” (Johnson, 1367).
—Here Johnson ties shame to transgression and an “erotics of looking,” which is empowering in its ability to subvert conventional sexual scripting.

Johnson examines “promiscuous looking” and the “shamed gaze [which] seems itself to produce new interest” (1368). She particularly addresses “attachments and engagements to nonhuman, inanimate, polymorphous objects as…primary investments…far afield from almost any scripted model for thinking about human sexual identity” (1368).
—This idea of “promiscuous looking” itself implies empowerment and defiance in its ability to replace traditional sexual subjects with sex objects.

Johnson refers to Linda Williams description of “’new European cinema’” that breaks down the ‘firewall’ that has historically separated scenes of explicit sex acts from scenes that deal with ‘philosophy, politics, and emotion.’” According to Johnson, Williams proposes that these films constitute the “alternative universe” of pornography (1370).
—This puts Breillat’s work in the larger context of “new European cinema.”

Johnson quotes a Breillat interview in which she relates her answer, in response to Robert Rossellini’s inquiry as to what a “woman’s vision” could bring to the “vision of love in cinema”: “I answered him very resolutely, ‘A woman would add the point of view of shame, which mean are incapable of having’” (1375).
—This emphasizes Breillat’s own investment in depicting shame in her films.

“Breillat’s own descriptive language often runs to notions of transgression and taboo, suggesting that she is responding to and defying critical prohibitions around women’s desire” (Johnson, 1376).
—Breillat’s cinema is deeply invested in transgression and challenging the status quo.

“…shame produced looking down, a position from which one can see a range of proximate objects. If this vision, this act of looking down, holds its own interest and engages the subject in new attachments and desires, Breillat is taking the logic even further than the other filmmakers I have considered. Here the erotic and polymorphous attachment is the most literally sexualized, and these proximate objects literally become sex objects” (Johnson, 1378).
—Shame/sex objects have to do with the vantage point of the female subject.

“Throughout, the film oscillates between scenes of desires that are produced by prohibitions and ones that are produced by shame itself” (Johnson, 1378).
—This oscillation reconfirms a sublimation of desire, a displacement from other humans to sex objects, that is brought about by the prohibitions places on women by society as desiring subjects.

“While the film is in many ways an attempt to give a précis account of Alice’s inculcation into heterosexual desire, the narrative is nevertheless located at a moment that is not fully about an engagement with desire for men. The film lingers on autoerotic, abject, and fetishistic desire…And when the attachment is to a man, it is precisely to treat him as a fetish object rather than as a desiring subject” (Johnson, 1379).
—This implies that the dislocation of desire is, in Breillat’s films, potentially tied to an adolescent phase poised between childhood and adulthood.

“She conceals her own looking in ways that resonate both as inversion of the assumption that only men can practice voyeurism and as a shame-prone wish to efface herself, recede, detach, and vanish—that is a wish to repeat and reverse the broken circuit of looking that characterizes shame” (Johnson, 1379).
—Shame is again tied to the prohibitions of women as desiring subjects, but that desire does not disappear, rather it is refocused.

Review of Sex is Comedy by Vincendeau

Vincendeau, Ginette. “What She Wants.” Sight & Sound. 13.5 (2003): n. pag. Wilson Web. 8 Sept. 2010. Web.

About: This article is on Breillat’s film Sex is Comedy. The author discusses, in her opinion, the pros (more truthful, original) and cons (exasperating, auteur character unlikeable) of the film and puts it in the greater context of films about filmmaking in general, and filmmakers specifically.

Quotes:

“Irritation, frustration and boredom are not unusual reactions to Breillat’s cinema; indeed they frequently co-exist with respect and admiration…Sex is Comedy is not much fun” (Vincendeau).
—This reveals a common critical reaction to Breillat’s work – that it is unenjoyable, but deserves recognition for its originality. I believe there is an un-articulated bias apparent in this type of criticism, which is a reaction to the perceived unpleasantness/complexity inherent in Breillat’s subject-matter.

“…it introduces something new, bringing an original point of view to the hackneyed genre of the film about film-making. Indeed, by bringing a strong gender dimension to both the figure of the director and the content of the film-within-the-film, Breillat raises key questions about authorship and representation” (Vincendeau).
—The author acknowledges that the film “raises key questions” emphasizing where it diverges from other European films about filmmaking without exploring any of the deeper implications.

