I first encountered Fat Girl not long after its release in the States. This was 2002, maybe — I have a vague sense memory of it being summer, the dog days, when every hour stretches like taffy. I was a fucked-up teenager with an anxious relationship to my nascent womanhood, and the Blockbuster on Lynnhaven Parkway (blessedly) had at least one person on staff with a fucked-up, feminist, Francophone-leaning cinematic palate. I’d never heard of Catherine Breillat but saw instantly in stumbling on Fat Girl’s DVD jacket — with its close-up of the titular fat girl, Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), peering through spread fingers — that whoever had made the film, like me, was fiercely familiar with the unbending desire that animates teen girls on the verge.
For the first 15 minutes, I recall feeling profoundly bored. The film’s sisters — beautiful and vacant Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and strange but intensely self-possessed Anaïs — too, are dead bored, spinning out their school holiday in a drowsy seaside town. A boy materializes, of course, and (of course) his sexual attentions accelerate the specifically sisterly antagonism that steers the film’s narrative. All well and good, erotic bildung and so forth: like catnip to me then, single-minded as I was in my despairing quest for love. But it was the film’s final scene — a rest stop, with the family’s women asleep in the car; a drifter, emerging from the forest to split the pretty sister’s skull with an axe, strangle the mother, and rape Anaïs — that launched me from the ranks of the Breillat-curious to lifelong fangirl.
Immediately, I was transported to the stories of my childhood, those unabridged horrors conjured by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen meant to edify young girls in savage worlds. Much of Breillat’s oeuvre resolves in the savagery of this fabular realm, where grannies are wolves, and men are beasts, and sex is not only bound to death but is death, full stop. (Is it any wonder she later turned her attention to the classics, adapting Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty in a planned trilogy that was meant also to include Beauty and the Beast, a project scrapped after a regime change at the German-French public service television channel ARTE?) Girlhood, Breillat’s films hold, is a warzone, and what is said to follow in the so-called happily ever after — marriage, motherhood, and (god forbid) aging — is no salvation, far from it.
“You reveal the gore buried in the young girl,” observes Murielle Joudet, a film critic for Le Monde, in her collection of interviews with Breillat, I Only Believe in Myself. Art, Breillat replies, is a merciless procedure of “transfiguring the banality of all those things that were inculcated in you that were so normative and degrading. I strip myself of it, but always through violence.” I Only Believe in Myself gathers material from 30 hours of conversation between Breillat and Joudet. The interviews were conducted in person and amended on the telephone in the period between September 2022 and March 2023, a time in which Breillat was editing her fifteenth feature, Last Summer — a thorny reckoning with sex in the #MeToo era and Breillat’s first film since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness.
The Breillat of these talks is raw, quick, and intimidating, darting seamlessly between gushing disquisitions on quattrocento framing techniques, bilious disavowals of heterofamilial orthodoxy, and gossipy confessions concerning her film shoots and the actorly tendencies of luminaries like Isabelle Huppert. She’s often literally laugh-out-loud funny, as when Joudet interrupts a long, quintessentially Breillatian rant on the virginity of teen girls to remind Breillat that boys, too, experience this loss (Breillat: “I don’t care!”), or when she refers to her sister as her “best required friend.”
“You reveal the gore buried in the young girl.”
As Joudet admits in her introduction to the text, she’d calculated a disciplinary and chronological approach to the interviews. She arrived with the “arrogance of the critic” and continually “ran into the monstrous wall of [Breillat’s] intellect.” What follows is largely monologic, digressive, and immensely entertaining, with Breillat acting as a sort of steamrolling Scheherazade, unfurling the 1001 nights of her own life and work. Her mental cosmology will be familiar to fans of the films: her recoil from the “sterility” of married life; her return, again and again, to the experiential cliff-edge overlooking adult womanhood; her clashing resistances to both filmic realism and simulated representations of the body and “love scenes”; her notion that men’s engineering of women’s subordination and abjection is what ineluctably catalyzes our passion for the bruter sex.
