A few years ago, I attended an early screening of Catherine Breillat’s L’Été dernier (2023) in Paris. It had been nearly a decade since her previous feature, Abus de faiblesse (2013), the autobiographical story of a hemiplegic filmmaker played by Isabelle Huppert who succumbs to a con man. Why had it been so long, the interviewer gently probed in a subsequent discussion with Breillat and some of the cast and crew. Why return with a remake of a recent Danish film about a middle-aged lawyer’s affair with her teenage stepson? Frail from the stroke which paralysed the left side of her body in 2004, haloed by glossy, platinum-blonde hair, Breillat was both resolute and enigmatic in response. ‘You have to do things because they’re absolutely necessary. Not because you’re skilled at them’, she replied, looking out at the audience with a steely gaze.

Breillat’s uncompromising approach has produced a striking, controversial oeuvre, and made her one of France’s most notorious auteurs. Born in 1948, she grew up in a small provincial town in western France. The younger of two daughters in a medical family, Breillat claims to have decided to become a filmmaker aged twelve, after watching Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) at her school’s cinema club. As a teenager she moved to Paris with her sister, Marie-Hélène. Inspired by the example of writer-filmmakers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Romain Gary, Breillat was convinced that publishing books was a surefire path towards becoming a director; buying a notepad, she later reflected, was more ‘accessible’ than attending film school. Marie-Hélène, meanwhile, wanted to become an actress, making her debut in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) in which Catherine also has a glancing role as a dressmaker, nearly crowded out by mannequins, looking downcast.

Breillat’s first manuscript, Le Libanais, the story of a rape attempt she survived when she was fourteen, went unpublished, though decades later informed the plot of 36 Fillette (1988), her film about a teenage girl who becomes involved with a much older man she meets in a nightclub while on holiday. Her debut novel, L’Homme facile (1968), about a lothario figure and his array of ‘liquid loves’, was banned for readers younger than eighteen – meaning Breillat herself was barely old enough to read it. It was the first of many experiences of scandal and censorship. Her first film, Une vraie jeune fille (1976), was commissioned in hopes of replicating the commercial success of soft-porn drama Emmanuelle (1974). Yet Breillat’s graphic depictions of a teenage girl awakening to the chaos of her own sexuality – one scene depicts her fantasy of a man tying her down with barbed wire and placing a dismembered earthworm in her pubic hair – were ultimately deemed too extreme to avoid the taxation on X-rated films in France at the time, and its distribution was pulled. The film was eventually released in French cinemas in 2000, twenty-four years later.

Breillat’s work has often been characterized as belonging to the ‘New French Extremity’, a pejorative term also applied to Virginie Despentes, Gaspar Noé and Bruno Dumont. The split between mind and body, and how the best intentions of the former can be derailed by the desires and instincts of the latter has been her work’s inexhaustible subject – in Serge Daney’s words, the particular ‘humiliation of trying to adapt one’s brain to one’s body’. She is fascinated by what she has repeatedly portrayed as women’s desire for their own degradation, how, in the heterosexual dynamics that most interest her, repulsion and attraction spin on the same axis. Femininity, for Breillat – both its sensuality and its shame – gives rise to a ‘fundamental wound’ that cannot be healed. Her film Anatomie de l’enfer (2004) opens with a scene of a woman slashing her wrist in a nightclub toilet after she has given a fellow reveller a blowjob. Another man walks in and asks her why she is cutting herself. ‘Because I’m a woman’ she says, as the blood runs.

Breillat’s literary ancestors might be said to include Lautréamont and de Sade – writers who exposed the savage excess at the core of the human psyche, and with whom she shares an emphasis on the imperative of personal autonomy. I Believe Only in Myself, a book of interviews recently published by Semiotext(e), in a translation by Christine Pichini, is therefore aptly titled. An earlier book of interviews, Corps amoureux (2006), explored Breillat’s rise from her unremarkable, if fairly cultivated, bourgeois upbringing to cinematic fame. Billed as a ‘long-form dialogue’ with critic and journalist Murielle Joudet, I Believe Only in Myself explores in greater detail the director’s worldview, in which the ‘only passion there is to experience’ is with the self. Dominated by Breillat’s pseudo-soliloquies, the book reminded me of the tradition of the livre parlé, pioneered by Marguerite Duras’s Les Parleuses (1973), an interview of sorts with Xavière Gautier, and La Vie matérielles (1987), from which Duras excised screenwriter Jérôme Beaujour’s questions.

