In the final minutes​ of Catherine Breillat’s film Fat Girl (2001), a man breaks the windshield of a car with an axe. Inside are a woman and her two young daughters, Elena and Anaïs; they have pulled over to sleep. Elena is killed by a single blow to the head and her mother is strangled. Anaïs, who watches the murders with unsettling detachment, her fear betrayed only by the urine running down her legs, is taken to some nearby woods, where the man throws her on the ground and pulls up her dress. ‘Tu vas pas me faire du mal,’ Anaïs says. ‘You won’t hurt me.’ The man tells her to be quiet and stuffs a rag in her mouth. She puts her arms around his shoulders; he gently strokes her hair. Later, as policemen lead her out of the woods, one of them tells his colleagues that the girl insists she hasn’t been raped. ‘I don’t care if you don’t believe me,’ Anaïs says. The movie ends.

Breillat has written and directed fifteen feature films since 1976. One of their major themes is the possibility of taking seriously a woman’s description of her own experience. But what would it mean to take seriously the proposal with which Fat Girl leaves us? Are we to believe that a 12-year-old has consensual sex with the man who has just killed her mother and sister? Reasonable viewers know that what happens to Anaïs is an act of violence. Breillat wouldn’t disagree, but she wants us to understand that it is also an act of violence to dismiss Anaïs’s account as a delusion or defence, and to impose on her a set of moral measures to which she refuses to subscribe.

Although she is sometimes compared to Gaspar Noé, Bruno Dumont and other directors of ‘the New French Extremity’ (sex-and-gore movies that push the boundaries of good taste), Breillat is an intellectual filmmaker. Her films pose ethical questions about desire and aesthetic questions about representation; in particular, they ask how explicit cinema can be without becoming pornography. Yet for all their moral seriousness, they reject the trappings of high art. With their washed-out palettes, soft focus and diffuse lighting, they sometimes resemble the smutty pastel covers of mid-century novels such as Bonjour Tristesse. This seems deliberate. Femininity is compelling to Breillat because it is so banal; its conventionality and dullness set the terms under which women are allowed to exist.

Still, she likes a good shock. In her first film, A Real Young Girl (1976), Alice, the 14-year-old protagonist, imagines the man she desires pushing an earthworm between her labia, then tearing the worm apart and arranging the pieces on her pubic hair. In Anatomy of Hell (2004), a woman orders a gay man to remove a tampon from her body; she then drops it into a glass of water and orders him to drink. These moments are not intended solely to disturb or alienate. They are part of Breillat’s ongoing investigation into the agonies of having a body, which is, for her, the origin and the enemy of female identity. ‘The body is not a thing, it is a situation,’ Simone de Beauvoir wrote. Alice puts the same sentiment in different words: ‘I can’t stand the proximity of my face and my pussy.’

Breillat was born in 1948 in Bressuire. Her father, a doctor, liked to say that he had the right to see his three women – Breillat, her older sister and their mother – naked. From her mother she inherited a sense of embarrassment about her large breasts. In 1988 she named a movie about a young girl trying to lose her virginity after her own teenage bra size: 36 fillette. When asked to describe her childhood, Breillat often refers to the shame that young women felt in postwar France. The Second Sex (1949) may have been a bestseller, but feminism had hardly taken hold of the country. Breillat’s father would say she and her sister were ‘dangerous to ourselves’. She read her way through the children’s section of the town library until her mother gave her permission to go over to the adult side, where she discovered Henry Miller, the Comte de Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade.

At twelve years old, Breillat saw Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), the film which she says ‘awakened me to myself’. At its centre is a bad romance between a circus equestrienne and a whip-wielding ringmaster. This Beauty and the Beast relationship, as Breillat later described it, became the framework for her films, nearly all of which feature a young woman in thrall to a brutish, stupid, cruel or murderous man. In Breillat’s words, the libidinal structure of this coupling is not ‘the union of beauty with itself’ but ‘the insult to beauty made by ugliness’. This is also the idea behind the first film in which Breillat appeared, three years before directing her own: Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bernardo Bertolucci’s psychomachia about a young Parisian woman who has an affair with a much older American man, played, with indelible eccentricity, by Marlon Brando. Breillat had a small speaking part as a dressmaker, but she found acting tedious. She preferred to watch Bertolucci and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, in action.

