Catherine Breillat

Wednesday, April 2, 8pm
Romance
(Catherine Breillat, 1999, France, 99 min, 35mm)
Marie, a young schoolteacher, is in love with her boyfriend, but the almost complete lack of sexual intimacy in the relationship leads her to search for fulfillment in increasingly risky situations. With this film, which includes highly graphic sexual scenes, Breillat takes her probing of women’s sexual identity to its most explicit point. The film inspired a trend of extremely realistic depictions of sex in recent films and opened a phase in Breillat’s career, which has allowed her to focus on female sexuality.

Wednesday, April 9, 8pm
Sex is Comedy
(Catherine Breillat, 2002, France, 92 minutes, 35mm)
A self-referential, meta-fictional study, Breillat made Sex is Comedy after the excruciating experience of filming a seven minute sex scene in a single take for her previous film,
Fat Girl. She recasts many of the actors from the original film and has the crew members stand on set and play themselves. Anne Parillaud, channeling Breillat, is mesmerizing as the sexualized, strutting, arrogant director who is half poet/philosopher, half petulant child: Upset with the performances she’s getting, Parillaud climbs into bed herself to rehearse with the leading man. A fascinating look inside the mind of a director.

Wednesday, April 16, 8pm
Fat Girl
(Catherine Breillat, 2001, France, 86 minutes, 35mm)
The centerpiece of our Breillat series, Fat Girl is one of the great movies about virginity. Two teenage sisters—the fat Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) and the beautiful Elena (Breillat regular Roxanne Mesquiada)—spend a summer holiday at a bleak seaside town. When the romantic, naïve Elena meets Italian law student Fernando (Libero di Reienzo), the younger but more mature Anaïs can only watch as her sister’s innocence is lost. A typically provocative Breillat film, Fat Girl takes an unflinching look at female adolescent sexual awakening. The translation of the film’s French title, A Ma Soeur!, “For My Sister,” hints at its perverse finale, which confirms Breillat’s mastery of gothic horror.