“I knew I had to stop, but I didn’t care”: Catherine Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness

For those accustomed to defining their personhood solely in relation to the mind, a rupture in the body can come as an indelible shock. Such is the devastation that opens Catherine Breillat’s 2014 film Abuse of Weakness. In a composed overhead shot that begins with a painterly expanse of abstracted white forms, Breillat widens our […]

Twisted sisters: Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl

Fat Girl (2001) is perhaps the quintessential Catherine Breillat film. A crucial figure in new French cinema, Breillat’s works are known as much for their challenging, graphic content as their cold, distanced modes of observation; traditional titillation has no place in her oeuvre. This certainly can be said of Fat Girl, which depicts—with no holds […]