Erika Balsom at Bookforum:
CATHERINE BREILLAT HAS THE HOTS for Rhett Butler. The French novelist and film director mentions the conceited cad played by Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind (1939) no fewer than three times, always in the context of attraction, in I Only Believe in Myself, a book of interviews conducted by Murielle Joudet in 2022 and 2023, now appearing in an English translation by Christine Pichini. It might be unexpected for an auteur closely associated with transgression to so frequently invoke a character from classical Hollywood, a cinema hemmed in by the Hays Code in what it can say or show. When Breillat elsewhere declares her debt to the “absolute violence” of the Comte de Lautréamont’s iconoclastic poetry and asserts that “beauty ought to be cruel and frightening,” it feels more in keeping with the spirit of an oeuvre that has been celebrated, censured, and censored for its fearless depictions of sexuality. From her first book, L’Homme facile (1968), which she published at seventeen only for it to be banned for readers under eighteen, to her most recent film, Last Summer (2023), which presents without condemnation the story of a lawyer’s affair with her teenage stepson, Breillat has gone where few would dare. The breasts of an overweight twelve-year-old, lipstick traced by a stranger around a suicidal woman’s asshole, chopped bits of live earthworms dropped onto the vulva of a teenage character: “I’m not ashamed to show every kind of depravity,” she says. “I’m familiar with it. I don’t glory in it, but I know that it exists.”
more here.
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