GFF 2010: No Sex Please - She's Catherine Breillat

Porn auteur, militant feminist, man-hater (or even woman-hater), shameless provocateur: countless labels have been attached to French filmmaker Catherine Breillat over the years, but none really fit. More than anything, Breillat’s work is discussed in terms of its jarringly graphic sex scenes, with GQ magazine describing her breakthrough film Romance as “sex, sex and, well, more sex.” It will come as a surprise, then, that her latest feature, Bluebeard, doesn’t contain even one sex scene.

For over 30 years, Breillat has shocked censors and the French establishment. Though much of her early work remains unseen in Britain, she came to international attention in 1999 with the harrowing tale of one woman’s sexual masochism that was Romance. Ten years before the extreme body-horror of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Breillat demonstrated absolute dedication to interrogating the human body, the extremes of its sensations and just how much viewers could take. Breillat’s work has consistently been labelled “auteur porn,” not helped by her status as director of the first widely shown film in Britain to feature an erect penis (the aforementioned Romance), her repeated casting of porn superstar Rocco Siffredi and staging of reputedly unsimulated sex scenes. It has always seemed, however, that Breillat shows sex less to offend public morals than to explore how the body can be used on screen, and the sensory effect it has on audiences. She breaks taboos in several ways: watching an unsimulated sex scene, viewers are immediately thrown from a conventional cinema-viewing position – we stop seeing two characters and instead see the actors. Breillat traverses the boundaries between fictional characters and real actors, between cinema and pornography. Since 2000, she has continued to push actors’ bodies, and audience’s perceptions, to extremes with films including A ma soeur!, Anatomie de l’enfer and Une Vieille Maitresse.

And so to Bluebeard, which may unjustly attract more attention for its lack of sex than for its unsettling sensory universe. Based on Charles Perrault’s folk tale, Bluebeard is Breillat’s second fictional adaptation, and second period piece (Une Vielle Maitresse was based on a 19th century French novel). The film depicts two teenage sisters in 17th Century France whose mother seeks to marry them off after their father’s death. The sisters are invited to the castle of the much feared Lord Bluebeard, famed for his inexplicably coloured beard, not to mention the mysterious disappearances of his previous wives. As a bond grows between Bluebeard and the spirited younger sister Marie-Catherine (teenage actress Lola Créton), and the two marry, Breillat avoids portraying Bluebeard as a monster, instead presenting a melancholic, solitary figure to whom Marie-Catherine might plausibly gravitate. Suddenly finding herself a lady, bedecked in finery, Marie-Catherine wanders throughout the castle, but is instructed by her husband never to enter a mysterious locked room - though inevitably, curiousity gets the better of her.

Despite its move away from sexual explicitness, this is unmistakably a Breillat film. Bluebeard is sumptuously shot and jarringly sensual: we see the beads of sweat on the Lord’s doom-laden brow, feel the weight of Marie-Catherine’s hefty gowns on her thin frame, and watch as a beheaded chicken runs around before its death, blood gushing from its stump. Breillat’s trademark use of colour – often extremely beautiful and rarely mentioned – is stunning here: the hyper-real contrast between blood red and bone-white appears regularly in her films. The unsettling chemistry between Lola Créton and the much older Dominique Thomas (Lord Bluebeard) continues Breillat’s run of casting young, unknown actresses in challenging, physically demanding roles, with Créton’s intensity reflecting the devastating performance of twelve year old Anaïs Reboux in A Ma Soeur!. Breillat has previously been criticised for using young actresses as mouthpieces for her own beliefs, but Créton’s performance stands alone as a powerful portrait of a young outsider voluntarily entering into a strange, possibly dangerous, relationship with a much older man.

Like all of Breillat’s films, Bluebeard is a film about bodies, not about sex. To return to Romance, we have to ask, who sees a film featuring perhaps the most graphic scenes of childbirth in cinematic history as “sex, sex and, well, more sex” anyway? And because there is no sex in this film, viewers might now look beyond the taboos associated with Breillat’s work to appreciate the maturation of a director who has rejected every label thrown at her. Along with her French contemporaries Claire Denis, Gaspar Noé and Bruno Dumont, she consistently interrogates human physicality and sensuality, and just how much a viewer can be made to “feel” a film, rather than simply watch it.