Breillat published her first novel – about a playboy and his various lovers – at the age of seventeen. It was quickly banned from being sold to anyone under eighteen, which put her in the position of having written a book she wasn’t allowed to read. In 1975 she received the financial backing to turn her fourth novel into a movie. Shot with a porn crew on the cheap, A Real Young Girl was finished a year later but it was shelved for being too dirty and wasn’t released in theatres until 2000. Set in the 1960s, the film aligns the conservatism of the heroine’s parents with the authoritarian government of Charles de Gaulle, who was then overseeing a period of rapid economic modernisation in France. There is more than a hint of the perverse in the heroine’s rebelliousness: Alice cycles without underwear, sticks a spoon in her vagina while having coffee with her parents and masturbates in front of Jim, an employee at her father’s sawmill. She is thwarted when Jim, on his way to meet her, is killed by a boar trap set by her father. The sexual revolution is still a long way off.

Not that it matters, necessarily. In an interview from 2008, Breillat dismissed May ’68 as a ‘micro-event’ which ‘made it clear to women that in this revolution, as in the first, they had been cheated’, their concerns about male domination treated as secondary to the larger project of social emancipation. Political economy is not her subject. Breillat is interested in the existential drama of heterosexuality, which she stages in blandly bourgeois environments. The world her heroines occupy is comfortable but torturous.

Perhaps this is why she is drawn to the pre-capitalist Lebenswelt of fairy tales. In 2009 and 2010 she released back-to-back adaptations of Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty, two stories about young girls finding themselves in eroticised peril. In Bluebeard, 15-year-old Lola Créton, who looks much younger, plays a girl who is married to a rich nobleman several decades her elder. Despite this difference in age, and the fact that he looks like a burly Rasputin, they form a bond troubled only by his mysterious insistence that she stay away from a certain room in his castle. One day, when he is absent, she enters the room and finds the corpses of three women hanging from the ceiling, dripping blood onto the floor: his previous wives. In Sleeping Beauty, a princess who longs to be a boy goes on fantastical dream adventures during her hundred-year sleep. When she wakes up, her fate is sealed. She cries as a man impregnates her and later throws her to the floor.

Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty were made for French television, and both embrace amateurism: the scenery is low-budget, the costumes are sourced from remnants and the supporting actors seem as if they’ve wandered in from a school theatre production. The result is a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect: the audience is not allowed to indulge in the fairy tale’s romance world but must confront the uneasy combination of sensuality and mortal terror that gives the tale its narrative force. These may be just stories, but they are stories whose logic runs deep. Breillat has said she doesn’t like Freud (‘I never had a missing penis. I did, however, have missing rights’) and this is partly why, for her, it is art and literature, not the family, that provide the blueprint for adult perversions.

Verfremdungseffekte don’t just undermine cinema’s supposed verisimilitude but draw attention to the manufactured nature of reality. Brilliant in one scene and wooden in the next, Breillat’s novice actors have us ping-ponging between identification and disavowal, sympathy and repugnance. Their artlessness heightens the rigidity of the heterosexual coupling, which turns out to be as contrived as a film set. For Romance (1999), Breillat cast the Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi opposite Caroline Ducey, in only her fourth role. Siffredi is painfully vulnerable, his self-consciousness softening his He-Man looks and bearing. As the lover of Ducey’s Marie, a schoolteacher whose neurasthenic boyfriend no longer wants to sleep with her, Siffredi is a broken toyboy. His body seems cut and pasted into the film from another universe, a brass planet orbiting Ducey’s pale star.

