What Women Want, per Catherine Breillat

Lori Marso reviews Catherine Breillat’s film “Last Summer” in the context of the director’s body of work, as well as alongside the recent Miranda July novel, “All Fours.”

By Lori MarsoJuly 19, 2024

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

“BE QUIET” is the last line uttered in Catherine Breillat’s film Last Summer (2023). Anne (Léa Drucker), a fortysomething French professional with adopted daughters and an enviable life, is about to confess to her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) that she has been having an affair with her wayward 17-year-old stepson Théo (Samuel Kircher). Pierre stops her with his command. He knows, better than she does, that the family unit cannot bear this truth—the truth of Anne’s desire and where it has led her. It, they, will surely break under the burden.

As a preface to Last Summer, this June, New York’s Film at Lincoln Center assembled a retrospective of 13 Breillat features, aptly titled “Carnal Knowledge.” Seeing these films on the big screen, one after the other, was for me a reminder and confirmation that although women are too often brutalized by heterosexual sex under patriarchy, desire remains. No director understands this better than Catherine Breillat.

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Cultural representations of what heterosexual sex is like for women tend to veer between visions of sex going right and sex going wrong. There is almost always a happy ending in the novels of romance and romantasy (romance plus fantasy), and cinema rom-coms. There is too often a sad ending, when litigating what “he said” versus what “she said,” when sex goes wrong.

In both the sex-gone-right and sex-gone-wrong scenarios, collective feelings are summoned. Audiences of contemporary, mass-market female desire narratives swoon together over hot men, empathize with the heroine’s dilemma, and submit to a Christian Grey–type figure and are accordingly rewarded with marriage. Participants and followers of #MeToo felt represented in stories of bad sex and were able to vicariously enjoy the outing of abusive and powerful men.

But neither of these forms of cultural representation or public conversation, as satisfying or important as they are, approach the question of what individual female desire looks like. The collective desire invited by romantic fantasies or revenge plots are almost too familiar. In this landscape, Breillat’s films appear like unicorns in a field of horses. They are so specific, strange, raw, and otherworldly that they almost seem to exist beyond any collective experience. Breillat’s films assume the impossibility of knowing collectively “what women want.” Instead, her films show individual women expressing their nonnormative, often disruptive, desires.

Women in Breillat’s film worlds move within expressly male-dominated spaces, fully aware of misogyny. They are eager to seek wild or dangerous sexual encounters that take them beyond zones of propriety and safety. What is most exciting about these films is that they never show women as victims, even as they are, at the same time, never in control of their own destinies.

At the end of Perfect Love (1996), for example, the younger Christophe (Francis Renaud) brutally stabs his older lover Frédérique (Isabelle Renauld). Just before he murders her, Christophe violates Frédérique with a broom handle, while she moans in pleasure or pain (we are not sure) and turns to laugh in his face. Throughout the film, Frédérique accuses her younger lover of despising women and secretly being gay (using derogatory language to heighten the insult). The violent encounter that ends the film and ends Frédérique’s life is anticipated by an opening scene in which police instruct Christophe to reenact the killing.

Perfect Love is as much a fantasy as Breillat’s Bluebeard (2009), and in both, viewers are primed to anticipate the violent death of the heroine. Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) willingly agrees to marry the Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) of Charles Perrault’s grim story, a man known to have killed all his previous wives. Is “willingly” the right adverb? In this film, like all her others, Breillat shows us the complications and constraints on women’s agency. Marie-Catherine tells her older sister that she wants to be rich, and that at the same time, she has no choice. Their father has died, leaving them without dowries or any future beyond grueling, rural poverty. But Marie-Catherine’s wit, curiosity, and willingness to flatter and deceive put her on top, and it is Bluebeard’s head that ends up on a platter.

Dark, funny, plucky, willful, and receptive to the dark continent of their own desires, Breillat’s heroines have neither a strong moral compass nor a reliably feminist worldview.

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Bloody tampons, the wet vagina and its sticky substances, a baby’s head crowning in the live birth near the end of the X-rated Romance (1999); the deformed hand, drooping mouth, and dragging left leg of the brilliant Isabelle Huppert in Abuse of Weakness (2013)—these images, alongside scripts that highlight how these images circulate and determine women’s worth and desirability, are unusual or verboten in conventional cinema, but are Breillat’s lingua franca.

There is also a lot of explicit talk about who will do exactly what and to whom. The central 25-minute durational scene in À ma soeur! (Fat Girl, 2001) occurs between 15-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and her Italian suitor, a university student on vacation in France (Libero De Rienzo as Fernando). Elena’s 12-year-old little sister Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux, the fat girl of the title) listens and watches (through her fingers) from her single bed in the same room. Fernando deftly employs the language of romance, the well-worn narrative not only familiar but also precious for some young girls. It holds no sway over the younger but wiser sister. In the opening of the film, Anaïs confesses to her sister that she wants to lose her virginity to a “nobody,” simply to be “broken in” because, after all, “guys are all sick.”

