‘The Look of Shame’ | Beatrice Loayza

The French filmmaker Catherine Breillat was in her mid-twenties when she met Roberto Rossellini. She had already revealed 4 novels and performed a small position in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Final Tango in Paris (1972); now she was about to direct her first movie, A Actual Younger Lady (1976). In a 2022 interview with the critic Murielle Joudet, she recalled having a tense dialog with the Italian filmmaker on the day earlier than taking pictures started. When she boasted about her ability as a director, Rossellini challenged her. “What else can you bring to the depiction of young girls that men haven’t already captured?” he requested. “The look of shame,” she answered. “Because it’s you who gave us shame, and we are the ones who carry it.”

Disgrace is ubiquitous in Breillat’s work; her girls usually appear to actively courtroom it. Alice (Charlotte Alexandra), the teenage protagonist of A Actual Younger Lady, staves off boredom with self-degrading fantasies: she imagines the native dreamboat tying her up spread-eagle with rooster wire and putting the severed bits of an earthworm in her pubic hair. In Romance (1999), a schoolteacher named Marie (Caroline Ducey) joylessly pursues informal intercourse with different males after her boyfriend loses curiosity. In Anatomy of Hell (2004), a suicidal girl (Amira Casar) hires a homosexual man repulsed by the feminine kind to experiment together with her physique. The younger woman in Bluebeard (2009), a fairytale set within the sixteenth century, is captivated by a beastly man who’s rumored, and finally revealed, to be a assassin. Abuse of Weak point (2014) follows the violent relationship between a disabled girl, Maud (Isabelle Huppert), and a con man. “It was me, but it was not me,” she says, taking possession of her attraction to this brute when her family members intervene.

Breillat’s heroines are burdened by the sexual innocence anticipated of them by French society, which treats them like passive victims and stigmatizes their much less typical needs. The ladies, for his or her half, deal with virginity like a curse. It tells them: search pleasure at your individual threat. Breillat’s curiosity is in how girls metabolize this worry, guilt, and misery. For them to pursue sexual gratification nonetheless is to insurgent towards each the world and themselves.

This stress runs by way of Final Summer time—Breillat’s sixteenth characteristic, her first since Abuse of Weak point. It opens on a steely legal professional named Anne (Léa Drucker) as she interviews a teenage consumer, a sufferer of rape. “Did you drink alcohol that night?” “How much?” “How many guys have you dated this year?” “How many did you sleep with?” The woman shivers.

Anne, a shrewd fiftysomething blonde, isn’t one to moralize, and but moralizing is the lay of the land—it’s going to, she is aware of, be central to the protection’s case. The opposite aspect, she tells her consumer, “will try to portray you as a world-class slut.” She encourages the woman to “keep calm,” to reject the disgrace that others need her to really feel. This maddening survival technique governs not simply Final Summer time however Breillat’s filmmaking as an entire.

Breillat was born in 1948 and grew up in Niort, a commune within the west of France recognized for its medieval landmarks. Her remedy of lust and disgrace tracks carefully with the occasions of her personal life: early movies similar to A Actual Younger Lady and 36 Fillette (1988) are coming-of-age tales about impetuous younger girls with our bodies that developed early—as Breillat has mentioned that hers did—who channel their angst into writing, journaling, and clubbing. Later movies like Romance and Good Love (1996) specific the director’s anxieties about motherhood and her skepticism of marriage, which she appears to seek out irreconcilable with sexual ardour. Abuse of Weak point fictionalizes her relationship with the con man Christophe Rocancourt, whom she met after struggling a cerebral hemorrhage at fifty-six, and who took benefit of her impairment to rip-off her out of tons of of hundreds of {dollars}. The title of Joudet’s latest guide of interviews with Breillat interprets to “I Believe in No One but Myself.”¹

Breillat is commonly labelled a “provocateur.” However that phrase suggests pushing buttons for the sake of it, when her work is nothing if not measured and self-aware. Her movies don’t glamorize masochism, however they take the enchantment of submission significantly. They depict girls pursuing unsure needs, swinging wildly from feeling to feeling, not precisely certain what they suppose. Breillat challenges the viewer to apprehend these needs with out dashing to evaluate them, which helps clarify her choice for unflinching lengthy takes. In 36 Fillette, we see the teenage Lili (Delphine Zentout) shrinking away from her lover Maurice (Étienne Chicot) earlier than reasserting her curiosity. In Fats Lady (2001), when Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) watches uncomfortably as her older sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), deliberates having intercourse together with her new boyfriend, the digicam stays mounted on the youthful woman’s flickering eyes.

