Updated RankingA Real Young Girl (1976)
★ ★ It’s head-smackingly obvious the difference in watching a female sexual awakening film made by someone of that gender. Rather than play as a male-gaze sexual tease, Breillat plunges deep into the emotional confusion of a developed, inexperienced body trying to control a constant hormonal surge. Unfortunately, this film is overly fascinated with all forms of body and animal secretions, as if Breillat needed to get that first rush out of her system before folding it into later films with more sophistication. The emotions here get out grossed.
Romance (1999)
★ ★ This was a tough one to get my head around. Like I often do, I turned to the internet to look for some other perspectives to see if any of them jogged anything for me. And yet these reviews, namely Roger Ebert's, expressed a similar level of unknowing. It is a film that seems to be saying things through its fairly direct narration/dialogue about the nature of female desire, but it never quite formulates.
Same, but isn’t that probably because we are men? Isn’t this a prime example of what suffers from a lack of gender diversity, that any thoughtful discussion of this film is incredibly hard to find. Breillat is provoking and all us men can do is put our hands up and mention the explicit content.
Anatomy of Hell (2004)
★ ★ In a masterstroke, Breillat’s male in her examination of gender behavior and interaction is gay. With desire removed, she is able to show the more primal and emotional differences between this couple testing the limits of their sexual identity. (That said, the focus is mostly on the woman with the man more of a passenger while she takes things to the extreme.) It’s still not that clear to me what Breillat’s getting at, there seems to be a Gaspar Noe sense of destructive nihilism, only with little of Noe’s technical craft.
The Last Mistress was a real change of scenery. I have difficulty getting into this type of film most days, and this wasn’t doing it for me, so I abandoned it a half-hour in.
The Sleeping Beauty (2010)
★ ★ ★ – OkayI didn’t realize this was going to be THAT story, and actually thought this was the film where a bunch of old men get in bed with Emily Browning and sleep. (That sure seems more like a Breillat idea.) Instead, this uses Sleeping Beauty as a launch point, pulling ideas from other fairy tales (especially The Snow Queen) and takes the playfulness of Donkey Skin and the metaphorical value of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. So it’s mostly delightful, more than slightly meta and could play to kids until the sexual awakening of the last section. The guy’s name is Peter, as in Pan, and his role as the boy who’s grown up shows what Breillat is doing here.