French filmmaker discusses her daring new movie
Paris director Catherine Breillat is known for making a stir with her erotically daring and cinematically experimental films such as "Romance" and "Une vraie jeune fille", adapted from one of her own novels.   A prolific novelist and director, she became an international cause celebre with "A ma soeur" (Fat Girl)  (2001),which follows a fifteen year girl experimenting with sex on the beach while her sister watches.   Breillat's forte is to challenge conventional ways about thinking about sexuality---something that has earned her, in some circles, the epithet:  "porno auteuriste".

 Her latest film, "Une veille maitresse", is Breillat's most audacious (and expensive) venture:  a costume drama of the l9th century, based on a novel by Barbey d'Aurevilly, it gives a painterly portrait of the intensity of passion between a man and two women, his "wife" and his "mistress."     Starring Asia Argento as the mistress, the film gives a painful and intense view of what it means to be divided and torn by incessant impossible love.  It is rewarding to watch, if only for the aesthetics of the frames and its obsessive focus on the controversy of female and male desire.   

Why did you choose to adapt the novel Une veille maitresse?            

I love the books of the l9th century.. I would have liked to be the author; he was considered scandalous; he was immense.  I  did a period piece because I want an ambiance in which passion is possible: the aristocracy allows for the range of emotional experience. When you are starving in Darfur, you cannot think about passion. 

Is it the aristocracy you like, or the bourgeoisie? 

The aristocracy has nothing to do with the bourgeoisie.   Moliere and Racine treat the bourgeois.  Shakespeare treats the elevated emotions.   When I was young, I also did not like the French language; it was too conformist.  It is the language of diplomacy;  it is dead in spirit.  I did not like France. 

What other themes in the novel drew you?

 I always loved Orientalism.  It is part of the book.  It is part of the femme fatale.   The myth is very absolute and eternal: the femme fatale. Take Phedre, for example:  the emotions are passion and love. Cinema's role is to make prototypes of emotions in which spectators can find themselves and see themselves in the costumes.  Everything in my film is modern:  it is the same man and the same woman.

Does your film have a feminine gaze? 

My name is Catherine Breillat, but I am like painter: there is no sex to the painter.

Would you say that passion is the  subject of all your films?  

I am a painter who always takes the same tableau.  Painters may take different subjects,  but the tableau is always the same.  St. Sebastian is unique, but many paintings represent him. 

What characterizes your aesthetics?  

The purity of the frame. I want it to be clear and precise. There is also a choreography to how my characters enter the frame.  I also am an artisan: choosing all the jewelry and costumes, real silks, no mediocrity in the fabrics.  As an artisan, I wanted to buy all these articles myself.  A painter chooses his paints; he does not just buy them.    

You say this is your best film.  Why?  

It's the end of a cycle. This film is new for me in that up to now, it has always been only two persons.  Also, there is more in the young boy.  I am in the boy's body, which I have never been before.   I looked for a beautiful boy with a feminine look, one who is radiant without being effeminate.  I chose Asia because she has the force of a panther, the violence.  I wanted two characters who change during their relationship. Domination changes back and forth. She sacrifices everything and he nothing.  

What effect do you want your films to have?  

There is no limit to provocation.  An artist is not transgressive but subversive.