Une vraie jeune fille – Bitch Flicks

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on the Female Gaze.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Satan in a Frilly Dress

However, this form of social shaming does not seem to prevent some of his young disciples from subverting their supposed childlike innocence: when the town is suddenly riddled by mysterious and violent crimes, it is suggested that the children have something to do with it, their leader being Klara, a 13-year-old angel-faced blonde and the pastor’s eldest daughter.

This guest post by Gloria Endres de Oliveira appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

What are little boys made of? / What are little boys made of?

Snips and snails / And puppy-dogs’ tails / That’s what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of? / What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice / And everything nice / That’s what little girls are made of.

(nursery rhyme dating from the early 19th century)

Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in Poison for the Fairies — Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in *Poison for the Fairies*

Creepy little girls in cinema and television have always been important to me; growing up as the pale, black-haired daughter of Brazilian immigrants in the suburb of an ethnically very homogenous German town instantly made me fall in love with sullen, gothic heroines such as Wednesday Addams, Lydia Deetz, and Nancy Downs (thanks to my older sister, I first saw and enjoyed The Craft at the appropriate age of 7). They looked like me, dressed like me, relentlessly pursued their own peculiar interests, and remained strong in the face of societal opposition.

As I approached my late teens, I ditched my gothy black frocks and Doc Martens and started to indulge my love for all things pink, frilly, and girly. However, this led to me experiencing an all new form of social discomfort – while before I was just looked at as plainly weird, my new stereotypically female exterior made people underestimate me in a painful way, doubting my intellectual capabilities and often even being surprised upon noticing that I, a girly girl, possessed so much as a sense of humor. Furthermore, I have experienced first hand how so-called femme-phobia can even pervade queer spaces, where femme-identified persons are often faced with exclusion. This personal background led me to be fascinated with an all new set of creepy little girls.

As Leigh Kolb notes at Bitch Flicks, ”(l)ittle girls are supposed to be the epitome of all we hold dear – innocent, sweet, submissive and gentle. The Victorian Cult of Girlhood … bleeds into the twenty-first century anti-feminist movements, and these qualities are still revered.”

Lewis Carroll described little girls thusly:

“Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred.”

Furthermore:

“Artists like Charles West Cope and John Everett Millais produced dozens of domestic genre paintings with titles like The First Music Lesson (1863) and My First Sermon (1862-3), which portray the child as a bastion of simplicity, innocence, and playfulness. Women were also praised for embodying these qualities, and together with children they were urged to inhabit a separate sphere: to withdraw from the workforce, embrace their status as dependents, and provide the male breadwinner with a refuge from the dog-eat-dog capitalist world outside the family.”

These historic ideals are explored in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon; the director paints a haunting picture of the fictional rural German town Eichwald at the cusp of the outbreak of the First World War. The oppressive nature of this puritanical society is underscored by the local pastor, who, in his confirmation classes, instills a deep sense of fear in the children he teaches – and, if they sin in any way, makes them wear a white ribbon to remind them of the purity they should strive for.

At one point, Klara is even implied to have butchered her father’s beloved parakeet with a pair of scissors. Childhood animal cruelty is not only thought to be an early symptom of psychopathic tendencies, but also stands in direct opposition to 1914 (and modern!) society’s standards for young girls – a budding mothering nature, nurturing, empathic and caring, finding release in doll and homemaking play.

Could angelfaced Klara have done this? — Could angel-faced Klara have done this?

The notion of female children as the pinnacle of innocence is thus subverted – but what exactly lies behind the concept of the pure, the innocent little girl? Even today, a century after the fictional happenings in The White Ribbon, purity often seems to be a euphemism for virginity and sexual inexperience, celebrated with so-called purity balls and purity rings. Just as in Victorian times and in the rural, puritanical society depicted in Haneke’s film, nowadays, women who are sexually active (outside of marriage) are still considered impure and thus abject. This notion is so prevalent and ingrained, that even women who would deny being influenced by it often dream of a white wedding, with the father of the bride leading her to the altar to basically entrust her into the husband’s custody.

Jeanne Goupil & Catherine Wagener in Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal — Jeanne Goupil and Catherine Wagener in *Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal*

A similar church ceremony is, of course, first communion – where the traditional white wedding finds it ritualistic precursor, with pre-pubescent little girls decked out in white dresses, veils and wreaths. Anne and Lore, the two 14-year-old protagonists in Joël Séria’s Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal, who meet at a catholic boarding school set in stiflingly bourgeois 1970s France, act out by playfully, then violently processing and at the same time powerfully overthrowing what society has taught them; in a pivotal scene, the two girls stage an elaborate, candle-lit and organ-accompanied mash-up of a wedding and a communion, where they pledge everlasting allegiance to … Satan. Interestingly, the film features a screne where a pet bird belonging to an older man is killed by a one of the girls – reminiscent of Klara in The White Ribbon and her disregard for patriarchal authority.

