A ma soeur!
Speaking of her work where there are numerous scenes of problematic seductions, rapes and ambivalent desires, Catherine Breillat says: “Many journalists said to me, a rape, a violent rape, is a crime. Therefore it is of course normal that the scenes would be censored, either cut from the film or the film forbidden. I say, no, it’s fiction; everybody says that women have a fantasme of rape. You can have the fantasy, you can want to be raped in your fantasies, but the reality is a crime. The crime is not a fiction, it’s a reality, not a thought—fiction and reality is not the same thing.” (Senses of Cinema) In A ma soeur! there is a problematic seduction, a terrible rape and ambivalent desire, and some might wonder if Breillat is much of a feminist filmmaker if she shows women subjugated and even potentially supporting their subjugation. At the end of the film, the thirteen-year plump Anais is raped by the man who has just killed her mother and sister, Elena. The police question her and note that Anais says the man didn’t rape her as she then offers, before turning towards the murderer and rapist, “don’t believe me if you don’t want to.” The film then freeze-frames in an odd homage to that most famous of fixed-frame endings, Truffaut’s 400 Hundred Blows, again about a teenager.
What are we to make of this ending, and do we need to read it through an entangled combination of alternative cinema, transgressive philosophy and the problem of the male gaze? First things last, and let’s start with that male gaze. In her now famous examination of the way Hollywood generates a male-oriented look in film, 'Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema', Laura Mulvey says: “The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.”
Catherine Breillat has been seen over many years as a director countering the male gaze by training her camera eye on scenes that in another director’s work might be brief, and tries in the extended take to extract from the image a new look that wouldn’t simply be the antithesis of the male assumption. It isn’t enough for example to have a reversal of expectation because while it would be true that the woman is no longer the victim, the gaze would still be masculine — only the identities have altered. For example, when a woman gets the better of a man in an action sequence, this might not be progress but just a different type of regression as the principles of the action scene remain the same, only the genders have changed. Whether it is Pam Grier taking out a couple of redneck nasties in Foxy Brown, or Cameron Diaz decking Crispin Glover with a flying kick in Charlie’s Angels, these are all very well for kickass contrarianism as women get revenge. Yet this was hardly what Mulvey had in mind when she said: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” ('Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema') In Foxy Brown and Charlie’s Angels, the women are no longer the passive objects of the gaze but they have become very modestly subjects of the action. The look hasn’t been radically reconfigured, only representatively tweaked. A woman does what a man does but this isn’t especially about a woman; it is frequently about an underdog. She defies the viewer’s expectations, certainly, but doesn’t gain much by way of subjectivity, or by access to the look.
What might, wouldn't be greater power but greater ambivalence, to force the viewer to reflect on some of the characters’ doubts rather than their certitudes and show it reflected in the camera’s approach. In our examples above we are in no doubt over the heroines’ objectives but it also means we don’t need to access any more complex thoughts. In many scenes from Breillat’s work, this is precisely what we need to do even if the characters might seem far more passive than the numerous assertive women to be found in action films during the same period. In Virgin, Perfect Love, Romance, A Ma Soeur! and others, Breillat often attends to love and its difficulties, disappointments and also its abuses. She wishes to give femininity less the authority of a man than the integrity of a woman: to look at the complexity of a woman’s mind. When speaking of Freud, Breillat says, “his analysis of women was very naive: women at that time had so little power it was natural they would have a desire to be a man. That wasn’t penis envy, it was envy for the rights men had.” (Sight and Sound)
Many action films’ approach to women’s physical prowess in numerous modern movies can be contrasted with classic Hollywood as we see the modern works insistently reflecting penis envy over a broader feminine purpose. The women in action films act like men; they prove the equal of them and yet often without the humour and self-interrogation to be found in that great classic Hollywood director of women adapting to homosocial environments: Howard Hawks and films including His Girl Friday, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, Rio Bravo. “Women dismiss motherhood in favour of adventure. Threaded throughout is a recurring trope of enduring debate – the female lead known as the ‘Hawksian woman,’ Ruby McGuigan says. “She is worldly and forthright, daring us to keep up in a rapid war of affectionate insults and double entendre. Infiltrating Hawks’ world of macho camaraderie with ease.” (bfi) They are often women who have the measure of men, which isn’t quite the same as resembling them. This isn’t penis envy; it is a negotiating intelligence well aware that they are not trying to be men as brute force but women using intuition, wiles and wit to assert themselves. In films reducing men to punchbags, this doesn’t make the women any more in control of their world; they are just mimicking violence men have been perpetrating for thousands of years. Nothing in the images impacts on the male gaze.
