IN THE CINÉMA CLUB OF… CATHERINE BREILLAT
French filmmaker Catherine Breillat is known for her unflinching works about intimacy, sexuality, and female desire. In 2001, her breakthrough film Fat Girl won the French Culture Award at Cannes Film Festival and the Manfred Salzgeber Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. She has continued making incisive films about fraught relationships since the turn of the millennium. Her most recent film, Last Summer (2023), is a provocative romantic drama about a relationship between a respected lawyer and her 17-year-old stepson. It was named one of the best films of the year by Cahiers du Cinéma and lauded by critics around the globe.
Last Summer opens in select U.S. theaters today.
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, Sergei Eisenstein, 1944
This film is a passion, I take a lot of inspiration from its expressionism. I like to move between naturalism and expressionism, like in Bluebeard. I was in love with Nicolas Cherkasov, I could watch this film indefinitely.
PERSONA, Ingmar Bergman, 1966
This film is all the incandescence and the quintessence of what Bergman is as a filmmaker. In Last Summer, I cite his shot of faces overlapping in the scene between the sisters…
BABY DOLL, Elia Kazan, 1956
After my first official film, Tapage Nocturne, I was considered the worst filmmaker in France. I was going to lock myself up and write books. I saw Elia Kazan’s Babydoll and stayed at the cinema for the duration of the screening day, from 12 to 12. The very next day I started writing 36 fillettes. Some films are loved but forgotten the next day; my idea of a perfect film is one that makes you want to make cinema.
INTENTIONS OF MURDER, Shohei Imamura, 1964
I programmed it recently to be able to watch it again. It’s everything I love about the Japanese… the ambiguity of desire, the brutality of the rape scenes, the intimacy of the faces… The Japanese are like their cuisine: raw and refined. In France, things need to be foreshadowed and there needs to be psychology. In Japan, no psychology. And we understand everything.
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, Nagisa Ōshima, 1976
It says in Ōshima’s diary that he had started to realize that even though sexuality was all he was interested in, he had never made a movie with unsimulated sex. To do this, you’d need a pink actress, a porn star. This is brave and I did it myself (Romance). At the time, porn could still have something cinematographic and libertarian about it, but censorship laws have passed to reduce films and sexual representation to the most matter of fact pornography, making sex abominable and making us ashamed.