And with this, Breillat is launching a full fledged assault on Western standard: that of beauty, expectation, and what is actually sexual. One could certainly imagine a hostile or mocking reaction from anyone asked to reestablish their ideals of attraction or beauty (which certainly accounts for the film’s bitter reception), and Breillat even anticipates such a response, [38] though deter her it does not. Her film is thus a thoroughly iconoclastic transvaluation of all Western –especially feminine– ideals. And Breillat views this not as “transgressive,” but as a recursive (versus progressive) truth.
“Because of this blood they say we are impure,” states the woman, alluding with “they” to the both the Hebrews and perhaps God in the Torahic book of Leviticus (as well as other biblical verses):
When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. … If a man lies with her and her monthly flow touches him, he will be unclean for seven days…” Leviticus 15:19-32.
Man born of woman… Who can bring what is pure from the impure? No one!”
Job 14:1-4
After a further discussion of the conventions of the “tampon,” as well as a blunt demonstration of its function, the woman offers a man a taste of her blood diluted in water, which they both drink. “Don’t we drink the blood of our enemies?” she asks. While diegetically disturbing, the act might be explained through the mysticism surrounding the drinking of one’s blood. Alan G. Hefner writes:
Throughout the ages, ever since primitive man, an attraction has existed toward human blood. It is thought this attraction originated in early man, when he observed a man losing blood he also saw the man eventually would weaken and die if the bleeding did not stop. Naturally it was concluded that the blood contained the man’s life. Gradually over time a magical connection to blood evolved too. Not only did the man’s blood contain his life, but it also contained his experiences, characteristics and qualities. Soon it came to be thought these characteristics and qualities could be passed onto others if they consumed or were touched by the blood. [39]
Figuratively, then, this act is the sharing of one’s own life, experiences, and characteristics with the other: the woman’s with the man. Diegetically, it is an act of hyper-masochism, which again, could created a connection through a sort of Sartreian anguish between the two otherwise distant characters. Though initially a demonstration of war, this act eventually turns into intercourse, implying that the characters felt something other than loathing upon drinking the woman’s blood, however transgressive such an act appears to be. The dead uselessness of a stone dildo without the movement of intimacy or the fantasy therein proves the need of sexual connection with some literal or imagined other, while also proving that sexuality is a very empty thing when stripped of emotion, connection, and longing –like the numb penetration of a tampon. Upon the woman’s admittance of isolation, the man seems to feel the same, and grabs the woman into his arms to make love. While this sequence of sex may seem sad, or even dismal, this is not to say that their love making is actually as such. Breillat is making a cinematic point: “I created the terrifying emotional substrata exploring the nature of sex to allow me to transcend the usual, horrible images that form the basis of the porno films people take pleasure in watching.” [40] Cinematically unaesthetic, and depressing by any pornographic standard, to Breillat, this is real intimacy: emotionally charged and bitterly honest, a real connecting interaction of love. Their humanity exists as the sole act of beauty in the dilapidated bedroom: an act of revolution despite the light, the filth, and the religious anguish that fills everything.
Afterwards, the characters stand gazing at the blood that spread as a result of their sex. Though one’s first reaction is that of disgust, the woman argues otherwise. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “You look like you’re bleeding. You’re afraid because you think you’re bleeding, even though you know you’re not. This hemorrhage is from the fertile blood of women.” Thus this blood transcends its impurity to something above anything else in human existence: fertility, the ability to make life. The connection they shared, of course, is that act. Though transgressive by many standards, Breillat argues the transcendent purity of menstruation: the last frontier, perhaps, of what is the “unwatchable.” By making what is impure good, Breillat thus escapes the nihilism of a society through beautifying what is called pure. Nietzsche writes in his praise of the Code of Manu:
Code of Manu shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life —the sun shines upon the whole book.— All the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity —for example, procreation, women and marriage— are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; . . . it is better to marry than to burn”? [41]
Nietzsche praises that which handles “procreation, women and marriage” with “reverence and with love and with confidence,” as does Breillat. The woman, her body, and her function are not vulgarities, but rather beauties. Nothing about her –or any human– could be gross, other than to say that it is gross, which could make it thus.