Breillat’s movies usually embody specific and in a number of circumstances unsimulated intercourse scenes. By the late Nineties, admiring critics and conservative opponents alike had been calling her the “auteur of porn.” She embraced the title—her 2001 novel from which she tailored Anatomy of Hell is known as Pornocracy—although her movies reveal a extra subtle grasp of pornography’s enchantment. She appears to grasp that, as Susan Sontag argued, “every truly obscene quest tends . . . toward the gratifications of death.” Throughout intercourse together with her husband, Anne recounts her teenage obsession with a thirty-three-year-old man, the odes she would write to his wrinkles in her journal. His “thin, parchment skin” made it seem to be he was “already dead,” she says, tickled by her youthful self’s warped notion of getting old.

If Breillat lingers on the fluidity and ambivalence of feminine need, she additionally offers frankly with the prevalence of male violence in bourgeois society. Good Love, like a number of of her movies, toys with the conventions of the policier: it opens on the crime scene the place Frédérique (Isabelle Renauld) was killed by her lover and jumps again in time to hint their erratic affair. Fats Lady unfolds for probably the most half as a ruminative teen drama however abruptly shifts gears within the final act when a serial killer rapes Anäis and slaughters her mom and sister. When the cops arrive, she insists, wild-eyed, that the rape was actually consensual.

Breillat’s dedication to staging sexual encounters that pressure the boundaries of consent has led her to interact in some doubtful on-set practices, which not too long ago got here below scrutiny within the French press. In a brand new memoir whose title interprets to Predation (Female Noun), Caroline Ducey accuses Breillat of facilitating her rape on the set of Romance.² In a single scene Ducey’s character, Marie, permits a stranger to carry out oral intercourse on her within the stairwell of her condominium constructing, however the man then forcibly sodomizes her. When she signed on to the challenge at twenty-one, Ducey advised Le Nouvel Obs, she was reassured that the intercourse scenes could be dealt with with care: “Neither in the original script nor in the contract that I would sign later was there any question of these scenes not being simulated.” When it was time to shoot the stairwell scene, she was stunned to study {that a} nonactor named Reza, whom Breillat present in a swingers membership, could be taking part in the rapist: “Catherine asks me to take off my tights and panties for the sake of ‘realism.’… I feel an intense burning: Reza is performing cunnilingus on me. I lose consciousness…. Then I’m revived when I hear the sound of the film.”

After her account broke, newspapers began gathering testimonies from the shoot. The make-up artist Claire Monatte corroborated Ducey’s story to Libération: “It was understood that she would not be informed.” Breillat, for her half, denied the cost. “Caroline was never betrayed or raped,” she advised the paper. “Everything was written in the script.” Two crewmembers acknowledged that boundaries might need been overstepped however contended that Breillat didn’t immediately instigate the unsimulated oral intercourse. The primary assistant director, Michaël Weil, associated that Breillat was pissed off: “We’re stopping. That idiot of an actor is incapable of doing the scene without hurting Caroline,” he remembers her saying. The actor François Berléand, in the meantime, advised Le Nouvel Obs that Breillat requested him throughout one other intercourse scene to penetrate Ducey together with his fingers “for real.” He refused however finally, in keeping with Ducey, carried out a mock model of the act in a means that happy the director.³  

Maybe probably the most illuminating window into how Breillat understands her actions onset could be present in certainly one of her different movies, Intercourse is Comedy (2002). In it, a filmmaker tries to good a intercourse scene explicitly modeled after the one by which Anäis’s sister, Elena, loses her virginity in Fats Lady. When the actress, additionally performed by Roxane Mesquida, refuses to work together with her equally recalcitrant scene associate, Breillat’s fictional stand-in (Anne Parillaud) performs mediator, wooing and menacing the actors, who finally emerge from their dressing rooms and undergo the method. After they finally succeed, the outcomes are ecstatic: the actress appears to be like exhausted but happy. Intercourse is Comedy doesn’t romanticize the chaos of the filmmaking course of, nevertheless it nonetheless clings to a fantasy on the coronary heart of many movies-about-movies: that the breakdowns, compromises, and accidents that occur alongside the best way are all the time price it.

