Anatomy of Hell (2003)

Slow and Weird

Some scenes are odd and better off not watching. It's interesting i guess, i do give these people credit for making this film. It depends on what you're into ... wether you will enjoy this film or not. Try not to go by others reviews and opinions always judge for yourself. July 15, 2008

Unpleasant and Ugly

It is not often that I see a film and feel uncomfortable and disgusted. Especially when I have some understanding of the ground I'm going to cover before engaging in a Catherine Breillat film-watching experience. I actually enjoyed her film Fat Girl tremendously, and I even liked and recommend the more obviously gratuitous movie Romance. If Breillat is a voice for womenkind, then those graphic films had a more concrete bone to pick with mankind. Anatomy of Hell is a film that tries even harder to successfully offer the idea that pornography, which in some cases this film turns out to be, can in fact be made effectively by a good director, albeit the means here as opposed to pornography are intended to serve a far more worthy end. Breillat is a filmmaker with merit but this particular film's message, if it exists at all, is so abstract that it gets completely lost and suddenly the accusations that Breillat is intentionally trying to offend us creep up from the dark again to spoil her valiant crusade against the crimes of man. It is a shame because I really cherish the idea that a filmmaker of Breillat's boldness can and does exist.

Anatomy of Hell, or Anatomie de l'enfer, is actually adapted from Breillat's novel Pornocratie. It follows an unnamed and troubled woman (Amira Casar) who meets an unnamed homosexual man (Rocco Siffredi) under some pretty dire circumstances. After their initial encounter she makes a strange request that the man watch over her for four days. During this time the conversations get very obscure, probably a bit pretentious, and of course the dialogue seems to me completely unlikely to come from anyone's mouth. I will admit my French is not good enough to follow these scenes without subtitles so perhaps the conversations went over my head due to poor translation, but I doubt it.

I guess the point of the film was not completely over my head. Breillat clearly wants us to look into the rawness of a woman no matter how ugly and unpleasant it has the potential to be. However, in my view, she goes far beyond that for the sake of shock and I'm not so sure I'm willing to forgive that, so the film really fails for me. There are things that happen in this film that are absolutely disgusting in any right-minded person's eyes. And that is coming from someone who gave Salò and Sweet Movie four stars. June 25, 2008

This film will dig deeply into you...

It took getting a lot of distance between me and the film before I could actually produce this review. The French film by director Catherine Breillat was disturbing in a most real and visceral way and my first few days after having watched it I couldn't get it off of my mind. It purposefully reaches into the not-so-innocent pasts we all had and attempts to show the ways in which they have affected our sexual developments. It is literally written, at times, with menstrual blood with its provoking dialogue about the sexual relationship between a man and woman. It also really raises questions about the politics of looking and the fine boundary between looking and touching. My one complaint was that the film, while doing a great job about turning this woman's consumptive sexual and emotional crisis into a discussion of the psychological reasons for her sexual fears and compulsions, it completely simplified homosexuality into a condition of being repulsed by women. Obviously, it's far more than that and many men just prefer men and don't have a particular dislike of women. In all, though, this film prompted me to really do a long of soul searching about my own sexuality and relationship to my childhood so I would have to say that it is definitely worth watching. March 29, 2008

An honest, deep and provocative film

A very honest, simple and yet intensely profound film. A woman pays a man, who is gay, to watch her for four nights during her most intimate moments. The movie then progresses through each of those four nights and the exploration that occurs between man and woman through sex and gender. Both the man and the woman attempt to explore the female gender, as well the social, sexual and intimate implications that the male and female genders have imposed upon it. What develops is a strange intimacy between the two which frees the characters to explore female sexuality.

What little dialogue there is becomes a vocalization of the fears men have about women and the "hell" women's bodies represent. The dialogue was honest and thought provoking, much like a philosophical interpretation of the meaning of the female gender. The theoretical principles explores taboos not only through the dialogue but through a series of images that may be shocking for most people.

Breillat, the director holds little back and delves into the exploration of the woman's body as it embodies temptation, desire, curiosity, sin and "hell". I really liked this movie. Although a bit shocking, I found it enthralling and honest. The movie is definitely not for the easily offended as it include rather shocking, graphic and explicit images. I liked the movie because it was thought provoking, it was beautifully shot and the actors were excellent in it.
March 6, 2008

"Watch me where I'm unwatchable."

"All true artists are hated. Only conformists are ever adored."--Catherine Breillat.

Catherine Breillat (1948) is a brilliant French filmmaker, director and novelist. Her films take us (particularly us uptight Americans) places we've never been before, and usually outside our comfort zones with their depictions of hard sexual truths. As a result, Breillat is often the subject of controversy for her explicit depictions of sexuality and violence. Adapted from her novel Pornocratie, Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l'enfer) (2004) is perhaps her most controversial film. It stars hunky porn star Rocco Siffredi (Romance) as an Everyman character and willowy Amira Casar as the Everywoman, and basically depicts four nights of sexual politics played out in a sparse bedroom in an isolated beach house. After meeting in a gay nightclub, the woman offers to pay the man to "Watch me where I'm unwatchable," that is, to observe all that he despises in a woman because he is a homosexual. The ensuing dialogue between the two is enlightening and the sexual scenes are primal.

Throughout the film, one wonders: what is Breillat up to here? Ultimately, Anatomy of Hell is not so much a film about four nights of explicit sexuality, as a film about confronting male misogyny, brutality against women, and fear of the female anatomy. For many, this film may be disturbing. Anatomy of Hell is to Breillat what The Second Sex is to Simone de Beauvoir. Thank the French God for these Gallic bad girls. Breillat's interest in exploring hard truths about human sexuality is something I admire about French cinema in general and her films in particular. Certainly, it would be difficult to find this sexual dialogue happening anywhere else in cinema. Like all of Breillat's works, this is a film people should be debating afterwards in cafes, bars, and in their bedrooms.

G. Merritt September 13, 2007

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