LWLies: Directors seem to be drawn to Asia Argento – physically and sexually. What is it about her that’s so alluring?
Breillat: I had chosen her before my stroke, and her first film in France was to be The Last Mistress. Then suddenly all the directors starting choosing her and I find that that’s harmed me a lot because suddenly she became the actress that all the French were choosing.
LWLies: You’re known for your work with Roxanne Mesquida, but Asia seems more naturally suited to the kind of films that you make – Roxanne seems so pure and innocent, where Asia’s more sneery and fiery.
Breillat: But I love to rape angels!
LWLies: There’s no arguing with that. You’ve spoken about the pureness of romance in The Last Mistress, but in the past your work has been described as ‘the annihilation of the myth of romantic love’.
Breillat: The purity of this passion can be devastating and even murderous, but what is important is that it’s total – total engagement in the passion. In the book, the young man was very elegant and doesn’t hesitate to destroy the life of his courtesan, and she in turn has no qualms in destroying her position as a lady having married the baronet – she has no qualms doing that just to become the mistress of Ryno de Marigny.
LWLies: But isn’t that the ultimate myth of romantic love – that love conquers all. Or at least that love is more important than all else. Does The Last Mistress represent a new approach in your attitude to love, or have people misunderstood your previous work?
Breillat: I’ve always said I was puritanical and romantic, but everybody thinks I’m perverse and scandalous. Always.
LWLies: You can see why people would make that mistake though.
Breillat: My work is a very pure line in the quest for sexual identity. It’s like the quest for the Holy Grail, a heroic quest: to find the purity in the sexual relationship between two people. In Romance, the husband cannot make love to her because that would lower her.
LWLies: I have a hard time with… Ryno in the film… At the risk of sounding trivial, are we supposed to support his actions? Is it supposed to be amoral? Are we supposed to make no judgments?
Breillat: You’re supposed to be in love with Ryno! And yet equally in love with La Marquise de Flers, Vellini and Hermangarde. There’s a reference to Dangerous Liaisons and the author because it’s also in the book, but here there isn’t a Madame de Merteuil. Merteuil is life and all the beings are animated by love, but here it’s life around them.
LWLies: Doesn’t love make him weak?
Breillat: Isn’t it better to be weak for something than strong for nothing?
LWLies: But he has something in life to be strong for – his wife who he claims is the love of his life. He has something to be strong for.
Breillat: Of course he has this love. When he’s crying with Vellini and he talks about horses of a noble pedigree, and when they’ve been slightly touched by the bayonet in battle they go for it again, and that really is his story. Because he really loves Hermangarde but there’s no perversity – he’s under the spell of his old mistress.
LWLies: You’ve said that this film represents ‘the real you’, and I was hoping you could elaborate on that.
Breillat: That’s because it’s a film with a big budget and in France that means it’s something that you need to be able to show on television at half-past-eight. So people should not be scared of seeing this film with their family, and not have any guilt about wanting to go and see it. But I am never in repentance.
LWLies: I was going to ask if you regret past provocations. Do you feel pigeonholed by people’s expectations?
Breillat: I have regrets for the people who think that those are provocations. I think they live a very poor life.
LWLies: You think people are too easily scandalised?
Breillat: French people, yes
.LWLies: Which is strange because we have the opposite stereotype here – that in France anything goes, while in England we’re easily embarrassed.
Breillat: It’s actually the opposite. I owe the fact that I’m still making films to Anglo-Saxon audiences. That’s who I owe it to. If you open the dictionaries of cinema of that time, I am the worst French filmmaker of all time. The boss of France Film went especially to New York to make a point of saying that the New York Film Festival had made a huge mistake by selecting my film because I was not representative of French cinema. And of course, I made it my glory. In Canada, following a survey in English-speaking Canada in Ontario, I was the most respected filmmaker, as opposed to in the French Quebec side where they hate me.
LWLies: So what happened to French cinema? Doesn’t it have a proud tradition of being provocative?
Breillat: For a very long time I have asked myself why Anglo Saxons like me more than the French. And if you say you’re too English to understand my films, maybe it means you’re a little bit French.
LWLies: I don’t know how to take that now. Would you have got the same reaction if you were a male filmmaker?
Breillat: No because all men who have done things either in cinema or literature that are sexual or provocative have been given consideration, like Bacon or Henry Miller or Jeunet. They’ve always been regarded highly. And also quite clearly when I did 36 Fillette, for example, I was a good looker as well and female and a beautiful woman, so could only be stupid.
LWLies: Do men still have issues with female sexuality – if you’re sexual then you can’t be smart, and if you’re smart then you can’t be sexual?
Breillat: One thing that people kept reproaching for me is that I didn’t love men, and so to mock them I would say, ‘I don’t like men because I don’t like bureaucrats, I like boys’.
LWLies: Do you think that you have suffered for being the kind of filmmaker you are?
Breillat: No. I may have done more films had I been more loved, but since a young age I’ve built myself on contradictions. So maybe they actually did me a good service because I made films that were absolutely necessary to me – that I needed to make. And I’ve always had to wait a long time in between my films. So Une vraie jeune fille was made very, very early on but it came out 25 years afterwards.
LWLies: Have other filmmakers abandoned their responsibilities to be making intelligent films, and to be acting as provocateurs?
Breillat: I always say that we do not make provocative films because to stop it is subversive and it is answering questions that are not being asked. I never had any intention of making a scandal – it’s not premeditated but I do throw stones at people because I’m working on denial.
