Sunday, November 19, 2006

Thine's like the dread mouth of a fired gun

Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell and Koji Wakamatsu's 1969 film Go, Go, Second Time Virgin have angry, confrontational reputations, but as films they are both rather spare and withdrawn.













Their precise framing and stilted philosophical dialogue work to prevent them breaking down before their subject, keep it within manageable confines. They examine their symptoms, as if tracing the line of a scar with their fingertips. Both have a numbness about them that makes them seem damaged, as if working through a trauma, but they calculatedly use this quality as the seduction-bait with which to attract the viewer.













A girl is raped on the roof of an appartment block by a group of students - it is the second time she has been penetrated and she recalls her first loss of virginity, raped by two boys on the seashore. She remains on the roof after the students have finished with her, gazing at the night sky. The following morning she finds she has bled again - hence the title. She dips her finger into the blood and talks to a boy who has been watching her, and who had masturbated during her rape.













In Anatomy of Hell a Man (Rocco Siffredi) is contracted by a Woman (Amira Cesar) to observe her over four nights when she is "unwatchable"; she challenges her viewer to a kind of spiritual journey using sex as a means, to pass through disgust and anger to something beyond it. The woman provokes him and he attempts to overcome her - he daubs her with lipstick, he inserts a rake-handle into her vagina - acts of childish abuse, or an attempt to create a grotesque artwork. The woman overcomes it by staring past it, by retaining her self-containment, until Siffredi understands that he can never finally destroy her and he cries as she sleeps.















Catherine Breillat has said that there is something royal about the Woman, that she is "reine" and "serene". People often get annoyed with this sort of thing, and bad reviews of both films are not hard to find. The woman with the rake in her bottom has a bandage on her wrist, a badge of self-disgust and self-absorption. The former disgust, its first spiritual level, is turned outward in the course of the film, against the men who have inflicted it. She remembers her childhood, and the faces of the boys playing doctor to her patient.















The same oafishness and incomprehension in these faces as in those of the students -













The raped girl talks with the watching boy, who is impotent except when he masturbates. He has a memory of sexual trauma, of being molested by a nightmarish group of men and women, grabbing at his trousers and writhing amongst themselves - the men retaining their ugly glasses in the way that actors always seem to do in porn films - if not glasses, a silly hat perhaps, or a grotesque moustache.













So the boy, who turns out to be a published poet, kills them all and arranges their bodies in a sculptural pattern. And the girl, who is merely repelled by the sight of their corpses, walks forward into the camera and shouts her defiance, her final declaration: Bakayaro! Bakayaro!, loosely but fairly translated in the subtitles of the Image Entertainment edition as Fuck you! Fuck you! - or fools, or oafs, as one could also translate it. At the end of the film the boy and girl commit suicide, throwing themselves from the roof of the tower block. At the conclusion of Anatomy of Hell, while Rocco Siffredi walks alone by the sea or tells lies about her to the boys in the bar, the Woman is cast/casts herself from a cliff into a violent sea - a flash of gothic white and she is gone.















Both Breillat and Wakamatsu are political radicals, and Breillat at least seems to hope that her films can effect change, might lead forward to a world where they are no longer so necessary. But in both films the conclusion is death, either a return to the ocean, or as in Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, a strange geometrical emptiness, the bodies resting on either side of a white line.

3 comments:

Dejan said...

Catherine Breillat is an intelligent French ''feminist'' wench who wants to convince you of her avantgardique discourse's radicalness. Intermittenly she succeeds, thanks largely to her
directorial talent and a penchant for sophisticated Lacanese dialogue, full of subtext, metatext, red herring and suggestive eroticism. No snobbish avantgardique child like myself could ever totally resist those double entendrees. Also because in the New Age, we are really geared towards the wimmin and their newly-conquered position of authority in the world of oppressive ''patriarchal'' men.

But the spectacular endings of her films invariably disclose Catherine's reactionary intent of identifying with the male aggressor and stealing away his sadistic pleasures. What I'm trying to say is that Breillat is in fact a militant snobbish French dyke with a pamphletist agenda to bite off your penis and paste it onto her sublime French vagina.

Catherine's film SEX IS COMEDY ends with Breillat directing the ending of her film about the female perspective on sex. In the scene, a young woman is fucked by a young man and the event is presented as being the Ontological Violation Of The Female Body. In other words, every male fucking of the female body is a priori rape.

There are no good men, readers. They should all be cooked and eaten by the French New Age Coven of Witches. And only an impotent man is able to touch Breillat's precious pussy.
Because readers, this gloious organ transcends the grasp of the inftantile male brain. In L'ANATOMIE D'ENFER, Breillat's hatred of men also hits on the queer audience that is supposed to be her friends (as it turns out, even gay men are impotent twats).

Parallel to Breillat's aggressive display of militant feminism, Catherine cynically takes the directorial seat and even though she would like me to believe she is doing it in order to deconstruct the sadistic male position in that seat, I think she is doing it for the jouissance afforded her by being able to appropriate precisely that loathsome male position.

Ergo, ''feminism'' is a politically correct term for the female appropriation of male violence. In effect, ''feminism'' and ''patriarchalism'' are both just sides of the same fucked-up Moebius strip!

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Elliott Broidy said...

Great read.