“Breillat says Sex is Comedy was designed to counter the plethora of ‘making of’ films generated by the advent of DVD” (Vincendeau).
—I would love to know where this information came from as Vincendeau’s discussion of documentaries is cursory, and has less to do with the “advent of DVD,” which seems to refer to director commentaries, which are packaged alongside the film.

“In this respect, closes to Sex is Comedy are such post-war European films as Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Wenders’ The State of Things (1982), Asayyas’ Irma Vep (1996) and Bonello’s Le Pornographe (2001)” (Vincendeau).
—The author situates Sex is Comedy within the greater context of European meta-films.

“The myth of the artist as a difficult individual is built on the notion of authenticity, which justifies bad behaviour: arbitrary decisions, changes of mind, extravagant or petty demands…The worse the behaviour, the greater the auteur or artists, the more misunderstood, the more authentic” (Vincendeau).
—This is an astute observation, but Vincendeau herself conflates the auteur figure with the filmmaker him/herself and does not raise the possibility that the auteur-persona is being parodied in these films.

“[Jeanne is] constantly confronted with the significance of her gender: both her choice of subject and her partnership with her male assistant Leo reverse the usual gender pattern (all the more so as Wanninger’s Leo, with his ‘feminine’ long blond hair, contrasts with the image conveyed by Jeanne’s more ‘masculine,’ dark, shorter bob)” (Vincendeau).
—She insists on reversal, comparing Jeanne to Leo, as opposed to Leo and the Actor, which in actuality reveals Breillat’s awareness of different male “types.”

“[Actor Grégroire Colin’s] smooth, youthful body has been used by a number of other women directors (including Claire Denis), and here his character’s insistence on a fake (and huge) penis for the sex scene comments on the insecurities of the actor he plays as well as on the difficulties in representing an erect penis outside porn cinema” (Vincendeau).
—Claire Denis, or Marie-Claire Denis is Breillat’s sister. This is an interesting point – that the Actor insists on the fake, huge penis, which comes to threaten him in his dreams. He is unable to extricate himself from the Lacanian phallocentric sexual economy, which Ince discusses in her article.

“In most films about film-making the imbalance in male-female power relations is conflated with seduction, a point often echoed in a parallel set of actual seductions, typically between director and female star” (Vincendeau).
—This shows Vicendeau’s conflation of the real director with the virtual director on-screen.

“By showing explicitly the manipulative role of the director, by making the male sexual organ grotesque and by downplaying Jeanne’s seductive dimension, Breillat has rendered her on-screen auteur more exasperating, but more truthful” (Vincendeau).
—Vincendeau seems to imply that the film is more authentic, yet less enjoyable that the other meta-films she references. 

“Is Sex Comedy or Tragedy” by Ince

Ince, Katherine. “Is Sex Comedy or Tragedy? Directing Desire and Female Auteurship in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 64.1 (2006): 157-164. JSTOR. Web. 8 Sept. 2010

About:

“In this essay, I want to draw out the philosophical implications of Breillat’s depictions of sexualities and sex acts in order to set out the female auteurship I think is proposed by her filmmaking. In arguing for Breillat’s auteurship as the ‘symbolic reappropriation of a feminine realm,’ I shall be drawing in particular on the theoretical writings of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray” (Ince, 157). Specifically, Ince examines Breillat’s film, Sex is Comedy, focusing on the “gender ontology that appears to govern feminine and masculine sexual identities” (Ince 159).

Main points & Quotes:

Breillat deserves consideration as a theorist, in addition to a filmmaker and novelist. Ince describes the “philosophical character of interviews such as ‘The Absolute Opacity of Intimacy’ and texts such as the preface to the screenplay of Romance (1999)” (157)
—Also consider the video interview posted earlier on this site on the issue of intimacy.

“Une vraie jeune fille and 36 fillette are Breillat’s two studies of adolescent femininity, both pervaded by an atmosphere of confinement, and attempted rebellion against the confinement through underage sex” (160).
—This atmosphere is confinement was also experienced by Breillat herself.