But what sort of images do? This is where work by Barbara Loden, Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Angela Shanelac, Alice Rorwacher and Lucrecia Martel can be examined for the way they take a quizzical approach to what they show us, making us wonder what behaviour happens to be as behaviour and not as gender stereotyping or facile reversal. It can make the films problematic because the women appear much weaker than in more conventional works, but the directors are asking, through the camera, questions that have been too assertively answered in mainstream cinema and which allows the form to remain the same. In these other works, like, Akerman’s Jeanne Dielma, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruzelles, it might be the domestic obligations the central character feels obliged to fulfil; in Wanda, the passivity of a character looking for affection and who will accept it from a man who insults her; in The Headless Woman, a dentist who allows the men around her to dictate her life. In Breillat’s work, it is often how the women resist or accept the advances of men who fall into ridiculously and yet predatorily predictable roles as they determine to have sex with women. Breillat insists on filming such scenes with a gaze that is both ineluctable and terrifying, with the viewer placed in a position that forces one to wonder over the ethics of the behaviour rather than anticipate an intervention in the diegesis. In two key sequences in A ma Soeur!, we watch as Anais’s older sister Elena is coerced into sexual activity by a boy several years older. What Breillat demands is that the scene isn’t a hyperbolised account of abuse, but a sober examination of ambivalent desire. Anais is attracted to this young man but knows too that she isn’t sure how she feels about the nature of that attraction and how far she wishes to take it.
Now often the two most common ways a film will show the sexual act, one that is not categorically desire, is through the abusive or the comedic: antithetical positions of course but that needn’t ask us to muse over the nature of the gaze. In Lipstick, I Spit on Your Grave, The Accused, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the approach is unequivocal. The women are abused by men and the viewer is firmly on the side of the victim: the more exploitative the film, the more likely that will involve the women getting personal revenge. The second is where usually male characters determine to get to first, second or third base, trying to alleviate their frustrations with a young woman whose purpose is to resist those advances as best they can. We might look back on a scene in Diner as rather less comedic than it thinks it is, with Mickey Rourke fast-forwarding to third base by putting a hole into a carton: his girlfriend finds there isn’t only popcorn in it. It was a variation on an early eighties comedy trope: men finding ingenious ways to get women to put out, often in films set in the fifties to play up the prudish against the prurient: Porky’s the most famous example, but 1979’s Animal House probably starting the wave.
But whether the films are presenting sex so terrifyingly that it becomes the subject of a horror or thriller, or so lightly it fits into the comedic genre, neither is asking questions about the content or insisting on challenges in the form. By making the sex scenes so uncomfortable it can often prove more difficult for the viewer to watch than if the scenes are disturbing. This might sound paradoxical but finds it its rationale in equivocation: in the difficulty the viewer has in knowing how to react. Nobody is in any doubt that the abuse the central character in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo receives is appalling but it leaves us assured in where we stand in relation to it. Breillat insists on saying that Elena is attracted to the young man and desires him. But she is only fifteen (nevertheless, the age of consent in France), Anais is in the same room, and Elena hardly knows this person who is holidaying at the same place as the sisters. Breillat wants us to see abuse but to see also the intricacy of one’s response to a suitor who is both flattering and exploitative.
Though Simone de Bouvier’s essay on Brigitte Bardot is mentioned in the film as the girls watch a programme on TV, Breillat’s influences are as much erotic, even pornographic, as feminist, a sort of philosophy of the perverse. She in the French tradition of Sade, Lautreamont, Bataille. Klossowski: writers who seek from the sexual the psychological, and to show that words with often a clear moral and social underpinning can be upset: words like abuse, power, desire and pleasure, good and evil. “I make moral films…But mine is a rather ambiguous, Dostoyevskian morality", Breillat says. "I believe that human beings are forever torn between their worst and best impulses. And nothing represents that better than sex - what is most trivial, most obscene, most debased and most beautiful in human beings.” (New York Times) What she does with the sort of gaze Mulvey wished to initiate isn’t offer an assertively feminist cinema of power which often does nothing to the gaze itself — as we have noted, and evident in any number of commercial films playing up women’s fighting prowess (Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider, The Long Kiss Goodnight, T2 and so on). Breillat wishes to make the gaze not more assertive but less so, demanding from the viewer a perceptual uncertainty that leaves us asking more questions than answers; as if the camera needn’t be there polemically to affirm a set of values but can be there to disturb those very values. The gaze Breillat and others propose needn’t be one countering just male power; it needs also to question the presuppositions that allow power to reside in certain places. A film that showed the sisters rising up against male oppression would be all very well, but it wouldn’t make for the uncomfortable viewing Breillat demands, where the viewer is expected to examine their own values rather than allow a film prosthetically to propose a system they are expected to accept.
When at the end of the film, Anais is unequivocally raped as Elena has been equivocally abused, we may be left wondering if Anais’s is the lesser of two evils, if we accept the film’s premise offered by Anais at the beginning: that the first time should be with a nobody; that love should have nothing to do with losing one’s virginity. It is a contentious claim made all the more so by how the film unravels. Yet Breillat offers it as the most awkward of hypotheses. She does so within a film that has an indeterminate setting. There is the black and white TV; cars that suggest anything from the 50 to the 90s; clothing likewise and a car journey that indicates a far greater distance than geography would dictate: the location is La Rochelle, only about a six-hour drive away from Paris. Such details may indicate the whole film is a fantasy, of the most perverse sort, even if the viewer is left with the reality of gender problems that won’t so easily be dreamt away
© Tony McKibbin