Embracing Sexual Difference in Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (2003)

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Catherine Breillat has lent her name to a form of cinema in Europe that deals with the contemporary issue of woman's quest for sexual identity. I will claim that Anatomie de l'Enfer shares some similarities with her previous film(s) but also departs from them/it. This departure is what will particularly interest me in this study. Anatomy of Hell revolves around a woman who pays a gay man "to watch her where she is unwatchable." While he contemplates her most intimate self, she is mainly asleep, relegated to a passive position. This active/passive split corresponding to a sexual division between man and woman, brings to mind Mulvey's feminist film theory. Through a detailed analysis of the film's major scenes, I propose to address the above issue. In this article I offer a critical discussion centering on the innovation in the cinematic representation of sexual explicitness of a woman's most intimate interiority. This article looks at Anatomy of Hell as a prominent and symbolic film among Breillat's corpus in the sense that, as I aim to argue, it offers an (inter)relationship or an exchange between the sexes. A consideration of the extent of the film's political impact will lead in the conclusion of this study to express an appreciation of Breillat's influence in contemporary European filmmaking.