LWLies: You say it’s not premeditated but you can have a good idea that if you put the rape of a 12-year-old girl on screen, it’s going to cause a sensation.
Breillat: But why did Muchette (?) in history and literature not cause a shock in a similar situation? Because we’ve retrograded. Now I call children’s bodies ‘the forbidden body’ – it’s terrible to be a child and have a forbidden body because it’s supposedly a body that is the object of desire. It’s a very Muslim idea in a way: it’s not the bodies that have to be forbidden; it’s the desire for them.
LWLies: Why do you think we’ve taken this retrograde step?
Breillat: The fact that the weight has to be carried by the potential victims instead of being carried by the potential rapists. When I was in Iran I told them, ‘You have to veil the little boys because they’re also the object of desire’. Paedophiles have to be able to walk around happily, in peace, so you have to cover up the little boys. That’s abject reasoning, of course you have to protect children and track down paedophiles, and actually not let them go with their nature, but that’s not why the body of a child should be forbidden. On the screen just like on paintings… Museums are full of naked women, and you know full well that Puritanism has wiped out a lot of works of art because we erased all the sexual connotations, for example, there is an image from the time of the Pharaohs of a god and his penis is erect and giving his seed to the world and except in Luxor because it’s such an ancient place and it was buried in the sand, and scandalously has a little mosque built on him, and in the Greek sculptures – do you think there were fig leaves? There weren’t! It’s a crime to a particular work of art because Puritanism that we use that way is often the kingdom of desire.
LWLies: Critics might say that the things we put on screen are judged in a different way than the things we put in an art gallery.
Breillat: Yes because it’s judging the morality of actors because they’re idols, and we don’t want idols to behave that way. But nobody is judging the Duchess of Alba who posed nude for Goya.
LWLies: I think because they’d say that there’s a different aesthetic context.
Breillat: No. There is no difference. There is no different aesthetic context – the difference is only a painting in movement, alive. We shouldn’t judge morally, we should judge artistically. At the time of the great battle over the ‘X’ rating in France, at a discussion with Elle magazine I first of all said, ‘You all have a sexuality between your legs, and everybody knows it. How can you bear it? Everybody knows you have it.’ And the problem with censorship, like the director of censorship said, is when actors really, truthfully sleep together, then it becomes pornographic. And I said, ‘No!’ The problem is if the frame was framed tightly, but if you have actors in a long shot really making out together and you don’t see it, if you judge those actors it’s no longer a problem of pornography, it’s a problem of morality. To know whether the tongue is in the mouth or not? That’s McCarthyism!
LWLies: Is art inherently amoral?
Breillat: If you look at the Origin of the World by Corbert (?), it’s a major painting, but not just morality like you’re talking about sexual morals, there has been no other scandal quite like that provoked by the Impressionists, there was such a violent feeling that it was intolerable that one should paint like that. With music it’s the same. You have to think of all that before speaking about morals otherwise you place morality in a very narrow context. Myself, I believe that cinema is a moral art, but what is moral is to be non-conformist, because there is no need to be conformist. Art should not conform to what people want. You can have some success, but then it’s an artist on his knees. In France I wrote an article in Trafic, which is a paper that’s very intellectual that virtually no one reads, but from an intellectual point of view it’s a very important paper, and the article’s title was On The Importance of Being Hated. I think when you’re an artist you derange the preconceived ideas people have, and you take the risk of being hated, which is very difficult to bear but it’s less hard to bear than to despise yourself.
LWLies: I wanted to ask briefly about your stroke.
Breillat: I always say that in the case of a stroke, if it falls on one side, you get total paralysis on the one side, but if the stroke happens on the other side of the brain you lose speech. I’m infinitely happier to have lost half my body permanently, in terms of the sensation, than my speech. It’s also very interesting to understand what we don’t understand – the fact that we’re very strictly, perfectly, cut in half by a line. There is a frontier that is very, very perfect. For example if I can’t see one half of my body, I don’t know where it is. Right now I don’t know where my foot is. So what’s hilarious is if there’s somebody next to me with a hand, even if it’s the hand of a man or not at all like mine, what is hilarious is that my brain will identify it as my hand. Finally it’s actually a very interesting experience, and true at the same time.
LWLies: Working on The Last Mistress after the stroke, did it offer you a perspective on how exclusive a place a film set is – how unfriendly towards disability it is?
Breillat: Actually not at all – it’s completely open to disabilities. The problem is insurance, but actually working with endomorphins and in the passion which you secrete yourself… I do a lot of films with my own body; I choreograph them with my own body and I thought that that I would no longer be able to do, but there was a sort of miracle that actually made me do things, nothing was stopping me from doing things. At one point during the dinner when Vellini breaks the glass, without knowing I jumped out of my chair and was jumping up and down like a spring, and of course all the actors were completely speechless but also all the technicians because normally that’s something I wasn’t able to do. And I would never try to do it if I’m not on set and I’m not aware of it because then I would fall and hurt myself. And when you have one side paralysed, if you fall you do very bad fractures so it’s not something I would normally risk. I did once make my hand explode because I cut myself and I was pressing so hard on it that the bone came out. That we hid from the insurers – it was a very short time before the beginning of shooting. I said that to be a bit elegant I had to adopt the look of Cronenberg’s Crash and suddenly I had this metal splinter fixed where there was this little cross, so I had this visual metal bar and I did think that was slightly too Cronenberg. I hadn’t planned to illustrate it quite so well.