Seduced by her longing for love and connection, the romantic Elena is wooed into submission on Fernando’s terms. He promises he will come to visit her in Paris, admits that, though he has had loads of girls, never was there one like her, and pretends to accept the verdict when Elena says she won’t sleep with him on their first date. He brags to her about his own refusal of girls who have wanted him, as he insists to Elena that the two of them must consecrate their love through sex. During the long conversation in the bedroom, Fernando says, “If you love me the way I love you,” and “if you were kind […] all the girls take it the back way.” Elena “agrees” to the anal sex that Fernando insists both “doesn’t count” and is a “proof of love.” During the act, Elena continues to plead, “I said I don’t want to!” and “I can’t!” She wants sex, but not this kind of sex.

A young girl’s desire for, and perspective on, sex—its significance and the potential overlap between pleasure and danger—is the subject of several of Breillat’s films. Her first feature, Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl, 1975), enacts an adolescent’s fantasies of violation and perverse sexual pleasures—earthworms and spoons make their home in Alice’s (Charlotte Alexandra) vagina, her bare female genitals rub against her bike seat, she waddles around with her panties bunched about her ankles. Completed in 1975, A Real Young Girl was censored and not released until 2000. Breillat’s 36 fillette (1988) features a prickly and sullen 14-year-old, Lili (Delphine Zentout), looking to lose her virginity on her family vacation. She gets entangled with an aging, misogynist playboy and avoids getting raped, but, in turn, exercises her own sexual prowess to lose her virginity in a passionless, economical encounter with a redheaded Camus reader whose sexual advances she earlier rejected, partly out of disappointment that sex was all he seemed to want from her. 

Never preachy or ideological, always a provocateur, Breillat seems to be winking at viewers, letting us in on a joke. By us, I mean the woman-identifying viewers in her audience, and by joke, I mean the uncomfortable laughter of recognition. These images, combined with the scripted conversations, play upon and release our collective cringe and shame about how women’s bodies are seen and judged, and the kinds of patriarchal abuse women must endure that some come to embrace. If we tell these women they don’t or can’t want what they clearly want, are we part of the problem?

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Anne of Last Summer is an older, wiser, accomplished woman who oozes success, but, like Breillat’s younger heroines, Anne also has trouble understanding her confounding feelings of desire. When she is in proximity to Théo, her body pulses with sexual energy. Basking in young and beautiful Théo’s attention, Anne flirts, smiles, laughs, confides, and arches her neck in orgasmic pleasure. She pleads to Théo to keep their secret and says repeatedly that their sexual encounters must stop. But she cannot, will not, does not, stop.

What kind of woman has sex with her underage stepson? Maybe the same kind of woman at the center of Miranda July’s new novel, All Fours. In her latest novel, July, a novelist and filmmaker (like Breillat), creates a vaguely autobiographical heroine (also like Breillat). This unnamed character—a well-known artist, approaching middle age—leaves her settled and peaceful home, her decent husband, and her cherished young child who uses they/them pronouns, and embarks on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. But just 30 minutes outside L.A., she checks herself into a motel room, fully renovates it with artistic and financial abandon, and spends more than two weeks inside the room courting and obsessing over a much younger man named Davey, whom she lustfully noticed at a gas station.

In July’s novel, written in first person, we get immediate access to the inner thoughts of our main character. July’s unnamed heroine humorously ponders previous decisions that have landed her at this dead-end feeling in her life, her slipping desirability status, the tightening constraints of female middle age (she is perimenopausal and worries about her decreasing libido) as she self-consciously recounts the way she dances in a group scene:

I moved discreetly at first, getting my bearings, then the beat took hold and I let my vision blur. I fucked the air. All my limbs were in motion, making shapes that felt brand-new. My skirt was tight, my top was sheer, my heels were high. The people around me were nodding and smiling; I couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed for me or actually impressed. The host’s father looked me up and down and winked—he was in his eighties. Was that how old a person had to be to think I was hot these days?

Sex with her age-appropriate spouse feels stagnant. She admits to a friend that to get off, she has to be “completely inside the movie in [her] head.” The narrator writes, “It’s like I have a screen clamped in front of my face. […] I’m a gross stepfather getting a blow job from my nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, or I’m the stepdaughter, getting tucked in. Or I’m flipping back and forth between them.”

Though July tells and Breillat shows, a common theme in All Fours and Last Summer is the subtle exploration of the dance women must do if they’re brave enough to acknowledge their sexual desire. What is this desire anyway? How can women recognize it among all the forces that shape it: the way it is channeled into obligation or propriety; the way even its fantasy worlds are infiltrated by the male gaze; the disgust it meets when expressed or released into public, and even private, spaces; the shortened window for exercising it (medical science shows that women’s libidos wane after menopause); and the real dangers (physical, psychological, familial) of risking that expression?

