ANATOMY OF HELL

3/10

Anatomie de l'enfer : France 2004 : Catherine BREILLAT : 72 mins

There's plenty of anatomy, and no shortage of hell - for the viewer - in Breillat's latest "provocation". But by the end the title, like much else, remains frustratingly opaque. If this po-faced picture displayed even the slightest hint of humour - and her last picture was called Sex is Comedy after all - one could perhaps charitably suggest that it could be read a parody of the "mucky" French arthouse movie: mucho full-frontal nudity and sexual explicitness "excused" by the flimsiest of excuses for "philosophical" dialogue. Fellow Edinburgh Film Festival title Process - ostensibly covering similar turf - sensibly injected moments of self-aware wit, and pretty much dispensed with dialogue altogether, with much more rewarding results.

Except what the characters - nameless, of course - speak here isn't "dialogue" as such: "monologue" is more like it, even when they're supposedly addressing each other. And we know we're in trouble from the very first lines. A beautiful, despairing brunette (Amira Casar) cuts her wrists in the toilet of a gay nightclub. "Why did you do that?" asks a man (Rocco Siffredi). "Because I'm a woman," comes the reply.

The man consents to make paid visits to the Woman's beachfront mansion where she - analytical, verbose - masturbates in front of this unaroused gay onlooker. Breillat's "thesis" seems to be something about how gay men are revolted by women's bodies - but this soon widens into a wider diagnosis of the misogyny that we're told afflicts even the most heterosexual of males: "the body of woman ... calls for mutilation."

The Woman here is so consistently annoying, however, that she shouldn't be surprised if she's experienced "misogyny," although she's probably mistaken in extending such antipathy to the rest of the world's females. Casar contributes a wooden, uninvolving performance - which is presumably exactly what Breillat (who's on record as saying that she "doesn't think about the audience") intended. Siffredi is another matter entirely. Something of a living legend in the world of adult movies, Siffredi somehow makes Breillat's script sound interesting and even, on occasions, borderline plausible. On this evidence he deserves further work in "mainstream" productions: his charismatic, intelligent performance is the only saving grace in what is otherwise a thoroughly tiresome - and, even at 72 minutes, somewhat interminable exercise in pretentiousness. "The horror of nothingness is the imprescribable all." "Frogs, at least," someone remarks, "have the decency of being green."

Speaking of decency - what are we to make of the scene, a flashback to the Woman's childhood, where a baby bird is taken from its nest and stomped to death? We don't see the stomping, only its messy consequences, and of course it's possible that the corpse of a young bird that had died from natural causes had been found, and substituted for the living creature during a cut. But, worryingly, there's no disclaimer in the end titles along the lines of "no animal was harmed during the making of this film." Given the deficiencies of the film as a whole, it's unlikely that many viewers will give Breillat the benefit of the doubt.

16th September, 2004
(seen 25th August : FilmHouse Edinburgh : press show - Edinburgh Film Festival)

click HERE for our full coverage of the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival

by Neil Young

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