If you understand something about Final Summer time, you’ll understand it’s about Anne’s affair together with her seventeen-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher). Age-gap liaisons should not new for Breillat. In 36 Fillette a punkish fourteen-year-old woman pursues a middle-aged playboy; in Good Love the age distinction between a thirty-seven-year-old mom of two and her youthful beau units off insecurities that culminate in homicide. However Final Summer time stands out for stressing the older determine’s capitulation to need. Anne provides into the sort of reckless abandon that may be customary for youthful romances—however for her results in a type of self-destruction.

The youngsters in A Actual Younger Lady, 36 Fillette, and Fats Lady are caught within the boonies throughout summer season trip, bristling with disaffection, tormented about desirous to lose their virginities. Like the ladies in these earlier movies, Théo is at free ends throughout a break within the college yr, however not like them, he’s blasé about his sexual conquests. A bundle of anti-authoritarian bravado, he has been arrested for assaulting his trainer—and his mom has had sufficient. She sends him away to stick with his father, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), a monetary guide in his sixties who lives in a sunny home within the Paris suburbs together with his second spouse, Anne, and their two adopted daughters. When Anne comes dwelling from work, {the teenager}’s garments and cigarette butts are scattered round the lounge; he hops out of the bathe and leans his slender, shirtless torso towards the doorframe.

Théo talks again to Pierre; he trashes the home and blames burglars. (Anne discovers the reality when she finds the spare keys from her stolen purse in his soiled laundry.) Accustomed to coping with unruly adolescents at work, she cuts his petty rebellions all the way down to measurement. “I’m not a kid,” he tells her, the digicam locked on his face. “Prove it,” she says. The depth of Théo’s gaze—his mouth barely open—has till this level communicated a fiery insolence. Now, as he stares at his stepmother, we sense a glimmer of fascination.

At a lake with the ladies, Anne and Théo dunk one another’s heads below the water; over white wine and cigarettes, he caresses her forearm, indicating the spots the place he may give her a tattoo. One night, Anne flees a gathering with Pierre’s pals and, mounting Théo’s electrical scooter, goes with him to a close-by pub. Lastly, whereas Pierre is away on a enterprise journey, she approaches his room to say goodnight, then finds herself sitting beside him on his mattress, watching anime on his cellphone. The digicam is nestled between their heads and appears on the cellphone display screen when—all of a sudden and naturally—they kiss. It stays on Théo’s face as they’ve intercourse for the primary time. The second time, days later, it stays on Anne’s.

Final Summer time is Breillat’s solely adaptation of one other movie: the 2019 Danish drama Queen of Hearts, a depressing, starkly carried out thriller with conventionally specific intercourse scenes exhibiting full-body nudity. (She might have taken this route partially as a result of, as she has mentioned in a number of interviews, she has had rising problem financing unique tasks. A number of of her scripts, together with a transforming of Magnificence and the Beast, had been deserted for lack of funding, and in France her controversial repute has considerably estranged her from the trade.) In Final Summer time, the lengthy, uninterrupted intercourse scenes linger intrusively on Anne’s and Théo’s expressions, reveling within the momentary extinction of consciousness. Théo’s conceitedness slips away; he assumes a posture directly sheepish and enthusiastic, like a gluttonous little one. The animal look on Anne’s face, in the meantime, tells us she’s some place else, if just for a second.

For all the eye Breillat provides to her characters’ fantasies, her movies all the time return to actuality. In Final Summer time the illicit thrills of the primary half slowly flip to concrete perils, like Bluebeard’s spouse discovering his chamber of corpses. In Fats Lady and Bluebeard, sisters delineate ethical boundaries and immediate one another towards self-reflection. Right here it’s Anne’s sister, Mina (Clotilde Courau), a single mother who works at a magnificence salon, who learns concerning the affair first: one afternoon she finds Théo fondling his stepmother within the again shed. She storms off in disgust.

We don’t see Mina once more till a lot later, however her response breaks the affair’s spell. “Some things should never have happened,” Anne says, holding again tears as Théo tries to coax soiled confessions from her together with his tape recorder. For him it’s only a recreation, and right here he appears to have extra in frequent together with his little sisters than together with his middle-aged lover, who responds to his juvenile questions with a complexity that startles him. Disgrace eats away at her. Quickly she breaks up with Théo and urges him to faux it by no means occurred. Then Pierre decides to take his son on a visit to the countryside. By the point they return, all has been revealed.