Last Summer opens with a stern-looking Anne in her professional role as lawyer insistently questioning a simpering “underage” woman: “You consumed alcohol that night?” Viewers immediately know where we are, namely the murky terrain where “officials” determine what comes next when sex goes wrong.

But legal redress and the pursuit of justice are not the subjects that interest Breillat. Even though Abuse of Weakness takes a French legal term as its title, Breillat’s thinly veiled autobiographical film about her serious stroke and subsequent entanglement with and victimization by a con man she invites into her life keeps its focus on the relationship between Maud (Huppert) and Vilko (Kool Shen) rather than on the legal battle that occurred after the film’s narrative ends. The first lines of Last Summer are there to simply remind us of the material, legal stakes of sex for women. “How many boyfriends this year?” is Anne’s second line of questioning. “Less than ten? More than ten?” Soon we learn why Anne is being so cruel in her questioning: “Just be aware, the defense will try to portray you as a world-class slut, and claim you consented.”

Under the direction of a different filmmaker, Anne might look like a monster. When directly confronted, she forcefully lies to her husband about having an affair with his son, whom they took in to “help.” We see Anne working with teenagers, and we note her professional familiarity with the psyches and behaviors of underaged kids coaxed or coerced into sex. In encounters with Théo, we become aware of the advantage Anne possesses not merely in years and experience but even in physical strength. Théo is willowy and seems almost ephemeral. As they circle each other flirtatiously while swimming, Théo playfully dunks Anne. When she dunks him back, Anne holds his head underwater a beat too long.

Any filmmaker could whip up a Notes on a Scandal–adjacent morality play, but Breillat is not just any filmmaker. She opens a space for female desire, but no space whatsoever for right and wrong. As the affair blossoms, Breillat’s camera sensually lingers on scenes of bliss, beauty, and freedom not only for Anne but for Théo too. Anne escapes from a boring dinner party, abandoning her husband and his work associates to jump on Théo’s scooter and drink with him. After an idyllic outing, Anne’s hair is whipped by the wind as she and Théo share the front seat of the convertible, small daughters in the back. Théo interviews Anne about her “first time” and appears to actually listen to her answers. He pays attention and her body responds in kind.

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In May, Miranda July told the hosts of the LARB Radio Hour that she did not want to write a book about a woman who “blows up” her life. In the end, the heroine of All Fours comes back to her family, and she and her husband try to make something new:

Harris suggested we stop referring to each other as my husband/my wife and this felt okay because meanwhile the three of us were making a family coat of arms. […] Now we drew with black Sharpies on the back of an old David Bowie poster to make something that looked like a sign for queer recycling but represented our commitment to being honest with each other about who we really were, even if we thought the other people wouldn’t like it.

July’s heroine also learns something on her journey about how sexual desire is constructed by forces outside the self, taking to heart how much her internalized misogyny has made her look at older women (and herself) in disgust and self-loathing. Driving this point home, July’s heroine even enjoys a brief tryst with an older woman, coincidentally the first woman Davey, her obsession, had slept with years ago.

All Fours is funny and charming and truthful, but it also sets out to teach readers about the new spaces we might inhabit if we are willing to acknowledge and explore desire in midlife. In a not-so-subtle move, July has her heroine create an entirely new home for herself in a motel, and then transport some of the new sensations and feelings she has discovered there back into her space with her husband and child.

By contrast, and in line with Breillat’s oeuvre, Anne’s journey is not at all pedagogical. Anne wants what patriarchy and professional success have promised her (family, respect), but she wants more than that too. While July’s character seems to imagine that she can use her individual insight, growth, and agency to transform patriarchy from within, Breillat shows us that Anne remains in the same place as always. A woman’s desire is real, but it is always trapped in forces larger than the self. When Théo asks Anne about her first sexual experiences, Anne explains that she had some partners, had a hint of a “moment,” but the AIDS crisis slammed the window shut just as it was opening.

What women want remains unanswered in Breillat’s films but not unshown. When Anne finally decides that her affair is too dangerous, too much of a threat to her conventional but mostly happy and satisfied life, she cuts Théo off. Théo, however, believing himself to be in love with her, is unwilling to stop. After being kicked out of his father’s house, Théo goes to the authorities and accuses Anne of sex with a minor. Anne can buy herself out of the mess but puts herself right back in the thick of it when Théo shows up drunk one night banging at the door. She slips out into the night with him, and her body takes over. This scene is just prior to her attempt at a confession to her husband, who beckons her to “be quiet.”

But what is there to confess? Anne does not know what she wants, or feels, or thinks. The beauty of Breillat’s films is that they show, unfiltered, the wild mess of women’s desire as a desperate set of attempts to be free, to explore, and to love in a man’s world.