Romance is Breillat’s most controversial film. It is also the best example of her distinctive style, which critics have tended to treat as secondary to the provocations of her subject matter. Several sex acts in the film are unsimulated. At the ten-minute mark, Marie starts giving her boyfriend a handjob that turns into fruitless and demoralising fellatio; not twenty minutes later, she and Siffredi’s Paolo are talking about penises (how ugly they are, how ‘most men’s look like dogs’) as he masturbates in front of her; at one point the headmaster of the school where Marie teaches ties her up, cuts a hole in her underwear and sticks his fingers inside. According to Breillat, Siffredi claimed that he went ‘all the way’ with Ducey while the cameras were rolling – something Ducey denies. Ducey has also said that another actor performed cunnilingus on her without consent while shooting a sex scene, and that none of the crew members noticed or tried to intervene.

In a book-length interview with the film critic Murielle Joudet, published in English last year by Semiotext(e), Breillat reveals that she originally asked Jean-Luc Godard to play the sadistic headmaster. Godard refused, citing François Truffaut to argue that ‘you can’t film actual acts and still call it cinema.’ This, Breillat says, is ‘low self-esteem’ talking. ‘Why is it that when I film two people having tea, that’s cinema, but if I film a sexual act, then the shot can only be pornographically vulgar?’ ‘My gaze as a filmmaker,’ she insists, ‘transfigures all of it.’ Elsewhere in her conversation with Joudet, Breillat explains that she made Romance in order to analyse the differences between pornography and cinema. When you’re filming the ‘same thing as porn’, what difference does the auteur’s eye make?

I wonder if Breillat knows that her films can be found on sites like TNAFlix (the ‘T’ and ‘A’ stand for ‘tits’ and ‘ass’), which is where I was able to watch Romance after searching streaming services in vain. Something tells me she wouldn’t be pleased. And yet, by far her most effective and original strategy as a filmmaker is her appropriation of porn’s visual language. If her movies have no ‘degrading displays of slimy flesh’ or images of penetration in which a penis ‘goes in and out, like the needle of a sewing machine’, what they do have is a highly stylised idiom that borrows freely from the formal conventions of adult films. They largely avoid the sentimental demand to align the audience with a character’s subjective point of view, and explore with calculated detachment themes mainstream cinema won’t touch.

The visual language of classical narrative cinema is heavily invested in convincing the audience that the characters on screen have meaningful interior lives. The plan subjectif, or subjective shot, collapses the gaze of the camera into the gaze of a character. (Textbook examples would be the 1901 French film Par le trou de la serrure, in which the camera adopts the perspective of a hotel valet peering through keyholes into guests’ rooms, and Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, from 1946, filmed entirely as if from the point of view of detective Philip Marlowe.) Similarly, the editing technique of shot/reverse shot – the camera shows an actor’s face, then what he is looking at, then the actor’s face again – forces a perspectival alignment between audience, camera and character.

This grammar is so familiar to us that we take its rhetorical properties for granted. Like the plan subjectif, the shot/reverse shot emphasises the individual nature of visual perception. Because it is so often used to film dialogue, it dramatises the difficulty of communication: the actors may be talking to each other, but they remain in separate frames. To paraphrase the film theorist Noël Burch, shot/reverse shot might be called the paradigmatic gesture of a medium which began as a ‘presentational’ genre, with its roots in vaudeville and the circus, and morphed into an art form determined by the ‘literary and bourgeois’ conventions of psychological realism. Shots where a character’s whole body can be seen in its surroundings are replaced by close-ups; the language of public action is subordinated to the language of private feeling.

Pornography belongs to an older era of filmmaking. It is entirely uninterested in the mental lives of its characters, who are less people than props. It doesn’t bother with shot/reverse shot because the exchange of sentiments is not relevant to the pornographic narrative; its close-ups are genital, not facial, and while there is an entire subgenre of porn devoted to point-of-view camerawork, its effect is to generalise perspective (‘you too could be here’) rather than to emphasise its subjective properties. There are lots of ways to explain the formal properties of porn, but one reason it rejects the psychologising manoeuvres of classical cinema is that it has no need to establish consent, and thus no incentive to suggest that its characters have interior mental states.