“Breillat’ tragedies of female desire reach their apogee in the searing irony of her title Parfait Amour!…Breillat’s most brutal illustration of the power structures women can suffer. The sense of limitation ‘before the law’ characterizing life in the tragic Lacanian Symbolic is lived out in the claustrophobic structure of Parfait Amour!” (160).
—Parfait Amour! is then a depiction of heterosexual relationships broken against the phallocentric Lacanian concept of the “law.” Also, note how this film’s atmosphere is also described as confined.

“In Romance, both tragic and comic modes are present…Gender identity is revealed to be performed in its ‘essence,’ and comically so” (160).
—Gender as performance.

Ince quotes Breillat discussing the “bondage in the red dress” scene in Romance: “I did it intentionally. On the set we were roaring with laughter…I wanted people to be able to think that a scene as weird as one about bondage and sadomasochism could be cheerful and convivial” (160).
—Humor in scenes of sado masochism, perhaps because of its theatrical/performative qualities.

“The opening shots of Romance, where Paul models a matador, show that masquerade in Breillat’s cinema relates to masculine gender roles and identities as much as feminine ones” (161).
—Ince introduces the idea of masquerade.

“A more significant instance of masquerade…occurs in the scenes with Grégoire Colin’s prosthetic penis, where it is the phallus ‘itself,’ signifier of the ‘indisputable and incontestable’ law of the father, whose ontological status is contested” (161).
—Breillat contesting male symbols. Consider the “banana” scene at the end of Sex is Comedy, as well.

“What women do not have is a libidinal economy prohibited by the phallocentric Symbolic: in other words, under phallocentrism, women’s desire cannot circulate as effectively as men’s can” (161).
—This could be seen as Marie’s essential problem in Romance.

“A phallocentric symbolic economy allows the representation and sublimation of men’s death drives, but not the ‘rechanneling, metaphorization or sublimation’ of women’s”…a redistribution of the death drives of men and women could create at least the conditions of possibility for a female Symbolic” (161).
—So not just sexual expression, but sublimation of the sex and death drive are also deterred in a phallocentric society.

“The dialogues and relationship between Jeanne and the Actor have an unmistakably symbolic—even an allegorical—dimension. Far more than just a reenactment of a ‘war of the sexes,’ they show uninhibited female aggression toward a male ‘artist,’ an altered sexual economy in which the desire of a woman director is successfully sublimated and find its expression in the realization of her film” (162).
—Breillat alters the sexual economy by reversing the roles.

“Breillat’s contribution to film as philosophy is thus a feminist and literary mode of philosophizing that plumbs the ‘essences’ of sexualities, exposes their thoroughgoing constructedness, and suggests new and different reconstructions of gender relations” (163).
—Breillat exposes the artifice behind patriarchal gender identities and offers alternative “types.” But by extension, this too would be an artificial construction. Are there potential problems with a reversal of this kind?

“Sadean Woman”: McNab Interview with Breillat

Macnab, Geoffrey. “Sadean Woman.” Sight & Sound. 14.12 (2004): n. pag. Wilson Web. Web. 8 Sept. 2010.

About: This article consists of an introduction for the Breillat film, Anatome de l’enfer (Anatomy of Hell) followed by an interview with the filmmaker herself.

Asked by Mcnab what her “goals” were in making Anatomy of Hell, Breillat responded, “I wanted to confront this forbidden image, to present a close-up of the female sexual organ – that which can’t be seen, which can’t be watched – so as to ask if this is what sexuality is really all about.”
—Breillat’s goal is to reveal female sexuality. 

Other noteworthy quotes from the interview:

“In the novel [Pornocratie] the woman pays the man so she can discover what sexuality is really about but in the film she already knows and places herself in an almost Christ-like position revealing it to the man” (Breillat).
—Somehow connected to the Christ-like positioning of Marie in Romance?

“In our society pornography is written on every woman’s body. But here the words give you a context in which to confront the images that arouse so much fear, allowing you to create a transcendent beauty out of things you’ve been told are purely ugly” (Breillat).
—Breillat’s films as meant to confront pornographic imagery and reveal transcendent beauty.

