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July 9, 2004
We can now see Catherine Breillat's latest film, Anatonmy of Hell. The attempt to have it banned by the Australian Family Association has failed.
According to this account in Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell the close-ups are reserved for the anus and vagina of the central female character. The review says:
"In Breillat’s vision it is through these orifices that the truest form of inter-human communication is realized. The narrative has an anonymous woman (representing all women) offering an anonymous man (representing all men) money to come to her house every night and watch her undress, masturbate, etc. Like in Pasolini’s Salo, and Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, a deep connection with another human being is equated with sexual debasement. The man doesn’t only watch, he touches too, sticking fingers and rods and large rocks up her anus and vagina, staring at and smelling and tasting the blood that she secretes, as if it held the secrets of her soul. Anatomy of Hell can be best described as a French existentialist version of Empire of the Senses, Oshima’s study of a claustrophobically possessive relationship which unfolds purely through sexual exploration."
Bataille as well I would have thought, as the film is about blood and vaginal juices, sensation, intensity of emotion (revulsion), transgression and death.
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