The fact that, in Christianity, “holy” ends are not visible is my objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin—therefore, its means are also bad. [42]
“The poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin” are the traits of the characters in Anatomy of Hell. These factors are the cause of their nihilistic self-loathing, contempt, and masochism. The only escape is to transvaluate the meaning of beauty, as well as filth, to redefine their individual selves as well as mutual selves as something beautiful, if not mystic. Like Nietzsche’s Übermunsch they are above society – transcend society – as they defy its essential decadence, and the society’s belief in their decadence.
However, a tragic ending to Anatomy of Hell suggests that Breillat sees such hope subject to imminent doom: that doom being a retreat into the safety of societal conventions. After the man leaves the house, he enters back into society, and leaves the isolation of that home, making their interaction nothing more than a sad pipedream. Once re-assimilated into the throes of culture and people, the man immediately returns to his contempt of women, talking to a man in a bar full of men. Breillat states:
In the scene in the bar he describes sex in the ugly way it is presented in pornography –he says he fucked her, and then he turned her over and fucked her up the ass– with no emotion or love attached to the act of love-making. It’s the way all men talk about sex, and also all the censors and religious creeds that teach us it’s an abominable act. But when he realizes that the vulgar terms he’s using are a lie, he begins to cry. He doesn’t even know her name, yet his sense of loss is overpowering. This is what making love is about, and the depth of his emotion is a revelation to him. [43]
A retreat into masculine-mutual violence, into destruction, destroying the beauty he experienced, the man returns to society’s expectations of him. Sex is restored as an ugly, one-dimensional exploit, an act of the flesh, of brutality –resorted to the realm of filth, of pornography. The old man’s casual agreement with Siffredi’s character and that character’s violence displays that the unnamed man’s view is passively accepted as normal in society, as expected. However, after a sudden and overpowering revelation, the unnamed man cries, “I experienced total intimacy with her… and I don’t even know her name.” The only way the man must be totally free of the woman after this stark and sudden revelation must then be to kill her, to free himself from her truth –and this he does.
In a beautifully and overtly surreal and reflexive final sequence, the unnamed man returns to the isolated home, finding nothing in the bedroom (a restoring of filth without emotion), afterwards approaching a ghost-like Casar and shoving her from a cliff and into the ocean –a highly dreamlike, memorable and intensely haunting mise en scène. If the woman exists as the iconoclastic martyr, then this death is necessary. Though tragically, this also shows that the man has returned to himself, and the movie comes full circle, the man allowing the woman to die as if he had never stopped her from committing suicide in the first place.
Like the fear of hell, the woman’s body has taken on the same attributes: both being the object of contempt and dread, as well as causing the woman herself to live in a state of “hellish” existence. “Hell has an anatomy,” says Breillat, “And it is the woman’s body.” [44] Breillat implies that if we cannot see differently, to transvaluate, nor understand that things like makeup, tampons, and even feminine shaving are not a heightening of the woman’s body but a hiding, a masking, a nihiliating, and that they were created as such, then she, the woman, will remain a map of hell’s terrain. A bold, and hyper-feminist stance, Breillat’s film is uncompromisingly bleak, yet dialetically hopeful. Though many will discard the film in hostile reaction, calling it “transgressive pretension,” Breillat’s “provocation” is not as it may seem:
I have both been praised and attacked by feminists. My discourse is feminist but also against women. I prefer to call it a feminine cinema. It is a discourse that should make men run away but the purpose is the opposite: to retain him… It’s a feminist cinema because it is from the point of view of women since there are certain things that are forbidden for women. I want to show these things, explore them beyond their limits …Is the provocation in my films intentional? I don’t focus on provocation. We live in a world in which there are many moral laws that people are obliged to conform to. Cinema allows us to have a transgressive weapon to break these rules. … My provocation is innocent. I started writing when I was 17. I wrote a book that was prohibited for people of less than 18 years. I was forbidden to read the same book I had written. If you consider that this is a provocation, this is what I do.
The “innocence of provocation” then lies in the audience’s reaction to the film: is it morally trangressive or recursive? A reversal of society seems unlikely, though this is what Breillat asks –or at least ponders. An audacious yet gallant work of dialetic, Anatomy of Hell will itself no doubt be the martyr of Breillat’s truth, bold and sacrificed in the name of transvaluation, in the name of the woman and man, and of love. It is humanity Breillat wishes to save, to liberate from repressive nihilism –from the icon. As such, Breillat’s true Auteurism is one of unrivaled heroism, and undaunted audacity, her films honest and innocent yet, more often than not, forbidden as well.
Endnotes
