‘Anatomy of Hell’

‘Anatomy of Hell’

She is the only woman at a gay bar. She enters the bathroom and slashes her wrist, and he follows her in, sees what she has done, and takes her to a drugstore where they bandage the cut. If you slice your wrist and there’s time to go to a drugstore, maybe you weren’t trying hard enough. He asks why she did it. “Because I’m a woman,” she says, although she might have more accurately said, “Because I’m a woman in a Catherine Breillat movie.”

Breillat is the fearless French director who specializes in stories of female sexuality. Sometimes she’s wise about it as in “36 Fillette” (1988), about an insecure teenager’s dangerous flirtations with older men. Or “Fat Girl” (2001), which explores the boiling resentment of a chubby 12-year-old for her sexpot older sister. Sometimes she’s provocative as in “Romance” (1999), about one frustrated woman’s relentless quest for orgasm. But sometimes she’s just plain nuts, as in “Anatomy of Hell,” which plays like porn dubbed by embittered deconstructionist theoreticians.

The Woman makes an offer to The Man: She will give him good money if he will watch her simply watch her for four nights. He does his part, but there were times when I would have paid good money not to watch them simply not to watch them. I remember when hard-core first went mainstream; we used to speculate what would happen if a serious director ever made a porn film. The answer seems to be that audiences would decide they didn’t need such seriousness after all.

The Woman believes men hate women, and gay men hate women even more than straight men do although straight men do hate women quite enough already. Men fear women; they fear their menstrual secrets, their gynecological mysteries; they fear that while having sex they might vanish entirely inside the woman and be trapped again by the womb. To illustrate these points, The Woman takes off all her clothes and sprawls naked on a bed, while The Man sits in a chair and watches her, occasionally stirring himself to take a slug of Jack on the rocks.

They talk. They speak in that uniquely French way, as if it’s not enough for an idea to be difficult; it must also be impenetrable. No two actual people in the history of humankind have ever spoken this way except maybe some of Breillat’s friends, whom even she gets sick of.

“Your words are inept reproaches,” they say. And “I bless the day I was made immune to you and all your kind.” After a few days of epigrams, they suddenly have sullen sex, and make a mess of the sheets.

There are events in this film that can’t even be hinted at in a family newspaper. Objects come to light that would enliven target practice in a Bangkok sex show. There are moments when you wish they’d lighten up by bringing in the guy who bites off chicken heads.

Naturally we are expected to have an immediate emotional reaction to the movie’s lament on male crimes against women. These acts, as The Woman against The Man and Ours against The Director demonstrate, can indeed be hard to remember.

He is treated as much of a prop here as men generally are in porn films performed by Rocco Siffredi, an Italian porn star; The Woman is played by Amira Casar, who is naked through most of the film (though the opening titles inform us that a body double will be standing in for her closeups in the more action packed scenes). “It’s not her body,” the titles explain, “it’s an extension of a fictional character.” Tell that to the double.

I don’t doubt that truths can be unpleasant, but I’m not sure that unpleasantness = truth. There are moments here when Breillat wants to gross us out not because we’re disgusted by women’s natural life functions, as she implies, but just because The Woman does things that would make any sensible Man (or Woman), for that matter, retch.

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