Breillat’s corpus hinges on the life-and-death stakes of the stories about love and longing women tell ourselves in order to heterosexually live. It would be easy to identify her as a heteropessimist on the subjects of sexual difference and desire — Breillat herself seems to despise all taxonomies of identification, woman chief among them — but the trouble may be more simply that Breillat is irreparably French and has an irreparably French sense of female need, which surfaces from the sludge of a Beauvoirian male-master/female-slave dialectic. Breillat’s philosophy of straightness views barbarism as indispensable to any erotic friction between men and women; there is, she says, an inexorable “law of the strongest,” without which men can’t get hard and women, ostensibly, can’t or won’t feel desirable. The story a man tells himself before fucking a woman is that of the hero, or else conqueror: of how “strong he is,” how much he “dominate[s] us” — and “we can’t blame them,” Breillat insists. After all, they are “only men.”
Breillat is irreparably French.
As young as 22, Breillat had the audacity to educate Roberto Rossellini on the “gaze of shame” that only female directors, she informed him, can comprehend fully. (As she confesses, Breillat had yet to complete a feature.) Indeed, the through line of I Only Believe in Myself is what, for five decades, has rendered Breillat so singular in her vision: the ability of her films to “name” the indignities and misogynistic violence undergirding all formulations of female identity within patriarchy. Heterosexual desire is, for Breillat, a primordial ooze of brutality and ineludibly masochistic for women. She isn’t animated by prosaic domesticities or conjugality but by the “romantic phantasmagoria” at the heart of all love stories. “The power of the amorous myth,” she remarks, “is the thing that kills” once it thaws into the chilly tedium of reality, the sharp recognition that even the most fantastical transformations of infatuation have event horizons — a tragedy Breillat literalizes in 1996’s Perfect Love, the story of a May-December liaison that concludes with optician and mother Frédérique being stabbed to death by her younger lover for mocking his sexual impotence.
Women in her world are Cassandras at the gates of male affect and experience; we articulate and expose aspects of men’s lives that “they can’t bear to hear.” Joudet (I think rightfully) characterizes Perfect Love as a story of femicide; Breillat elaborates on this to remark that a frightening and utterly pedestrian reality is that men kill us “to make us stop talking. In [Perfect Love, Christophe] murders laughter. To kill laughter, you need 500 stab wounds…Laughter is inextinguishable.” And to kill a woman as Frédérique is killed, Breillat continues, a man must first have deified her. She becomes, for Christophe, a sort of false idol; only annihilation serves. As with the shocking conclusion of Fat Girl, the murder bookending the affair at Perfect Love’s center was pilfered from the headlines, though Breillat shifts the social class of the victim to situate her more solidly in the bourgeois realm (“so that the characters could be really verbal” — a typical quality of all Breillat’s girls and a comment emblematic of her snobbishness toward the working class).
“To kill laughter, you need 500 stab wounds.”
Breillat suggests that her own experience with assault (and, for that matter, laughing in the face of assault) was the rupture that called her to writing. At 14, Breillat survived an attempted rape at the hands of a Spanish grandee she’d met in the club. She recounts this scene with derision and caustic humor: “I was wearing sailor’s pants,” she tells Joudet, that “had buttons all over them, and it was impossible to figure out how to take them off. We fought for three hours, he never managed.” He demanded a handjob or blowjob in lieu of penetration, but the teen Breillat “didn’t even know that men got hard” yet; instead, she grabbed him by the balls and squeezed. “I knew,” she says, “what you had to do to defend yourself against a man.”
At this, he nearly choked her to death (“There are strangulations in all my films”), and when she broke free, she “told him he was a pig” and “treated him with total contempt.” Rape, in other words, is the dark genesis of Breillat’s creative imagination. The encounter itself becomes crystallized in 1988’s Junior Size 36, a film Breillat disturbingly suggests might have been subtitled, “or, How Young Girls Ask for Their Own Rape.” For Breillat, no act or affect is beyond representation: “Disasters, heartaches, strokes…everything must be sublimated.” Elsewhere, she uses the language of transubstantiation to describe the conversion of experience into art: solve et coagula, the alchemical principle.