Two little girls entangled in increasingly sinister play and satanism are also the protagonists in Carlos Taboada’s swan song Veneno para las hadas (Poison for the Fairies).

Veronica, the school’s outcast, traumatised by the death of her parents, her loneliness and the ”ridiculously inappropriate bedtime stories” her nanny tells her, befriends the new student Flavia – a wealthy, sweetly happy girl from a seemingly intact family. Veronica, a master manipulator at the ripe old age of 10, convinces Flavia that she, Veronica, is a powerful witch, enabling her to blackmail Flavia into sharing her privileges (her dolls, her happy family, her family’s summer house, even her beloved puppy) with her to an uncomfortable extent.

Elsa María Gutiérrez & Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in Poison for the Fairies — Elsa María Gutiérrez and Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in *Poison for the Fairies*

Scared and intimidated by Veronica’s increasingly violent displays of her supposed magical power, including the death of Flavia’s piano teacher (which was, in reality, due to a longstanding illness, not witchcraft), Flavia despairs and, at the culmination of the film, resorts to literally burning the witch: Veronica dies in a fire, the film ending with her haunting cry: “¡Flavia ayúdame!” (“Flavia, help me!”).

Behind the societal construct of the innocent little girl not only lies the imperative virginhood, but also the requirement of a certain passivity and submissiveness. Girls are taught from an early age not to be too rambunctious, not to get themselves dirty during play – femininity is thought and taught to be pristine, docile, meek and often inferior. The fact that Klara, Anne, Lore, and Veronica cannot be described as so-called tomboys is emblematic for their characters’ subversive power: They cause their violent mayhem in the frilliest, most femine dresses, decked out in candy colors, ragcurled pigtails bouncing. Perhaps this is one of the key factors that make famous cinematic creepy girls such as Wednesday Addams, Rhoda Penmark, and the Grady twins so powerful and memorable – by society’s standards, their characters’ darkness and defiance seems to exist in direct contrast to their girly exterior.

Jitka Cerhová & Ivana Karbanová in Sedmikrásky — Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová in Sedmikrásky

They have this in common with the Marie and Marie, the heroines in Věra Chytilová‘s Sedmikrasky (Daisies) and Alice, the protagonist in Catherine Breillat‘s directing debut Une vraie jeune fille. Those girls, wearing plenty of mascara and mini dresses, cause a range of disturbance, ranging from public masturbation to con games, theft and cake fights.

Both of these films not only pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours, but are also exclusively and intimately told from the girls’ perspectives, rendering them very modern and relevant still (which perhaps also explains Daisies‘ current popularity among girls, with stills and gifs from the film very present on all kinds of online platforms).

Charlotte Alexandra in Une Vraie Jeune Fille — Charlotte Alexandra in *Une Vraie Jeune Fille*

Another similarity between those two films (and Seria’s Mais Ne Nous Delivrez Pas du Mal) is that all three of them were immediately banned upon their release in their countries of origin. All three films depict young girls who defy any Victorian Etiquette School-style rules, who actively and independently take charge of their sexuality without any hint of submissiveness. None of these films explicitly depicts violence (no blood is ever seen on screen). The Godfather, on the other hand, a film released at a similar time, featuring a litany of violence, fist fights, gun shootings and blood baths (including a lengthy scene where a man brutally ”chastises” his wife with a belt), was not banned, neither in its country of origin, nor in France, or former Czechoslovakia. Rather, it was celebrated unanimously, winning three Oscars and is to this day held up as a cinematic masterpiece.

Creep girl du jour: Mia Wasikowska in Stoker — Creep girl du jour: Mia Wasikowska in *Stoker*

To me, the decade-long banning of films depicting rebellious young women demonstrates their subversive power that can be traced to the present day; as Elizabeth Kiy concludes, ”a culture’s horror stories have always reflected what they finds terrifying (…) from the fear of liberated women in Dracula to the virgin/whore dichotomy of the slasher film, and probably always will.”

Personally, I still cling to every well-written creepy heroine appearing on my screen, such as, most recently, India in Chan-wook Park’s Stoker – hopefully dismantling harmful gender stereotypes one lace-collared dress at a time, making it a little less difficult and less lonely to be a young woman.

Gloria Endres de Oliveira is a Berlin- and London-based actor, filmmaker, photographer, and writer. Updates on and samples of her work can be found on her tumblr and she twitters at @gloriayloslobos