The director Luca Guadagnino called “one of the greatest alive”
You might argue that art is subjective, but you can certainly tell when you’ve stumbled upon an artist who does something profoundly special, even if you don’t like it.
That’s because they move with such unabashed power, such integrity, and you’ve got to admire that. Good art can be horrible, it can be uncomfortable, and it can be ugly. You don’t have to ‘like’ it – some of the best art is utterly polarising, and few directors have polarised like Catherine Breillat, whom Luca Guadagnino considers “one of the greatest alive”.
The French filmmaker has been active in cinema since the 1970s, making her debut as a director in 1976 with A Real Young Girl – to call it controversial would be an understatement, as across 90 minutes, we see a 14-year-old girl (although she was, thank god, played by an adult) experience her sexual awakening, albeit a rather grotesque and uncomfortable one, and in a particularly unforgettable sequence, she fantasises about being tied up with barbed wire while the man she fancies inserts worms into her vagina.
Breillat is unflinching, and we see a very graphic depiction of this dream that the young protagonist has, but that just scratches the surface of what we’re forced to witness in the film, which is full of graphic scenes of masturbation and plenty of shots of various characters’ genitals. It definitely requires an open mind, let’s put it that way.
The film was banned for many years, only getting a theatrical release in 2000, but in the meantime, Breillat continued to write and direct some rather transgressive depictions of female sexuality, like the very explicit Romance and Guadagnino’s favourite, Fat Girl. For many, Fat Girl is their first introduction to Breillat – it certainly was for me – and it’s perhaps ever so slightly more accessible than the movies she’d made before it. That’s not to say it’s remotely easy to stomach, though.
Fat Girl, or À ma sœur!, follows a 12-year-old girl, Anais, who lives in the shadow of her 15-year-old sister, Elena, whom she sees as much prettier and more desirable than her – Anais has yet to shed her childish puppy fat, but she’s starting to open her mind up to the adult world of sex: all she wants is to lose her virginit, and while on holiday, Elena meets a university student and brings him back to the room she is sharing with Anais, what transpires is a wholly devastating encounter, with Anais witnessing Fernando pressuring Elena into anal sex.
The film’s exploration of female coming-of-age and sexuality is honest, yet painful, and the ending is truly heinous – yet one that tells an unwavering and horrific truth. Appearing in the Criterion Closet, Guadagnino called Fat Girl “one of my favourite movies ever,” calling Breillat “sublime.”
Explaining his love for it, he said, “This movie is devastating in every way you can think of because it brings you inside of the visceral relationship between growing up and not knowing what you’re going to become and the power of the impulses of sexuality over the body and the mind of a young girl. It also lands in a place of apocalyptic fury in depicting, somehow, the invisible hand of violence over women.”
Referencing that ending, Guadagnino concluded, “It has one of the most striking, impossible, terminal finales that I can think of in a movie.” Breillat knows how to make an impact, which she has continued to do with movies like Anatomy of Hell and Brief Crossing, but none have the sheer visceral pain and unflinching violence as Fat Girl.