“Religion would have us believe that sex is simply about the flesh when in fact it’s something much higher and more idealistic” (Breillat).
—Sex as transcendent.

“I was very isolated as a child – I started to menstruate and develop physically very early and my parents saw me as a walking time bomb and tried to protect me from myself and from the lust I might arouse in others” (Breillat).
—Breillat’s own experiences mirror that of the main characters in Une vraie jeune fille, 36 fillette, and A ma soeur.

“To me Freud is the protector of bourgeois society, he assuages the symptoms so that society can continue unchanged. His analysis of women was very naïve: women at the time had so little power it was natural they would feel a desire to be a man. That was penis envy – it was envy for the rights men had” (Breillat).
—Breillat as anti-Freud. He preserves the status quo, which Breillat challenges.

Romance, Part I

Catherine Breillat’s first major international success, Romance, was also one of her most controversial films. Incorporating depictions of real sex within the movie has earned it the designation of “art porn.” The film has also raised eyebrows due to its depictions of female masochism. However, in the (relatively) close reading and analysis that follows I argue that the masochistic acts serve as a kind of exorcism of internalized shame. The male figures operate on and in relation to Marie, each in their own way as catalysts propelling her on a sexual odyssey towards a kind of consummation of self, a marriage between mind and body.

The movie begins with an image of Paul, Marie’s male model boyfriend, being made-up for a photo shoot. The artist applies white make-up, which contrasts with his red lips. Her t-shirt design includes Asian symbols. The implication seems to be that Paul is a kind of geisha, or stylized prostitute – he sells himself, the image of his body, for money. (We also see him tied to Japanese culture via the sushi restaurant he often frequents.) Marie watches him during the shoot from afar. He is the object of her gaze/desire. 

Soon after, we learn that Paul is withholding sex from Marie. Three months into their relationship, he tells her that he has simply lost interest and that this is the norm for him (mirroring Christophe from Parfait Amour!). It is an interesting reversal of gender roles – Paul as prostitute and withholder of sex, the tease and Marie as possessor of the gaze and dominant voice in the heteroglossia of the film. Her inner monologue, conveyed by voice-over, reinforces the impression that she lies at the center of the narrative, and the male figures serve as figurative satellites, in orbit around her.  However, Marie does not view herself as a powerful or central figure. 

Entering Paul’s immaculate, white bedroom, Marie thinks, “An invisible cage…descends on me.” She is a captive of her own love and lust for Paul. She asks him to remove his t-shirt, which he does, but unwillingly, as if he prefers to keep a material distance between her body and his own. Marie performs oral sex on Paul, but he stops her, not because he is impotent, but because he chooses to deny her even the gratification of pleasing him. Marie says to him, “You despise me because I’m a woman.” Again, we hear echoes of Parfait Amour!, however, in this instance, Paul, at least superficially, appears more in control of the situation. Unlike Christophe, who is incapable of performing sexually with Frederique, Paul’s denial of sexual gratification of any kind to Marie is clearly a calculated manipulation. He shows little sensitivity and his face is a veritable mask, presenting a screen to Marie, which both obscures his inner thoughts and reflects her own self-loathing. Paul is much more masterful than Christophe at composing his features and in posturing, perhaps as a result of his profession as a model. (We see this start to breakdown in scenes where he is intoxicated and it is clear that he must make an effort to retain the mask and illusion of dominance.) 

Later, lying in bed in the dark crying, Marie thinks to herself, “Why can I only love him or hate him? Why can’t I be indifferent?…A man who can’t love me physically, is a pit of misfortune, a gulf of suffering.” This idea of a pit or hole will be repeated throughout the film. It has clear ties to female genitalia (for example, a “hole” in Marie’s spelling becomes an explicit reference to her vagina). It is also a place which conceals, it is the origin of the feminine mystique, the threat of death, and, as we see at the end of the film, a source of rebirth.

