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This chapter analyzes Catherine Breillat's film Bluebeard. It argues that Breillat's filmic appropriation of Charles Perrault's “Bluebeard” is part of a memetic process that entails imitation, innovation, and transformation. Her interpretation of Perrault's tale is a contestation, and while she seeks to replace Perrault's version with a double rendition of his tale, she also emphasizes the significance of Perrault's tale and demonstrates how all Bluebeard tales are part of a singular discursive process within the larger genre of the fairy tale. Interestingly, both Perrault and Breillat become merely markers in the evolutionary history of a tale type about mass murders that continues to breathe and demand our attention through supernormal stimuli.

Catherine Breillat’s explicit engagement with female sexuality across her corpus is illumined through discussion of her return to images of nudity and reclining in European painting, as witnessed in particular in her work from Romance forwards. Romance and Anatomy of Hell draw on the forms, colours, affects, and sensations of paintings by Georges de la Tour, Ingres, Manet, and others, but the closest point of contact for Breillat with painting is with Courbet’s The Origin of the World. If attention to artistic influence allows apprehension of the formal beauty, luxury, and sensuality of Breillat’s works, her moves through Courbet, and her choreographing of the bodies of her actresses as they adopt recumbent and horizontal poses, speaks further of the animality, savagery, and mortification of being knocked off a vertical axis, and laid out on a bed, as on a butcher’s slab. Beyond Varda, Breillat pushes towards the annihilation of the subject foreshadowed and figured in images of reclining.

This chapter looks at Marguerite Duras’ short story The Malady of Death and Catherine Breillat's book Pornocracy, and film Anatomy of Hell—the latter two of which are redactions of the Duras story. All three works are discussed in terms of their presentation of the scene of naked sharing of bodies and the inappropriable finitude that is impossibly shared between them, right up to death. The bed scenes in the Duras and Breillat are in turn compared with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson as analysed by Sarah Kofman, and to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ photographic image of an unmade bed. By providing visual evidence of two bodies having been in the bed but that are no longer present, Gonzalez-Torres's image is an emblematic image for the entire book and its study of the retreat of bodies as retracing the scene of the decision between us as already-unmade and as erotic and funereal, at once.

This book began as a brief review of Bruno Dumont's film, Twentynine Palms (France, 2003). It intended to puzzle out the reasons for Dumont's descent into gore and hard core, whether it was a mere exaggeration of the brute corporeality of his previous cinema, or something more disturbing: a submission to fashion. Twentynine Palms felt like a forced anomaly, a freakish excursion into the unknown. Was it sheer coincidence that Twentynine Palms followed a spate of self-styled transgressive French films by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Catherine Breillat, François Ozon, Gaspar Noé and, most unlikely of all, Claire Denis, whose vampire nocturne, Trouble Every Day (France, 2001), seemed a radical departure from her earlier films, even those dealing with such ‘extreme’ subjects as cockfighting and serial killers? What was the New French Extremity? Though the ‘new extremism’ has perforce rejected humanism as false piety, pitilessness should not be mistaken for truth or courage, an error too often made by its reflexive defenders.

The convulsive violence of Bruno Dumont's film Twentynine Palms (2003) has dismayed many, particularly those who greeted his first two features, Life of Jesus (1997) and L'Humanité (1999), as the work of a true heir to Robert Bresson. Twentynine Palms elicits an unintentional anxiety: that Dumont, once imperiously impervious to fashion, has succumbed to the growing vogue for shock tactics in French cinema over the past decade. The critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux — and now, Dumont. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn — gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore — proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical or, at their most immoderate, at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (mostly Surrealism).

This chapter draws on a 2005 study sponsored by the British Board of Film Classification to evaluate the ways in which real audiences (not audiences artificially assembled for purposes of a laboratory-like ‘test’) make sense of and respond to watching sexual violence on screen in extreme cinema. It argues that such an endeavour is imperative because it challenges the widespread tendency to make general predictions regarding the ‘ways in which films might affect audiences’. Looking at the different responses that Critics (those who reject the film) and Embracers (those who engage with it) had to the violent ending of Catherine Breillat's À ma sæur! (France, 2001), the chapter concludes by arguing for the importance of heeding the ‘rich and complex’ ways that Embracers engage with films, noting that we need as film scholars to learn how to learn from them rather than falling back onto generalised predictions about the figure of the spectator.

Chapter 3 explores the critical frame of feminist Lacanian postmodernism, underpinning an understanding of real sex films like Romance as art-house cinema in mutual dialogue with pornography. It argues that this fusion and tension between genres misses significant disparities within art house, and neither offers a robust history nor acknowledges that the Romance narrative focuses on Marie’s negotiation of her own sexuality and embodiment via a picaresque series of female/male encounters in a changed modernity. In its detailed analysis of Romance, the chapter draws on Giddens’s concepts of plastic sexuality and confluent love, Raymond Williams’s notion of emotional realism, and Trevor Griffiths’s historical understanding of the (raced and classed) wandering vagrant in an interdisciplinary “extension” of Tanya Krzywinska’s analysis of real sex cinema. This textual analysis combines “mutual understanding” of feminist mapping theory with risk sociology’s recognition of history as the growth of dialogue with the ars erotica.