Catherine Breillat (Bressuire, 1948) has never minced words. Sincerity has been the hallmark of this pioneering and controversial filmmaker since she picked up a camera and began to explore in a raw and direct way female sexual desire, gender dynamics and the nature of power in relationships between men and women. .
Her first feature film, A Real Girl (1976), talked about the sexuality of a teenager in an explicit and demystified way. She created controversy with Romance And she has continued to challenge cinematic conventions with her bold and provocative approach to sex in a total of 15 titles, such as An Old Mistress, Blue Beard and Anatomy of Hell, again with Siffredi. Nine of them are now part of a retrospective that can be seen at the Filmoteca de Catalunya in collaboration with the D’A Film Festival, including their last film in ten years, The Last Summer, which addresses the passionate relationship between a mature woman ( Léa Drucker) with a teenager (Samuel Kircher), the son of her husband’s previous relationship.
The film competed in the last edition of the Cannes Festival and will land in Spanish cinemas on May 24. “If I had been a man I could have made 30 films, twice as many as I have made. And, sometimes it must be said that within feminism itself, women do not help because when I made Romance Culture of France – considered very feminist – said that I didn’t have to make any more films. I felt squeezed like a lemon,” said Breillat in a meeting at the Filmoteca with a group of journalists.
The French filmmaker, screenwriter and also novelist has arrived at the event dressed in a black hat and leaning on a cane, since her mobility was reduced after suffering a hemiplegic stroke in 2004. Regarding how she sees feminism today, the director has been blunt: “Many feminists are very hysterical. I consider myself very feminist. For me feminism is having the same rights and I am against a large part of current feminism that defends moral rigorism, a single thought, and that is fascism. A generation of women is being created to detest men. I love men and I have been accused in my previous films of exaggerating men’s defects, but what I told in my films or what had happened to me me or people I knew because I have little imagination. We must stop saying that all directors are rapists and predators. There is hysterical guilt.”
On this topic he has referred to the role of the boy played by Kircher in The Last Summer, a young man who falls in love with his stepmother, a brilliant lawyer. “I saw more than 200 young people and they all told me that they were terrified of seducing girls their age. I think that seduction and love have to be something light. You have to live adolescence without judgment.” Breillat insists that “I can’t stand being given orders” and that “it is important to educate, although I consider myself more like an entomologist. I make fiction and I am not a judge or a social educator.”
She recalled a “very groundbreaking and feminist” speech she gave in 1999 on Iranian television that today would be classified as “horrible” by feminists. “We have reached a feminism worse than the radical Islamism of Iran,” she declared. A speech that worked for more than a month with many analyzes ranging from the femme fatale to the pin-up and where he vindicated films such as The Empire of the Senses, by Ôshima, a cult film about a couple of lovers who live a story of love taken to unimaginable limits. “It is very important to preserve cinema as art. For me, freedom when creating is essential.”
Breillat, whose answers are extensive and thoughtful, has defended that the profession of actor should return to what it was in the 18th century, when they considered themselves “prostitutes” because they did “trade, not sexual, but with their body, their tool.” of work”. “The actor and the actress trade their body because cinema is the art of incarnation. That everything happens through the body and the face has a carnivorous and anthropophagous point. But we are reaching limits in which we are going to ban more things than in Iran. And neither as a filmmaker nor as a woman do I want this and I will fight against it.”
The figure of the intimacy coordinator in the movies does not suit her. “They believe they are judges of absolute virtue and basically what they do is disturb the filming. They don’t have a reasonable discourse.” Of course, she has stated that “it is true that young actresses must be taken care of.”
After a career in which she has thoroughly explored female desire, Breillat believes that “it must always be defended against people who claim to be moralists and who know everything about virtue.” And she adds: “The survival of the human species depends on desire.”
In this regard, he mentioned a phrase by Pasolini that said that “love is always new and no one knows where the desire comes from. Love has many layers and many levels. It can be a purely sexual pleasure encounter that is not important or something.” very metaphysical and destructive. The range of complexity is much more important than what people today have reduced it to. And every perversion, from the sadomasochistic desire, to the inconsideration that can come with rape, always comes from a puritanical education,” has loaded.
Breillat has also referred to his concern for the new generations. “I think there are identity and gender problems that we have created as a society. There are many people who do not feel good about the gender they were born with. Obviously now you can choose but I have two cases in my own family that worry me. Lola is 25 years old and she still doesn’t know if she likes boys or girls. She wants to be called Emilio and she doesn’t know if she is going to have surgery or not and it is something strange for me because this situation is not something innate. And you have to ask yourself. “What is happening in society because I believe that these people are not happy either having surgery or changing their name. I will do my best to support them but it is worth asking what we are doing as a society so that these problems that did not exist before exist now.”