A pivotal point in the film occurs when Marie leaves the apartment in the middle of the night. It is the moment when Marie begins her sexual odyssey in earnest. She goes to a bar where she meets Paolo, Italian for Paul. She tells Paolo that she has a husband, “so that he’d know [she’s] not free.” He tells her that his girlfriend died in a car accident and that it’s been four months since he has made love. As they’re making-out in a car Marie thinks, “I watch myself giving in as if it wasn’t me…I wanted another taste of the miracle.” It is difficult, at this point, to know what exactly to make of this new Paul that Marie has discovered, however, what becomes clear is Marie’s desire that the affair have limitations and that it should be rooted in virtual anonymity. She feels that she has already found love and wants her relationship with Paolo to remain purely sexual.

However, before consummating their affair, Marie returns to Paul and her job as a school teacher. Much like, Theresa, in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, who works as a teacher by day and pursues increasingly risky sexual behavior at night, Marie begins a double life.

Again, echoing Christophe in Parfait Amour!, Paul tells Marie that “a guy needs to remake the world with his pals in a bar.” Although he prefers that she stay at home while he goes carousing, Marie cannot resist the urge to stay by him – “I cling to him like a leech because I’m madly in love with him. What he calls breathing suffocates me. I never asked to be free. And I don’t want him to be either. I’m a real stickler for absolutes…But when I apply it to life I really go schizo.” This scene both illustrates Paul’s machisimo and need for validation by his peers, as well as Marie’s obsession with “absolutes.” She is complicit in her own compartmentalization of life and self. She can see no gray, only black and white. She is as much a victim to the fantasy of Love, as she is to Paul’s manipulations. 

Marie further extrapolates on her theories of love and relationships in a club scene where Paul dances and flirts with other girls as Marie watches on, forlornly. Her hair hangs across her face as if she both wants and does not want to see, the equivalent to holding one’s hand in front of one’s eyes, only to peek between the fingers. She thinks in syllogistic terms, “He dances because he wants to seduce. He seduces because he wants to conquer. He wants to conquer because he’s a man.” Marie leaves the bar and Paul is quick to run after her to accuse her of “[making] a scene.” It is as if his intention all along was to disturb and upset her, to create a situation where he can accuse her of being hysterical or unreasonable. Paul wants to designate Marie as stereotypically female – emotional and illogical, and decidedly “other.” He seeks to prove his manliness in direct relation to her feminine behavior.

Marie and Paolo eventually meet again for a sexual tryst. The scene is relatively explicit and significant for its ability to illustrate Marie’s complicated relationship with sex and her own body. She admits to Paolo that she “quite likes disgusting things,” such as used condoms and tampons, an admission that Paul would find revolting and unladylike. She explains that, in pornographic films, the men are not really aroused and that they don’t care about the women they have sex with (interesting, as the actor who plays Paolo is none other than porn star Rocco Siffredi). She also says, “It’s ok if the guy could screw you but won’t. That’s the Tantalus torture. It makes you admit you could do that or even worse as long as he ends up screwing you…I don’t like the guys who screw me. I detest them.” This is the first indication that Marie has severely internalized the shame associated with sex for women. She wants to be forced into intercourse by virtue of her own desire, something akin to denying oneself food or water until their hunger or thirst becomes unbearable. The Tantalus torture is also, of course, related to Paul’s denial of sexual pleasure to Marie. Some part of her seems to revel in the sadism inherent in this act. Paul is her master, and she is his slave. At this stage in the film, she is not able to see herself as an agent of her own desire, rather she is a willing victim.

It is also during this scene with Paolo that she thinks, “I don’t want to see the men who screw me or for me to look at them. I want to be a hole, a pit. The more gaping, the more obscene it is, the more it’s me, my intimacy…I disappear in proportion to the cock taking me. I hollow myself. That’s my purity.” When Marie feels arousal she wants to disappear, to be annihilated. She wants to be the “hole,” locus of desire and degradation. She wants to disappear because she cannot bear the idea of herself and her humanity at that moment. She does not want to see or be seen because to see is to desire, but also to love, and to be seen is to be loved, but also imprisoned.

As Paolo kisses her tenderly, Marie begins to disconnect emotionally, pulling her hair across her face. Again, this reveals her desire to see, but to remain hidden. Although Marie says she cannot kiss someone she doesn’t love, she kisses Paolo. She realizes then that she must end the relationship because, when she embraces Paolo, she “[stops] thinking of Paul.” Paolo serves as a kind of double for Paul, but what kind of double is unclear. There is one instance where we are made aware that Paolo has likely lied about his dead girlfriend. He slips when he first says it has been four months since he has made love, and then later says it has been six. (Interestingly enough, Marie similarly slips when she says she is married and then later refers to Paul as her “boyfriend.”)

