The film's philosophy of the bedroom suggests this second possibility. "The fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality,'' the man says on seeing the woman naked. "Women depend on one or the other.'' To which the woman, in turn, asks: "What should we fear more? Nothingness or brutality?'' It should be easy to dismiss this Manichaeism, to argue that between nothingness and brutality there exists a world of possibility for men and women. But such arguments have no place in this movie because Breillat doesn't just recycle musty ideas about men and women's essential, bestial, obscene natures; she seeks male approval and then punishes her on-screen avatar for seeking such approval. That Breillat uses a gay man to indulge such masochism, a man who very likely wouldn't give a woman a second look, is especially gutless.
This is a depressing turn for a filmmaker who has always hewed to her own course. It has been Breillat's independence that has made her work so much more interesting than many films in what the critic James Quandt has christened the New French Extremity. Heavy on sex and death and sometimes some frenzied combination of the two, these films include misanthropic anti-entertainments like Gaspar Noe's Irreversible and Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms, which both seek to punish their audiences as brutally as their characters and exploit rape to justify their nihilism. Breillat shares with these filmmakers an almost juvenile interest in rocking bourgeois sensibilities, but in contrast to someone like Noe, she has always used shock to express ideas, not to camouflage an absence of ideas.
In her earlier features, most of which serve as a better introduction to this gifted filmmaker than this film, Breillat's disregard for social pieties and insistence on tearing away the veil from female sexuality has made for galvanizing viewing. I can think of few other filmmakers who have so fearlessly risked legitimacy (and laughter) to pursue their personal vision. At her best, Breillat comes to each of her films as naked as any of her female characters; she strips herself bare for her art and beliefs, and it is this passionate commitment that has helped gloss over her occasional missteps. But Anatomy of Hell is more than a lapse; it is a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker who, having stripped down to the nitty-gritty once too often, may finally have nothing left to show.
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