Catherine Breillat’s film about incest and morality
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The long-awaited new film by Frenchwoman Catherine Breillat has been released in Russia. The plot, almost entirely confined to one country house, tells about the incestuous relationship of a 50-year-old lawyer and her 18-year-old stepson. Breillat, who became famous for her uncomfortable films about sexuality, returned to work after 10 years of silence, but remains true to herself: in Forbidden Passion, morality turns out to be a relative matter.
Anna and Pierre lead the life of a respectable family: she is a lawyer, he is a businessman, they have a rich house in the suburbs of Paris, boring respectable friends and charming adopted daughters. The only disturber of this bourgeois tranquility is Pierre’s son from his first marriage, high school student Theo, who moved in with them, who does not trust either his father or his stepmother and tries to attract attention with scandalous behavior. Trying to improve the relationship, Anna hides Theo’s next prank from her husband, but, having tied herself with her stepson with a common secret, this sensible fifty-year-old woman unexpectedly finds herself in a much worse situation: the sympathy that arose between her and Theo quickly goes too far – much further than Anna could have guessed, and much faster than she could understand what was happening.
Due to health problems over the past 20 years, director Catherine Breillat has had to reduce her creative activity. Her previous film, “The Abuse of Weakness” with Isabelle Huppert, where Breillat herself was the prototype of the heroine, was released in 2013. But Breuil’s main and most famous achievements in cinema date back to the turn of the century, when in parallel with her, fellow compatriots François Ozon (“Ratman,” 1999), Claire Denis (“Every day, there’s trouble,” 2001) were engaged in provocations on the big screen. , Gaspar Noe (“Irreversible”, 2002) and others—journalists then called these authors “the new French extremes.” What happens to them two decades later? Ozon makes bourgeois films with the right messages. Denis alternates melodramas with near-Hollywood projects (she, however, was initially only a casual companion of the “extreme fans”). Noe still shocks the audience, but within the framework of his very simple, if not undeniable, guidelines: for all the shocking idea in the film “Love” – it is better not to cheat on your partner – there is nothing extreme, but quite the contrary.
But Breillat—who is filming not her own story here, but a remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts—continues the course she set out in Real Girl (1976), about the sex life of a 14-year-old schoolgirl. At the same time, the new film is much more restrained in its methods than Breuillat’s scandalous debut forty years ago or, say, her later work with porn actor Rocco Siffredi. Although the plot of “Fatal Passion” also sounds pornographic – the MILF tag is consistently the leader in popularity on thematic sites – this, of course, is not the kind of movie that you should go to for pleasant exciting emotions, no matter how the distribution title tries to convince you otherwise (Breillat, the author of the film “Anatomy of Hell” is no stranger to pompous formulations, but “Forbidden Passion” in the original bears the abstract and faded title “Last Summer”).
There are a lot of sex scenes here; they mark turning points in the plot, but you can’t discern the mechanics of the process in them. When they have sex in the film – without any frills, always in the missionary position – camerawoman Jeanne Lapoirie (who worked with the same Ozone, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Paul Verhoeven, was nominated for a Cesar Award three times) keeps a close-up of Anna’s face in the frame. In the beginning, during a routine marital intercourse performed as if on autopilot, the heroine recounts to her husband her teenage fantasies about mature men – probably calming the complexes of Pierre, who is fifteen years older than her. In the scenes with Theo, Anna says almost nothing, and the effect of Breuil’s chosen technique turns out to be paradoxical. Given the situation in the plot and how long Breillat lasts for these shots of Anna and Theo, this kind of erotica is very uncomfortable to watch. However, in the few minutes that we watch one of the acts in the middle of the film, Theo almost completely disappears from the frame, as well as from the sound track – his panting becomes a barely noticeable background, only Anna’s moans are heard. The content of the episode is the tension between this very discomfort and a rare and attentive depiction of female pleasure. This, in a nutshell, is the content of the entire film – it’s not for nothing that this scene, where little new happens in terms of drama, is located exactly in the middle of its running time.
By making films about moral issues, Breillat does not become a moralist. Her gaze is devoid of judgment – this is the key difference between the remake and “Queen of Hearts” with its more dramatic and unambiguous ending. The incestuous romance in Forbidden Passion develops naturally, as if by itself – with glances, gestures, omissions, touches. The fact that, in parallel with her adventures, Anna works as a lawyer with teenage girls who have experienced abuse and violence speaks of her hypocrisy. But Lea Drucker convincingly plays her as a woman who made a mistake and did not understand how it happened. Her adult, responsible heroine, who has successfully arranged her life, suddenly loses control over the situation and finds herself completely at a loss: she smiles stupidly, looks with a clouded look and is not able to answer Theo’s provocations. Her hypocrisy is the result not of evil intentions, not of depravity, but of weakness.
As for the second main character, there is a paradox in him too. Played by the young Samuel Kirscher, 18-year-old Theo behaves even more disgustingly than the average “difficult teenager” from the movies, but one can understand him: the young man has almost no rights in the family, they don’t listen to him, his father doesn’t trust him and already at the beginning of the plot , it seems, is ready to give up on Theo. In this story about where skeletons in closets come from, Breillat shows: moral standards are spoken of as absolute, but in life anything can happen, even something like this, and it is not always possible to assign right and wrong. And an even more scandalous secret, which is revealed in the last scenes of the film: in fact, everyone understands this perfectly well.
In theaters from December 7
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