Although Paolo seems infinitely more affectionate and attentive to Marie, there is the possibility that he would become more like Paul in time. The name, Paul, itself may have ties to Paul the apostle, attributed with the parts of the New Testament that seek to uphold patriarchal dominance: “I will therefore… that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety…Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection…I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence…” (2Timothy 2:8-12, King James Version). Whether it’s Paolo similarities to Paul or his differences, in any case, Marie ultimately rejects him and the threat he poses to her existing relationship. Thus ends the first phase of Marie’s sexual journey. 

“Parfait Amour” as Simulacrum

“Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.”
-Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“What was terrible, you know, was that I considered myself to have a complete right to her body as if it were my own, and yet at the same time I felt as if I could not control that body, that it was not mine and she could dispose of it not as I wished her to.”
-L. Tolstoy, Kreuter Sonata as quoted by Andrew Dworkin in Intercourse

“Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence.”
-Slavoj Zizek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”

Catherine Breillat’s film, Parfait Amour!, follows the relationship of a couple, Frédérique and Christophe, which begins in bliss and ends in murder. In doing so, Breillat successfully exposes the dark underside of the heterosexual love relationship. She reveals that the burden of being a “man” or a “woman” has little to do with (biological) reality, rather the gender concepts exist as roles or masks which people adopt and, in doing so, they become strangers and are set against one another in diametric opposition. It is a process of “othering” in which, what is at stake is not the survival of the couple or the individuals, but the idea or cliché of love. The individual, having internalized these notions conflates the two and in doing so contributes to his/her own destruction. The romantic relationship, “parfait amour,” then is itself a simulacrum, an artificial construction with no foundation in the Real. Individuals become slaves to the virtual – the ideology of love.

At the beginning of Frédérique and Christophe’s relationship they are open about their pasts and there is an emphasis on their similarities, in particular the dysfunctional relationships they have with their parents. There is an emphasis on acceptance and empathy. Christophe says to Frédérique, “That’s why I love you. Your mom put you through hell.” Despite the age difference, Frédérique is in her thirties, Christophe in his twenties, they seem to recognize a part of themselves in each other. They are both seeking love and acceptance. It is a shared essence of being that is exemplified in long shots of their lovemaking with cuts to intimate conversation in bed. Sexual intercourse becomes the idyllic intermingling of selves.

However, a noticeable shift takes place following the symbolic marriage and consummation of their relationship as expressed by their holiday retreat to the country. This formal event marks the beginning of the “othering” process. The morning after they have returned from their trip, Christophe is introduced to Frédérique’s children. Christophe very quickly begins referring to himself as a stepfather to Frédérique’s son and refers to her as his wife. Roles are quickly adopted by both partners and drastic behavioral changes become imminent.

These roles are established by the conventional concepts of “male” and “female” and the way in which the different genders interact in a relationship. As opposed to relating to one another on a human level, the mask of gender prevents understanding and intimacy; creates walls, which encompass each individual. Sexual intercourse is no longer equated with lovemaking, but is transformed into “fucking,” a combative assault on or retreat from “the other” (“I like guys who screw me because they don’t exist”). “The other” threatens, not the innate self, but the illusionary self, the mask, the concept of self. 

The patterns that form in a love relationship, born out of an antagonistic collision of false selves, are revealed over the course of the film as we see Frédérique and Christophe enter into a repetition of the past. At the beginning of Parfait Amour! the spectator learns of Christophe’s tendency to seek out mature women. He tells Frédérique that he had an affair with an older woman before. She was a pharmacist who eventually became pregnant and ultimately refused to leave her husband. (Frédérique also works in the medical field as an opthamologist.) Later his mother criticizes his penchant for older women telling him, “You’re at it again.” Of course, Christophe’s relationship with his mother also serves as a model for his relationships with women in general – women are overbearing, needy, critical, therefore, as a man, he must maintain his autonomy at all costs.