Watch​ enough of Breillat’s films and you’ll start to notice something: they, too, do away with the psychological syntax of mainstream movies. Her camera favours full and medium shots, so that you can see her actors’ bodies moving around the set. When there are close-ups, they are staged like portraits, with the actor’s shoulders and chest filling the bottom of the screen. Often the actor’s face, rather than floating isolated in space, is set against a background of other people’s bodies. In one scene from Bluebeard, a girl with vibrant red hair dances on the grass with a group of finely dressed courtiers. The camera moves in and around their bodies, occasionally pausing on the girl’s face as disembodied legs and bodices appear behind her. When Breillat films conversations, she prefers to position two people in the same frame or to have one person listening and responding to a voice from off-camera. You never get the sense that her characters are divulging their private selves to one another. There is plenty of emotion in these films but it is strangely dislodged and atmospheric, floating free of any one character or plotline.

This is a cinema of non-disclosure, where the mental lives of characters are treated as impossibly opaque, leaving their bodies to do the talking. Even though Ducey’s Marie appears in every scene of Romance, she remains an inscrutable figure, the extreme pallor of her face suggesting a mask or a veil. When she’s having sex with Siffredi or other men, the camera keeps its distance and shows the actors’ bodies in full. The adornments of a conventional love scene are nowhere to be found. There is no music, no one gazes into another’s eyes, and the camera never cuts tastefully away from what it came to film.

Breillat treats sex as a process of exteriorisation in which the self is turned inside out or reduced to a purely surface phenomenon. Her characters have no unconscious drives. They say what they mean and are impervious to any attempts to psychoanalyse their behaviour. These aren’t characters we understand or with whom we identify. They are like dolls or machines, which is what makes it shocking when they decide, usually without warning, that they don’t want to have sex at all, or, in the next breath, that they do.

In 36 fillette, 14-year-old Lili, on holiday with her family in Biarritz, meets Maurice, a man in his forties who is at first dismissive of her, then intrigued. They end up in his hotel room. The scene that follows lasts almost fifteen minutes. Lili and Maurice sit on the couch and talk. He is indulgent and irritable. She is seductive and peevish. ‘You’re too old,’ she tells him as she lies down. ‘You make me sick.’ She submits passively to his overtures but then seems to change her mind and sits up. Then she lies back down. Maurice puts his hand down her pants. He informs her that he can tell she’s aroused, so that even if she screams or struggles, he won’t stop. She pushes him away. ‘I said I don’t want to,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that enough?’ Maurice taps her head. ‘There, you don’t want it, but there’ – he rubs between her legs – ‘you’re dripping with desire.’ ‘Wanna cut me in half?’ she asks.

In this scene Breillat shows something you don’t see every day: a girl who is not raped, a man who wants to do something bad and doesn’t. The movie never downplays or excuses sexual violence, but Breillat refuses to be pedantic. Her Lili is not an angel but a creature of whims. Her desires are incoherent and changeable. The film suggests that it is her right to flirt, seduce, take risks, push buttons and boundaries, say yes and no, for Maurice, in the end, does something that ought to be ordinary: he backs off. The movie ends with Lili losing her virginity to a nerdy young man her own age (‘You love me?’ he asks eagerly. ‘Asshole,’ she replies). In the last frame, she stares at the camera for a sullen beat or two, then breaks into a grin. Again, the camera keeps its distance. Lili is not in close-up here, but standing to one side of the frame, behind a birdcage that occupies the foreground. Impulsive in the way of all teenagers, she is a riposte to the moral logic that would ask us to understand her before we can take her at her word.

