ROMANCE SCREENING

"But I still thought it might be seen as progressive in America, especially because its rare confluence of cinematic taste, literary intelligence, and hard-core sex might undercut the crippling puritanism of our movie codes, which usually equate eroticism with porn, sleaze, and stupidity rather than, say, art, health, and intelligence."
-Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

"In her solemn, sexually graphic ''Romance,'' Catherine Breillat explores the nature of a woman's need for male attention and erotic love. Though many of her film's insights might be obtained from back copies of Cosmopolitan plus a smattering of the Marquis de Sade, watching it is a memorable experience for several reasons. Not least of these is its blunt, hard-core frankness. It's doubtful that the film's intellectual aspects would command the same attention if the camera did not make the actors' genitals as familiar as their faces."
-Janet Maslin, NEW YORK TIMES


Suggested Secondary Screenings:  EYES WIDE SHUT (Stanley Krubick, 1999) and LAST TANGO IN PARIS (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

SEX IS COMEDY SCREENING

"There are insightful moments about the delicate relationships between a director and her cast, and about the mind games that go on both behind the camera and in front of it."

-Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"It's refreshing to see this side of Breillat, a self-reflective artist whose evident anger over the sexual state of the world doesn't entirely subsume her, or her humanity."

-John Anderson, NEWSDAY

"A rigorous and bracingly charming movie about moviemaking."

-Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE

Perhaps the least extreme of the films we will watch, SEX IS COMEDY is a commentary on what it means to represent sex on screen from the perspective of the actor and the director.  In this meta-film, a Breillat surrogate must work with two young actors as well as her crew to capture a moment of raw intimacy and intensity.  The director employs numerous and often contradictory strategies to achieve her goal and edges the border of exploitation, sadomasochism, and touches on issues of consent.  How far must one push oneself or others in the pursuit of art?  This is the central question of Breillat's film and her cinema overall.  As we continue with her work, a fascination with the obscene, that which should not be seen, will continue and SEX IS COMEDY is an excellent text that Breillat provides to explain her method and motivations.

Suggested Secondary Screenings:  IRMA VEP (Olivier Assayas, 1996), BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), DAY FOR NIGHT (Francois Truffaut, 1973), CONTEMPT (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), BROKEN EMBRACES (Pedro Almodovar, 2009), THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (Lars von Trier, 2003) and H STORY (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2001).

THE PRETTY THINGS ARE GOING TO HELL

Here is David Bowie's 'The Pretty Things are Going to Hell,' which appears in FAT GIRL during the drive.  The lyrics are prophetic for the the film and speak a lot about the edge and crossing over, which is an interesting and important concept in Breillat's work as well as the New French Cinema of Cruelty in general.

FAT GIRL SCREENING

"I was kind of mad at the way things had this arbitrary development ... That's what happens in real life... I thought a lot about this movie after I saw it -- days afterwards, a week afterwards."

-Richard Roeper, EBERT & ROEPER

"FAT GIRL is uncompromising and unforgiving, but ultimately more self-destructive than any of its characters."

-Jay Carr, BOSTON GLOBE

"There is a jolting surprise in discovering that this film has free will, and can end as it wants, and that its director can make her point, however brutally."

-Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Catherine Breillat has described this film as a story about "a soul with two bodies."  FAT GIRL is a frank exploration of sisterhood and adolescent sexuality that has shocked audiences and enraged censors.  Revolving around the complicated relationship between Anais, a twelve-year-old ugly duckling, and her gorgeous older sister Elena, FAT GIRL is uncompromising, brutal, and unflinchingly honest.  The tension between Anais and Elena grows when Elena meets Fernando, an Italian law student, who seduces her with promises of love while Anais bears witness to the corruption of her sister's 'innocence.'

Suggested Secondary Screenings:  BLUEBEARD (Breillat, 2009), A REAL YOUNG GIRL (Breillat, 1976), MOUCHETTE (Robert Bresson, 1967), BABY DOLL (Elia Kazan, 1956), LOLITA (Stanley Kubrick, 1962), and AMERICAN PIE (Paul Weitz, 1999) [Just kidding, sort of, it might make a really great comparison paper.]