Often dubbed the “bad girl of French cinema” even though she’s in her late fifties, Catherine Breillat makes films that are sexual, polemical, taboo-breaking and transgressive. She is a screenwriter (Federico Fellini’s And The Ship Sails On, 1983, and Maurice Pialat’s Police, 1985) and an actress (her debut, fittingly, was Last Tango In Paris, 1972), but she started out as a novelist. Ever since writing L’homme facile at the age of 17, Breillat has twinned shame and desire, sexuality and indignity, regarding the tipping point for women as the moment in puberty when “you are subjected to a wave of suspicion”. It’s a suspicion that, according to Breillat, becomes internalized, later manifesting itself in contradictory and self-destructive sexual urges. Confronting and candidly documenting these masochistic impulses has been the driving force behind her work for the last three decades.

The director returns continually, if not compulsively, to the theme of the loss of virginity: Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Lady, 1976), 36 fillette (Virgin, 1988) and A ma soeur (Fat Girl, 2001) are painful, brutally honest depictions of sexual awakening via degradation, culminating in the latter film’s rape scene. More explicit, in every sense, Breillat’s films about adult sexuality are cold, punitive studies of sadomasochism and clinical dissections of the sexual act. The most controversial of these is Romance (1998), the first mainstream film to show the act of penetration outside of the grind houses. Pared-down and polemical, Breillat’s adult films – Sale comme une ange (Dirty Like An Angel, 1991), Parfait amour (Perfect Love, 1996), Sex Is Comedy (2002), Anatomy Of Hell (2004) – reveal a simplistic Manichean rigidity: her women are emotional, confused and fragile, her men are rapists, murderers, charmers and liars, defined entirely by their tumescence.

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