Past Screenings + Seminars:
The Lifetime Series:
A Catherine Breillat Retrospective
October 6 + 7, 2001
Program Introduction
Back to index of past screenings +
seminars
Saturday, October 6
2:00 p.m.
A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH CATHERINE BREILLAT
ROMANCE
1999, 88 mins. With Caroline Ducey. Breillat received worldwide attention
with this sexually explicit fable of a young woman whose withholding lover
drives her into infidelity and self-discovery. This film flirts with the
style and substance of pornography and shows how words and images can
obscure as much as they reveal.
Free with Museum admission.
4:30 p.m.
A REAL YOUNG GIRL
1976, 92 mins. Breillat's first film, from her novel Le Souperail, was
shelved thanks to France's "X Law" and not released until 2000. A teenaged
girl on summer vacation in rural France plunges into a contemplative world
of sexual self-exploration.
6:30 p.m.
TAPAGE NOCTURNE
1979, 94 mins. With Joe Dallesandro. A startling experiment in shifting
moods, Tapage depicts a film director's roller-coaster affair that careens
out of her control. This major film is the fullest expression of the dialectic
between gaiety and gravity in Breillat's work.
Sunday, October 7
2:00 p.m.
36 FILLETTE
1987, 88 mins. With Jean-Pierre Leaud. Breillat's first film to receive
U.S. distribution is an exciting pas de deux between a headstrong fourteen-year-old
and the aging Romeo whom she fascinates.
4:00 p.m.
DIRTY LIKE AN ANGEL
1991, 105 mins. "I want to tell a story about people who don't love each
other. They desire each other, and that desire is born of betrayal, shame,
and remorse." Breillat enters the policier genre with this story of the
affair between a 50-year-old detective and the young wife of his partner.
6:30 p.m.
PERFECT
LOVE!
1996, 113 mins. This unnerving, brilliant work, based on a real-life crime
of passion, depicts the troubled romance between a twice-married surgeon
and a younger man. Preceded by AUX NICOIS QUI MAL Y PENSENT (1995,
22 mins). This short was made for the anthology film A PROPOS DE NICE,
LA SUITE.
Past
Screenings + Seminars
The Lifetime Series:
A Catherine Breillat Retrospective
October 6 + 7, 2001
Program Introduction
Back to index of past screenings
+ seminars
With
the recent U.S. releases of her sixth feature, Romance, and her 1976 debut
A Real Young Girl, Catherine Breillat earned notoriety as a controversial
filmmaker who tests the boundary between art films and pornography. Between
these bookends lie a series of extraordinary films, virtually unknown
in this country, that establish Breillat's place, along with Maurice Pialat
and Jean Eustache, as one of the greatest post-New Wave French directors.
Her films are not comfortable for
audiences seeking clean lines of identification. Breillat loves and admires
her sexual combatants, but also shows their cruelty, their fraudulence,
and their animosity toward the opposite sex. This freedom of characterization
combines with Breillat's observational powers to create a remarkable sense
of realism: No truth is censored to preserve a character's dignity or
stature.
Men and women in Breillat's films
are tender enemies, equally powerful, instinctively wary of one another.
Their sex is full of hesitations, frustrations, longeurs; Breillat likes
to use jump cuts to increase the sense of ennui rather than to remove
the dull bits. Though she spares her characters nothing, Breillat the
director inhabits a separate metaphysical plane, where she finds a kind
of joy in a war fought well; at unexpected moments, her charcters join
her on that plane and the tone of her films shifts from despair into exuberance.
This retrospective coincides with
the release of Breillat's eagerly awaited Fat Girl, which is premiering
at the New York Film Festival.
This series is made possible in part by a generous gift from Lifetime
Television.
Special thanks to Cowboy Booking, Empire Films, FPI (Paris), and Margo
Films.