Despite herself, Breillat is a near-perfect oracle for the #MeToo era; not because her politics align with the movement’s but because she, too, sees the way a culture of rape bears down on female sexuality. “Misogyny is in France’s DNA,” she remarks, and I cannot help but wonder what she makes of the Pelicot trial, which sparked nationwide rallies and led to the enshrinement of consent in French sexual assault litigation. That rape is systemic is, for Breillat, irrefutable. “The virginity of girls,” for example, has nothing to do with our autonomy or sense of self-possession; it “belongs to society…We have all been raped.” Our bodies, as her films remind us, are not our own.
“I loathe the assignment. Becoming, being a woman.”
Adult femaleness, meanwhile, is not just an ambivalent but a nearly unbearable condition for Breillat. Cinema, in her life, has supplanted any temporal or emotional investment in such pitiably quotidian matters as wifedom or motherhood. But in fact, Breillat has been married three times, has had three children. She could never keep a man, she jokes — a shoot is short, but it’s “too long for men to forgive you.” She adored her babies, she maintains, but (it seems) in the way she adores her actors: for the “transparency” of their eyelids, their eminently filmable skin. They are like the paintings she admires by Titian, Raphael, or Botticelli, and like those tableaux and her actors, children become less absorbing when the complicatedness of their personhood leaks beyond the borders of the imagistic frame. It’s a slant but disorienting admission, her tacit objectification of her own children, particularly after Breillat has staked such an impassioned claim for the dignity and autonomy of young girls.
She is, she avows repeatedly, an auteur, not a caretaker — after all, “Why must women stop being intransigent minds once they become mothers?” (In Breillat’s disaffiliation from the iconography of the Female Artist, I cannot help but think of Lydia Tár acidly spitting “I am Petra’s father” in a child bully’s face.) For the women of her films who “submit” to feminine conformity, Breillat-the-iconoclast has little patience: Assimilation renders them castrating Medusas or sentimental pathètiques.
Neither Breillat nor Joudet, however, remarks on the fact that Breillat renounces mature womanhood — “I loathe the assignment. Becoming, being a woman” — in the same moment she again invokes the age she was during her near-rape, 14, the period in which she says she wishes to “stay mentally stuck.” She describes rape as an experience to be briefly endured and then siloed to the ephemerality of the past, yet her films, too, are frequently stuck in the quicksand of erotically violent ruptures. Her fixation on and disdain for the figure of the victim, she says, emerges from her sense that women linger on and traffic in our own suffering; “there’s a mandate for [the raped woman] to be raped and devastated for life…Society would have liked [us] to suffer in a psychiatric hospital.” Like many naysayers of traumatic disclosure, Breillat seems to believe that documenting or objecting to one’s experience of sexual violence itself signals a kind of existential suspension within the event. To admit the wound, in other words, is to surrender to it utterly, now and forever after. Yet the wound, in this case, drives nearly all of the work.
Elsewhere, Breillat laments #MeToo as the real backlash of our era; it represents the “implementation of a ruthless moral order” that censors authentic art and installs hypocritical “little ayatollahs” (intimacy coaches) on film sets, interested not in preserving the dignity and security of actors but in fabricating a patina of supplication to our passing current of cultural puritanism. Her language in these passages eerily echoes that of the 2018 open letter published by Catherine Deneuve and 100 other Frenchwomen in Le Monde, where they characterized #MeToo as a “witch-hunt” orchestrated by female prudes to target innocent men. She’s a feminist, though, Breillat tells Joudet — she would have hated herself otherwise.
No one who’s seen Breillat’s 2002 Sex Is Comedy (which metanarratively interrogates the production of a pivotal love scene in Fat Girl) will be shocked by her suspicion of intimacy coaches. She is a self-described tyrant on set; even the notoriously diamond-hard Huppert was forced into submission. “I film ultraintimacy,” Breillat remarks at one moment, and it’s true — I can think of almost no other director who cuts as near to the aorta of our most grotesquely vulnerable moments. “Don’t worry,” the Breillat stand-in tells her assistant in Sex Is Comedy, “I won’t harm the film.” But what of the people performing in it?