In 36 fillette Breillat expands the moment between innocence and experience, delaying and then finally averting the catastrophe of rape that seems, at many points during the film, to be inevitable. It is, you might say, anti-traumatic, both in the sense that it refuses to subject its heroine to irreversible damage and in the sense that it seems not to believe, exactly, in the idea that frightening or painful events stay with us for ever. In her conversation with Joudet, Breillat is impatient with the received wisdom that girls who have been raped are ‘ruined, traumatised for life’. ‘Rape in itself doesn’t change you,’ she says:

What changes you is the ruthless injunction ordering a victim to behave as an emblematic victim. We have to be able to dissociate the fact that while for me, the victim, it’s better to get up and consider it as nothing, for the rapist it’s still a crime – that’s a fundamental distinction. If it means nothing to me, it’s because I’ve managed to pull myself out of the feminine condition that I’ve been stuffed into like a sack, like when they drown stray cats and mice.

This is both stirring and maddening, as are many of Breillat’s pronouncements on sexual violence. When Joudet asks her about Maria Schneider’s claim that Bertolucci and Brando colluded to assault her on camera during the infamous anal-sex scene in Last Tango in Paris – the one where Brando growls ‘get the butter’ – she is incredulous. Nothing happened on set, Breillat maintains, but once the film came out, Schneider was mocked in the press and by the public, who ‘thought they were allowed to openly laugh at her’. ‘People would routinely place a stick of butter in front of her on the table in restaurants,’ Breillat says. ‘That’s what destroyed her. Not the making of the film.’

In 2024 Ducey appeared on the front page of Libération next to the headline ‘La réalisation d’un viol’ (‘Directing a rape’). The article describes Ducey’s claim that an actor in Romance stuck his tongue inside her vagina without her consent. In her memoir, La Prédation (nom féminin), Ducey writes that as a young, unknown actress she felt that she couldn’t speak up, but that during the second take she grabbed the man by the throat, preventing him from doing it again. Ducey blames Breillat for the episode, which Breillat denies ever took place. ‘I was right there, with the assistant monitor operator, the script supervisor and my first assistant. We all had headsets, we didn’t miss a single word that Caroline said: it would have been impossible for a rape to take place under those conditions without the active complicity of all those people.’ She admits that the actor in question, a non-professional who had been hired only the day before, was a bad seed, and that she ‘unceremoniously’ threw him off the set after the scene was finished. Breillat’s first assistant director remembers Breillat saying something along the lines of: ‘We’re stopping. That idiot of an actor is incapable of doing the scene without hurting Caroline.’ Where Ducey and Breillat agree is that it wasn’t always clear from the script which scenes were meant to be simulated and which were meant to be for real.

That was 27 years ago. Today, a movie like Romance probably couldn’t be made without intimacy co-ordinators – or, in Breillat’s words, those ‘little ayatollahs who surf the waves of our current puritanism’. From her perspective, the people who sent sticks of butter to Schneider’s table and the people who want love scenes scripted down to the last eyelash flutter represent two sides of the same coin. They all think sex is dirty and disgusting, something to which no virtuous woman would subject herself and from which she must be protected. This seems right. But it would be more convincing if Breillat were willing to accept the lesson that her own films teach: that the interior lives of others may be opaque to us, but that doesn’t mean we should treat them as fabrications or fantasies.

In 2023 Breillat released Last Summer, the story of a middle-aged lawyer who has an affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo. When the boy tells his father about the affair, the woman denies it and his father doesn’t believe him. Breillat sees the movie in the same terms as 36 fillette: it’s about an adolescent who comes too close to an adult and gets burned, though not ruinously so. ‘Théo experiences his first heartbreak,’ she shrugs, ‘that’s all.’ But if you consider that the heart of the film is not the stepmother’s rejection of her lover, but rather the father’s refusal to believe his child, its meaning changes. This is not an erotic betrayal but a moral one. It is hyperbolic in its cruelty, and there is nothing complicated about it. When a director is so alert to ambiguity, and to the inscrutability of others, it is the most glaring violations that get caught in her blind spot.