A.k.a. Anatomie de L’Enfer
D/S: Catherine Breillat. P: Jean-François Lepetit. Cast: Amira Cesar, Rocco Siffredi. UK dist (DVD): Tartan.
No discussion of deliriously bad cinema can be complete without mention of the jaw-dropping, irony-free-zone that is Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell, a gender battleground as hard-hitting and uncompromising as Edward D. Wood’s Glen or Glenda. This is a film whose artlessly-articulated, shamelessly self-pitying message might best be summarised as “I Am Woman: Woe Is Me!”
Suicidal Woman (model-slash-actress Amira Cesar) picks up misogynist Man (porn star and frequent Breillat collaborator Rocco Siffredi) in a gay nightclub [Breillat: “It’s not a gay nightclub; I prefer to think of it as a place where men desire only other men”] and proposes a bizarre contract: she will pay him to observe her for three nights at her home, “watching her where she is unwatchable”, transforming her nude body into an object of scientific study to explore the reasons for the Male’s inherent disgust for the Female. With hilarious consequences.
Adapted from the director’s own novel “Pornocracy” (a term coined by the ancient Greeks to bemoan the pollution of the political sphere by women), Anatomy of Hell is a virulent harangue against the male sex for its undisguised loathing of the female anatomy. Fertile ground, then, for pseudo-intellectual pontification, so woefully wrong-headed it’s a constant delight. Contrary to expectations, Breillat denies the film is a feminist tract – going so far as to denounce such a reading, in an interview included in the DVD supplements, as “idiotic”. (I haven’t seen a French filmmaker get so disproportionately peeved since an unwary interviewer described Jacques Rivette’s Histoire de Marie et Julien to its director as a “ghost story”. How many times, you fool – they’re revenants, not ghosts!) The reasons for her aversion to the feminist label are opaque, though one may speculate. The term is too limiting, perhaps, to describe such a work; for a film this bold surely transcends such narrow allegiances. Breillat (it says here) is an artist, a provocateuse, a visionary, not some ranting leftie on a soap-box – and woe betide any fool who thinks otherwise.
This is the stuff of great comedy, were the director only aware of it. Mention of Glen or Glenda in this context is not entirely facetious: similarities with what was previously considered to be the inimitable Ed Wood style abound (even if Breillat lacks, by and large, Wood’s dotty charm). Breillat shares Wood’s fondness for the most convoluted brand of nonsense-poetry dialogue and crackpot didacticism (“You men of Earth are stupid! stupid! stupid!”), and the pair demonstrate a sublime and distinctive lack of self-awareness which sets them both apart as clueless eccentrics in the classic mould. Breillat even mounts a graphic visual homage to Glenda’s “Pull the string! Pull the string!” monologue (so memorably delivered by Lugosi), literalising the image in the infamous tampon-removal scene (which culminates, superbly, in the mutual imbibing of a menstrual cocktail).
Ah, but to laugh at Anatomy of Hell is to admit that Breillat’s right after all – this is laughter in the dark, a transparent attempt to defuse the sputtering bomb of truth which fearless Cathy has hurled into the cultural arena. You only giggle because you’re terrified of what she has to say, do you hear, terrified to death! There’s a paranoid quality to Breillat’s logic that outdoes even Marx’s notion of false consciousness: if you disagree with me, it’s because social conditioning blinds you to the truth of what I’m saying, therefore your very disagreement only serves to confirm that I’m right and you’re wrong. QED: it’s bulletproof. Incredibly, Breillat admits only to a single instance of flirting with the absurd: that unforgettable moment when Siffredi returns from a nocturnal wander around the Woman’s garden with a sizeable pitchfork, which he then proceeds to insert, handle-first, into her vagina while she sleeps, leaving it protruding from her derrière like a javelin. The scene is absurd, right enough, but by no means uniquely so.
The film cannot, in all honesty, be condemned on all counts; it’s nicely shot, and the deliberately-mannered mise-en-scène occasionally aspires to the stylised eroticism of Alicia Reyes or Georges Bataille. For all its wilful provocation, it’s a tough film to hate; it’s just too silly to inspire an emotion of such intensity. The dogged fanaticism of Catherine Breillat’s doctrine, with its blindly reductive mantra – all-men-are-really-homosexual-woman-haters-who-crumble-in-the-face-of-female-sexuality– will strike many as daft beyond words, and her attempts to liberate the “unwatchable” aspects of female life, while legitimate in their intent, simply emerge as childish exhibitionism. The viewer is ultimately left not with the sense of a great truth revealed, but with the feeling of having witnessed a hardcore restaging of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”.