Rape proves to be the ethical snag that unravels I Only Believe in Myself. Though Breillat’s obsession with misogynistic violence highlights its material omnipresence in our world, her discomfort with and renunciation of her own womanhood borders on the reactionary. It’s worth acknowledging that much of the violence committed against women in Breillat’s oeuvre is self-perpetrated. The trouble surfaces again and again: “I don’t know what a woman is.” Breillat says, “I’ve managed to pull myself out of the feminine condition that I’ve been stuffed into.” She insists, moreover, that she isn’t cowed by compulsory female solidarity: “I want to be able to be against a woman.”
It seems she got what she asked for: In 2024, Caroline Ducey, the star of 1999’s Romance, published (the as-yet-untranslated) La prédation (nom féminin), a memoir in which she alleges Breillat facilitated her rape on the set of that film. Romance featured unsimulated sex scenes, including one of penetration involving porn star Rocco Siffredi and another — the assault in question, as identified by Ducey — in which a nonactor nonconsensually performed cunnilingus on her. Ducey contends that she was aware of the scene’s content but not that Reza Habouhossein would make actual contact with her genitals. (Ducey “n’avait alors donné son accord pour que cette scène ne soit pas simuleé,” as reported in Femme Actuelle).
Several witnesses involved in the shoot came forward, some in Ducey’s camp and some suggesting the logistics of filming were more indistinct than she claims. My French remains rudimentary, which is to say I haven’t read the memoir in full, but for Breillat’s part, she declares that Ducey was informed of — and consented to — everything as it happened. While her contract was not explicit on the matter of non-simulation, Ducey was allegedly free to back out of any of the scenes in question. Ducey, Breillat attests, retrofitted a narrative of violation onto the experience after panicking that a possessive boyfriend would be angry with her for having performed unsimulated love scenes. (This description of survivor testimony as an ex post facto transmutation of regret is all too familiar.) Ducey, she continues, later campaigned for the lead in 2007’s The Last Mistress (a role that went to Asia Argento, whose allegations against Harvey Weinstein Breillat likewise pooh-poohed) — a supposed proof that Breillat had done nothing untoward.
Breillat’s discussion of Ducey is difficult to stomach; her logic, in defending herself against Ducey’s claims, reeks of recognizable discursive and legal tactics weaponized against survivors. For good or ill, though, it’s beyond my power to arbitrate the dispute between Breillat and Ducey. What I can say is that the Breillat of I Only Believe in Myself dances between public-facing personae, alternatingly proving herself to be intensely charismatic, disarming, contemptuous. It’s easy, yes, to be swept away by a person or an artist — the word genius is lately out of fashion — radiating at full candle power. And I have real compassion for the 14-year-old girl who felt she needed, simply, to get over her violation and its attendant trauma, to channel a nearly unsurvivable experience into works of terror and beauty. I was that girl, too, once. No one protected me, either. I realize Breillat would despise my mawkishness, but I have witnessed too often the way our wounds may make of us the monsters we most fear. That, too, is an awful transubstantiation: a bad alchemy. I only believe in Breillat when she says this: “When I want an image, I have absolutely no pride, no shame, and no mercy, either. I don’t care how grotesque I am, as long as I get it.”
She is the Art Monster par excellence, a director for whom all but the cinematic shot is inconsequential, is sloughed off. Breillat sketches a striking image of herself on set, watching the film unfold on a monitor, her head hidden beneath a scarf. It’s so her actors and colleagues can’t see her face as she watches, she tells Joudet, but by the end of I Only Believe in Myself, this directorial self-portrait suggests another possibility: that Breillat has subscribed to a sort of willful ignorance of her own limitations, renouncing all but what serves a ruthless, incandescent vision.
Jamie Hood is the author, most recently, of Trauma Plot: A Life, the hybrid pandemic diary how to be a good girl, and a forthcoming collection of love poems. She lives in Brooklyn.
Fat Girl and Abuse of Weakness stills courtesy of Rezo Films; The Last Mistress courtesy of StudioCanal; Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty courtesy of Arte; Last Summer courtesy of Pyramide Distribution.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.