The Mercury Cinema

77mins France
R Actual sex, High level sex scenes, High level adult themes.

Exclusive Adelaide season
14 to 22 December
Two sessins daily at 1 and 9:15pm

A young woman meets a man in a gay nightclub. He agrees, at her suggestion, to be paid to meet her over four nights to look at her "where she is unwatchable".
What follows is a series of sequences in which writer and director Breillat sets out to prove that all men are, at their core, misogynists.

After finishing ROMANCE, I immediately felt like "remaking" the film. Not that I wanted to disown it but I knew that the subject had two sides to it, an obverse and
a reverse, hell and horror, if you prefer. This time, I have decided to see it through to the end. I have decided that I couldn't go any further, that the Xth
film would be the conclusion of a Decalogue. The X of Xrated film: The ANATOMY OF HELL.

The Girl Amira CASAR The Guy Rocco SIFFREDI

NOTES ON THE FILM BY CATHERINE BREILLAT
Initiatory taboo versus religious taboo
The film could only ever take place behind closed doors. Within four walls, you can't escape the essential. The woman is confined to the bed and all will be revealed. This film is like Pythagoras' theory of obscenity. Society provides for us to live comfortably but never profoundly, at the heart of what we are. Which is why I am totally Socratic, i.e. "know thyself".

The Christ I film is not the one you find in church. It's the real Christ, bleeding on his cross. The woman herself becomes Christlike. She is pinned to the bed under the man's gaze, which could be the gaze of the Pharisee. She is in a state of both sanctification and sacrifice. There is something sacrificial because she is destined for cruelty.

I wanted to rediscover some of the emotion of silent movies with, in
particular, the incandescence of the light on the bodies that enables them
to stand out against light and dark backgrounds, to the point where they
become almost ethereal. For me, light is the soul. It was fundamental that
for this film, which is rooted in our origins, the lighting could reveal
something primitive.

There is no dramatic dynamic within the movie. There is just a mythical dynamic. That is why it was vital to groundit in a literary way, or to be more exact in a subconscious way.

I was very afraid when I wrote the screenplay, much more than for the
book. I knew that filming the forbidden was another matter. Unforgivable
almost. But I was determined to make this movie at all costs. I knew it would be
the last on this subject. It closes a cycle. Consequently, the words
"obscenity", "pornography" and "human dignity" linked to a woman's body
and its (dis)play stifle any possible argument. Since philosophers are not
prepared to argue this case, it is up to filmmakers and artists to find
something that preceded fundamentalism.

I don't fear censorship.
I fear hatred, which is the gut response to a film like this.

(Excerpts from an interview by David Vasse, author of Catherine Breillat, un cinema de la transgression which will be published early 2004 by Arte Editions/Editions Complexe.)