'Le Cinéma De Catherine Breillat'

chapter 1 ‘Le Cinéma de Catherine Breillat’

An Intertextual and Transgressive Cinema: Sex is Comedy and Une Vieille Maîtresse

Breillat’s cinema has often been coined with the following expressions: ‘extreme cinema’, ‘cinema of evil’ or ‘cinema of the abject’ – as observed by Martine Beugnet. While not ignoring these terms, I prefer to look at Breillat’s cinema by taking into consideration its strong connection to writing. Breillat began her career as a writer and novelist with the intention of swapping her pen for a camera. This desire to become a filmmaker is evident in her style of writing, according to some critics. For instance, Shirley Jordan claims that her style bears a cinematic signature: ‘it is hardly surprising that Breillat or Des- pentes, who are film directors as well as writers, think with cinematic impact’ (Jordan, 2006, p. 13). Breillat confirms this view when she was interviewed on a television show on the French channel Antenne 2 in December 2007 to pro- mote her novel Bad Love; here, she declared: ‘Je ne l’ai pas écrit effectivemment comme un roman et pour être publié, ça c’est vrai’. Breillat’s introduction to filmmaking was linked to an offer to adapt one of her novels to the screen. Since then, the pen and the camera have, sometimes simultaneously, been her two means of expression. After adapting her novel, she carried on writing and wrote film scripts for directors such as Daniel Hamilton (Bilitis, 1976), Mau- rice Pialat (Police, 1985), Christine Pascal (Zanzibar, 1988) and Xavier Beauvois (Selon Mathieu, 2001). I therefore claim that the significance of writing – novels and scripts – and its connection to filming is a defining feature of Breillat’s cinema. As a result, to understand Breillat’s cinema, looking at her position as a ‘scénariste’ – scriptwriter – will be a starting point, which will subsequently serve to shed light on her position as a ‘réalisatrice’/auteure.

The Script of ‘Intimate Scenes’ in Sex is Comedy

As a ‘scénariste’, Breillat brings to the fore an overlooked area of film study. She not only writes film scripts for herself and others, but the script is also a topic of exploration in her work. Interviewed on her filmmaking process, it is not unusual for Breillat to mention the intricate position of the script in

Le CinÉma de Catherine Breillat 19 relation to the film.1 More importantly, I believe that she has used the filmic space to explore the script. At a crucial moment in her career as a filmmaker, she released a film, which at first glance concentrates on filming. Sex is comedy appeared in 2002 following Brève Traversée, but more significantly following the international and controversial successes of Romance and A ma soeur!. The international screenings of these two films generated several retrospectives of her earlier work, which stirred extreme reactions from viewers. Seen in this context, devoting a film to the reflection of her filming style seems to come at an appropriate time. Sex is comedy specifically concentrates on the film director’s tense relationships with the main actor by showing the actor’s anxiety and discontent resulting from variations in the story’s development. Variations from script to revisions and from revisions to the finished film form part of the film’s focus. It appears that these variations result from an actor’s expectancy based on what is written in the script and the film’s new line of direction. If the film provides an insight into the filmmaking process, it is mainly due to highlighting the transition from script to film. In this light, Sex is comedy’s ob- jective can be redefined as bringing attention to the relation between forms of writing and filming. The film highlights the complex relation the script nur- tures with the film, or more specifically, the variations that the story, or script goes through before attaining their final form, the film. It can be argued that while the film stresses a battle of power between the male actor and the female director, another battle underpins it, one between the written and the filmed text. However, because of the critics’ neglect of noting the script, this remains an overlooked aspect of Breillat’s cinema. Critical interest in the script used to be limited to the publication of screenplays. The French film magazine, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, has released two of Breillat’s screenplays, Romance (1999) and Fat Girl!2 (2001), and has also de- voted a dedicated study to scriptwriting. The author of Scénario, Anne Huet (2005), expresses the growing recognition of scriptwriting in cinema giving the examples of its presence in academic study and its nomination at film festivals, such as the Cannes Film Festival. In 2007, the year when Breillat entered the of- ficial competition at Cannes with Une vieille maîtresse, Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (2007) won the prize for the best screenplay. As a result, the publishing

1 Mainly in Catherine Breillat (2006), but also in other interviews on the Internet and film magazines. 2 Catherine Breillat (1999a) Romance, précédé d’un texte ‘De la femme et la morale au cinéma. De l’exploitation de son aspect physique, de sa place dans le cinéma: comme auteur, comme actrice, comme sujet’; Catherine Breillat (2001) A ma soeur! précédé de Une âme à deux corps.