 Starring: Sarah Pratt, Gilles Guillain
Director: Catherine Breillat
Year Of Release: 2001
Plot: 16-year-old French youth Thomas meets middle-aged Brit Alice on a cross-channel ferry. Deciding to spend some time together, they have a meal and then go for a drink, discussing their lives and bonding along the way. Alice tells Thomas that she has just left her husband and eventually they sleep together, even though he is a virgin. However things may not be exactly as they appear. |
This is the second Catherine Breillat film I’ve written about in the Movie-A-Day series (the first being
A Ma Soeur), and there are a couple more to come. The reason there are so many is that I really like her movies, even though she’s the sort of director who normally drives me up the wall.
She is arty and rather pretentious, and fills her movies with people who talk like they’ve swallowed a philosophy textbook. She is, in other words, a French film director. However at the same time I really enjoy her movies themselves (although ‘enjoy’ may be the wrong word to describe them).
With films by many arty-farty directors you get to the end and it all seems completely pointless and just an excuse for them to congratulate themselves on how wonderful they think they are, but Breillat’s movies really seem to be struggling to understand and explore issues surrounding male and female sexuality, and they do so in a thought-provoking way while telling interesting stories. While in some films the philosophy textbook talk seems to be there more to show off the director’s intellectual pretensions, with Breillat you feel it’s because it would be very hard for her to explore the heart of the complex psychology of human sexuality that she’s attempting to deal with in any other way.
Brief Crossing is a much quieter, stylistically simple movie that her more controversial films, such as A Ma Soeur, Romance and Anatomy Of Hell, which have mainly become notorious for featuring graphic ‘real’ sex. They’re all full-on explorations of human sexuality and while she may have gone a little too far in Anatomy Of Hell, underneath the contrivances and slightly ponciness, there are all sorts of fascinating arguments going on, which ensure that you feel there’s actually a point to showing the in and outs of sex (if you’ll pardon the pun).
Brief Crossing is certainly simpler and less graphic, but intellectually it’s one of her most interesting works. For most of the running time it’s a relatively static two-hander, featuring a middle-aged woman and a 16-year-old youth talking about their lives. Underneath this simple set-up is a fascinating discussion of how age affects your outlook on the world and how others see you, and things like whether a woman getting married is basically giving up her sexuality and individuality for a nice, comfortable, but soulless existence.
On this score, if you’ve seen any of Breillat’s other movies, you might have expected the film to spend 90 minutes telling you how evil men are, but Brief Crossing is far more complicated than that, as there’s an interesting sexual role-reversal and power dynamic in the film. Thomas is virile and has the powerful bravado of youth, but he’s sexually inexperienced, while Alice is older and more cynical, but is far more worldly wise when it comes to sex. The ending also leaves a lot of interesting questions that put a different spin on what you’ve just seen.
As all that sounds quite interesting in a stroke-your-beard kind of way, you may think I’m being unfair when I say Breillat is the sort of director who normally makes me want to punch something very hard. In order to see what I mean, here’s the IMDB plot synopsis for the film, apparently written by Breillat herself. “Desire for a subject that functions like a brief fling with no future as such, yet embellished by that very fact. Because something fleeting and futureless is not necessarily pathetic or trivial. A brief crossing, perhaps an initiatory trip. Filming a guy's "first time", filming him like a girl. Gut level skin deep... Nostalgia for vast ocean liners, for places "beyond the law" where you can venture outside of life, safe within an interlude. Describing a passion while respecting classical tragedy's unity of time and place, setting the stage for the eternal play of Masculine/Feminine. A hot-blooded Latin temperament versus an apparently cool English one. A ship - one night - Sudden intimacy between an Englishwoman whose complexion is frosted by bitterness and a teenager whose gaze glows like ardent coals.”
Now is it just me, or do you read that and then want to buy a copy of Brief Crossing, just so you can set fire to it with a blowtorch? If someone came up to you and read Breillat’s description of what the film is about, would you even vaguely have any desire to watch it, or would you immediately write it off as pointless, pretentious drivel?
However that’s almost the most fascinating thing about Breillat. When you watch her films, there is undoubtedly a pretentious air to them, and yet it works. What she shows is that the artier end of the film world has been so inundated with tripe, that it’s now very difficult to know what’s actually worthwhile and what isn’t. There are endless directors who talk like Breillat and who can come up with plot synopses even more opaque and poncey than the one for Brief Crossing (after all, reading that would you have any clue the film was basically just two people talking on a ferry and then shagging? Yes, there’s more to it than that, which is why Breillat gets so flowery, but purely on plot terms, that’s pretty much what happens), but when you watch their movies, they’re absolutely awful.
Because of this, all arty films where it isn’t easy to understand what they’re all about (particularly from the ways the directors talk about them), tend to get tarred with the same brush. Although I ardently wish these many of these arty-farty directors would descend from their own anus and start making movies and talking about them in ways that make real sense, rather than sounding intellectual enough to be meaningful while actually being either idiotically simple or complete empty, it doesn’t mean all films by these directors are worthless. It’s just very difficult to sort the good from the bad, and demands an effort most viewers would be unwilling to put in, to sort through an awful lot of rubbish to find the ones that genuinely are trying to tackle complex issues in interesting ways. Breillat’s movies do that, but a lot of the time she makes it hard to see, by coating everything in an air of pretention.
I think the difference between her films and those of many others is that they work on their own terms. With many directors you feel like you need to read an accompanying essay to get anything out of the movie, which seems to me a rather frustrating and pointless way to make a film. If what you’re getting at isn’t in the movie itself, why bother? However while there are a lot of things Breillat is trying to do which may not come through when you first watch one of her movie, they nevertheless work as films in their own right. You can see what she’s trying to explore and she does it in an interesting way.
It is the difference between the director and the film. Breillat may be the sort of director who normally drives me to distraction, but her films exist almost apart from that, and while they may be a little pretentious, they’re also fascinating and well worth a look.
PS: You may have noticed the synopsis a reference to ‘Filming a guy's "first time"’, which is allegedly what Breillat actually did. Although not shown as graphically in some of her other movie (and there’s a lot of debate over whether the sex in the film is real, as it isn’t exactly coy), it’s said that actor Gilles Guillain was indeed a virgin and lost his cherry on camera, as Breillat wanted to be able to capture the reality of the situation, rather than just a facsimile. Whether Gilles really had sex for the first time in the film or not, it just shows what Breillat is trying to achieve with her frank depictions of sex, and that she’s attempting to find truths about sexuality that are difficult to explore in other ways.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Bridget Jones's Diary - Or, why do some people see this idiotic woman as a role model?
NEXT: Brief Encounter - Or, why film has difficulty taking us into people's minds and thoughts
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
