Word: breillat
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...Mistress. Novelist and filmmaker Catherine Breillat became notorious with four movies - Romance, Fat Girl, Sex Is Comedy and Anatomy of Hell - that put young women in states of bondage or virginal peril without making them seem victims, and with an attention to sexual realism that verged on hard-core. Breillat suffered a cerebral hemmorage a while back; that hasn't stopped her career but it has slightly softened her tone. An Old Mistress, based on a 19th century novel by Jules-Am?d?e Barbey d'Aurevilly, is the director's first period film; she wants to see what's under those...
...Aattou is a luscious, full-lipped, smooth-bodied satyr who could be Argento's prettier, more feminine twin. No wonder Ryno can't shake off Vellini's spell - she is his more volcanic, dominant half. The film may be more seductive than it is plausible, and it's not Breillat's most engaging work (that would be Fat Girl and its funnier remake, Sex Is Comedy). But this filmmaker's train of erotic thought is always worth riding...
...chief service to film lovers is not its restoration of the titles we all know are classics but its insistence that certain recent titles, especially the ones on the outer edges of the mainstream, are classics of the future - movies like David Gordon Green's George Washington, Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl and Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven. Ramsay's 1999 story of a boy's troubled childhood in Glasgow in the 1970s is tender and harrowing at the same time. The disc includes three of her short films, two of which won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival...
...last decade, some European directors (Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noe) have made serious dramas with explicit sexual elements; but these forays could be pretty dour. Nobody I'm aware of had tried a light-hearted X-rated social comedy. All hail, then, to writer-director John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote and starred in the off-Broadway musical hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch, for pretending the last 30 years didn't make hard-core romance obsolete. Shortbus is so retro, it seems sparkling...
...European films of the art-house variety are trying to be more adult by showing more sex. Not pretend sex, to mirror the spectacles of fake violence in summer action pictures, but genuine, clinical whoopee. The French led the way, with the sex-splatter epic Baise-moi and Catherine Breillat's Romance. Now comes the first film (actually, digital video) by a respected British director--Michael Winterbottom, whose works include Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude and 24 Hour Party People...