In discussing her first marriage to a homosexual, Frédérique attributes her difficulty in leaving her husband to the “Virginia Woolf syndrome” where you “stay with someone because you hate the idea that he can live without you…You’re chained together.” This becomes the nature of Christophe and Frédérique’s relationship as it becomes increasing fraught with conflict and deceit. She also tells him that her second husband dumped her “for a slut.” Later, we see Christophe flirt outrageously with other women in front of Frédérique and, in secret, visit prostitutes, even though he has told her that he is no longer interested in sex. (In this way he comes to inhabit the sexually depraved figure of his own father.)

Breillat is particularly astute at revealing the new character types that exist in heterosexual couplings and in doing so implies that the story of Frédérique and Christophe is a condensation of all romantic relationships. The simulacrum of “love” is shown to be a phase in a longer process that necessarily contains conflict and ending, either through death or abandonment. (Consider the cliché beach shots which transition from beach as stereotypical site of romance to a kind of desert devoid of humanity.) The conflict is derived from the woman’s desire for a man to be strong, proactive, to dominate and the man’s desire for the woman to be feminine, passive, ever-tolerant, and to conform to his needs.

We see Frédérique grapple with traditional women’s roles on numerous occasions as she is torn between her conception of self as innocent and whore. On the one hand, she tells Christophe that she wants to be the “weaker one,” that she “[feels] fourteen,” like a “baby who wants to cry.” She expresses a desire to erase her past sexual escapades and return to a state of innocence, to be re-virginized. At the same time, the allure of the “whore” stereotype, with it’s refutation of the bonds of monogamy, its ability to transgress, to be selfish also exists for Frédérique. This desire begins to dominate as she feels herself literally enslaved to Christophe, a repetition of the Virginia Woolf syndrome. 

It is interesting, then, that Frédérique is complicit in her own enslavement, albeit unwittingly. In addition to her verbalized desire to be dominated, she also uses accusations of homosexuality to whip Christophe into a veritable frenzy to prove his masculinity with aggression. Breillat has been criticized for portraying female masochism in her films, however, the depictions are also an indictment of the love relationship simulacrum that has no basis in the Real. It is the desire, internalized by men and women, to dominate and be dominated, that is destined to result in destruction. “La petite mort” or “the little death” of the orgasm comes to signify, not spiritual ascension, but actual death, death of self through the objectifying and alienating nature of Dworkian “fucking.”

In a sense, one could argue that Frédérique’s ability to oscillate between different female roles affords her a modicum of freedom, which Christophe cannot possess, imprisoned as he is in the confines of the singular role, the masculine. Frédérique can be innocent, emotional, loving as well as selfish, sexually voracious, scornful. Christophe must be aggressive, able to “fuck” or he is effectively emasculated or deemed a homosexual. He bolsters this false self with clichés: “You won’t break me,” “I said from the start that I’m a wolf,” “Let me breathe.” This crisis of identity leads to Christophe’s eventual psychological break and murder of Frédérique. Because he is unable to perform sexually, to dominate, Christophe must kill the beholder of the gaze, the woman who sees and in doing so exposes the façade of his masculinity.

At the beginning of the film, which constitutes the end of their story, we see Christophe with his mask stripped away. Dazed and lost, holding his head in his hand like a child, we begin to understand Frédérique’s daughter’s mysterious statements regarding the murder: “I hate him…I feel mostly pity…He’s the real victim…He gave Mom so much…She was almost his thing…She was totally devoted to him…With him she experienced what she always wanted…Affairs like that are endless.”

That is not to say that one should take the daughter’s statements as inalienable truths or Breillat’s version of truth, rather it illuminates the greater issue of the simulacrum of romantic relationships with its emphasis on the gender roles that individuals are expected to inhabit. The misogyny and masochism that is interwoven in male-female relationships is internalized and must be overcome or the result is dysfunction and destruction. Both Christophe and Frédérique are victims of the simulacrum, or ideology of love, with its parasitic ability to sustain itself through countless reproductions, within a lifespan of a host, within generations of hosts. In this way, the affair is endless; it will be repeated again and again unless it is questioned, dissected, exposed as Breillat has done, and continues to do, in her films.