‘I’m intractable. I can’t not be me, even if it breaks me’, Breillat insists at one point. Her headstrong style has certainly led her into ethically fraught waters, which have at times threatened to submerge her career. Ambition for a kind of aesthetic perfection – most of her film’s scenes are intensely choreographed, composed with a painterly attention – have led to an interventionist, at times abrasive approach with actors. In 2024, the actress Caroline Ducey published a memoir titled La Prédation accusing Breillat of arranging an ‘unsimulated’ scene of cunnilingus to which Ducey had not given prior consent, on the set of her film Romance X(1999), about a schoolteacher who pursues outré encounters with strangers to escape her sexually disappointing relationship. (Breillat denies that she ‘organised’ the incident and that such an act could possibly have happened on her watch). Among the knottiest aspects of Ducey’s unsettling memoir is her difficulty in metabolising the abuse she alleges was authorised not only by a woman, but a ‘feminist icon’ to whom Ducey looked up.

Breillat has never shied away from associating her work with feminist concerns. In I Only Believe in Myself, she explains that this identification is ‘essential’ to her, that if she hadn’t been a feminist from the beginning she would have ‘hated herself’. Yet the term can be difficult to square with Breillat’s visceral scenes of women’s self-obliteration. And much like her vision of cinema, her feminism is deeply individual, suspicious of collectives and collaboration. Social reform has never been her interest, political activism never her style. ‘I organised with myself’, she deadpans to Joudet. In À ma sœur! (2001), which follows the summer exploits of two sisters, one thin and conventionally beautiful, the other overweight, she eviscerates notions of ‘sisterhood’, instead attending to the insoluble kernels of rivalry, ambivalence and competition that can contaminate even the most sacred bonds. The film ends with an explosive act of violence – a ‘surge of hatred’, as she puts it here, inspired by a lurid tabloid crime story.

Joudet challenges Breillat on the making of Romance. Pushing her for details about actors’ contracts and the coordination of certain scenes, it is one of the few sections where the critic holds her own. Though the reader emerges with a hazy grasp of what unfolded, Breillat’s responses are defiant. She refuses to concede that the film was an ‘unsupervised experiment’. Instead, she maintains that its subject was precisely the fictional and ‘mythic’ qualities that we ascribe to sex, or in her words, the ‘romantic phantasmagoria’ that mystifies otherwise banal, mechanical bodily acts. Here, Breillat echoes Lacan’s famous pronouncement that ‘there is no sexual relation’ outside of our fantasising around it. This abstract, cerebral stance – what Breillat calls making films ‘in the ether’ – chafes against an intensely material interest in the mess of interacting human bodies, which cannot always be perfectly controlled – perfectly directed – and which sometimes veer off course and cause harm.

Some of Breillat’s pronouncements in I Believe Only in Myself are difficult to stomach: ‘There is no difference between flirting and sleeping together’; acting is a ‘sacred kind of prostitution’; ‘How do you expect men to get hard if there is no law of the strongest? It’s in their genes.’ Others are spiked with glittering dark humour: intimacy coordinators are ‘henchmen without any real qualifications’, her numerous naysayers are ‘bad-faith assholes’. Throwaways remarks like these conjure the familiar characterisation of Breillat as a ‘provocateur’ and ‘enfant terrible’. While reducing her oeuvre to a one-note desire to shock would be unjust, it is fair to say that the director’s sensibility and aesthetic are instinctively oppositional. ‘I constructed myself against, against, against’, she insists. For Breillat, most people avoid the scorching work of introspection. Yet I Believe Only in Myself is a manifesto less for solipsistic self-interest than for a kind of extreme, at times painful, attention. This form of discipline is rare these days, as rare as the announcement of a new Catherine Breillat film. 

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Auteur as Outlaw’, NLR 149.