Will Anne come undone? In one other, extra typical movie, she may lose every little thing. When Pierre accuses her of sleeping together with his son, we see that destiny projected in her eyes. No matter is alleged, maintain calm. Anne lifts herself out of her seat slowly, rigorously, as if a sudden motion may break her focus; the digicam’s regular pan upward echoes her actions. For many of the movie, Drucker has performed Anne with a swish, relaxed naturalism, punctuated solely by her shifting, anxious gaze. Now she pivots into sharp melodrama. “That’s vile. Insane. You’re not telling me you bought it?” She dismisses Theo’s allegations because the fabrications of a perturbed little one. The remainder of the scene performs out like a one-woman present, a theater of denial so sensible that Pierre collapses right into a puddle of regret. This stunning lie is the movie’s best provocation.

Théo is devastated. Insisting that the affair was actual, he engages an legal professional and positions himself as a sufferer of sexual abuse. The closed-door proceedings unfold blandly and systematically. It doesn’t matter what Anne says. She slept with a minor, and for that she’s going to all the time be responsible within the eyes of the legislation. Ultimately she pays for a non-public, scandal-free decision.

That is thorny territory for Breillat. Even earlier than Ducey’s allegations broke, she had achieved a sure notoriety for talking out towards what she considers the blindly punitive elements of the #MeToo motion. In a 2018 interview she insisted that Harvey Weinstein is “not the worst man there is” and solid doubt on the sexual assault accusations that Asia Argento, her lead actress in The Final Mistress (2007), lodged towards him. “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. So I don’t believe Asia,” Breillat mentioned—as if sexually assertive girls may by no means be abused, or as if the potential ambivalence of girls’s sexual actions exonerated abuse.

“Society demands victims [of rape] to feel like they have been destroyed for life,” Breillat advised Joudet. “For the rapist it remains a crime.” However, she continued, “if I can get over it and say it meant nothing, it’s because I managed to escape the feminine condition I was stuffed into like a bag.” She was not denying that males violate and terrorize girls with impunity. Certainly, her public statements and the gender relations depicted in her movies counsel that she considers most males so bestial that merely coming into right into a heterosexual encounter includes a sort of masochism—exactly the will she desires to reclaim from a society that deems it ugly and self-debasing. Even in Abuse of Weak point, which depicts her personal victimization, she emphasised much less that the con man was a villain than that Maud selected to let him in. 

This understanding of sexuality rests on the belief that puritanical guilt poses the best menace to girls—that the precedence ought to all the time be to carve out an area for their very own taboo needs and refuse to answer male violence with self-loathing. It’s unidirectional, all the time pushing in the direction of a perfect: proud insubordination; an insistence that feminine company can overpower male violation. Marie, in Romance, appears to talk for a lot of of Breillat’s heroines when, on the finish of the movie’s rape scene, she cries out: “I’m not ashamed, asshole!”

That line could be learn as defiant.⁴ However rewatching the movie after studying Ducey’s testimony, it feels nearer to contrived—an beautiful abstraction designed to meet Breillat’s dream of a world by which girls aren’t torn down by the sexual impulses of pitiful males. In actuality, there are causes to really feel ambivalent about intercourse that don’t have anything to do with internalized misogyny. Some traumas can’t be overcome just by asserting energy; prepared oneself to say they “meant nothing” may additionally trigger them to fester. Breillat’s movies themselves point out that such emotions may be throbbing below the icy surfaces of her characters’ self-control. On this sense she is certainly one of our final true Hitchcockians, perversely fascinated by the fragility of non-public autonomy at the same time as she insists on the necessity to shore it up.

Ultimately Anne is again the place she began: luminous, cherished, surrounded by household. It’s Christmas, Pierre has given her a fabulous Cartier bracelet, and even Mina has discovered a means again into her confidence. “We’re sisters, after all,” Mina says as they share a heat, if vaguely conspiratorial, embrace. However comfortable endings in Breillat’s movies are all the time compromised. In Romance, after Marie marries her lover, attaining the extent of dedication from him she had all the time needed, she murders him and attends his funeral clutching their new child little one; in The Sleeping Magnificence (2011), when the princess makes like to Prince Charming, she’s thrown out of her fantasy realm and turns into an angsty, self-effacing girl strolling alone on a metropolis road. In mattress with Pierre, Anne hears a knock on the entrance door. She slips off the bed and finds Théo, drunk and raving. They fuck outdoors, their our bodies faintly illuminated by moonlight. Anne returns to mattress like nothing occurred, her secret protected for now. She nestles in Pierre’s arm. His marriage ceremony ring twinkles.