Rocco Siffredi
Occupation
Actor
Anatomy Of Hell Review
Terrible
It's almost never fair to reduce a film, even a very bad film, to one single image or scene - out of context, almost anything can unfairly seem offensive, moronic, or just plain clueless. However, in the new Catherine Breillat provocation, Anatomy of Hell, you can fairly easily isolate one scene as being emblematic of the whole piece: The character known only as "the man" enters the room where he's been spending a whole lot of time staring at "the woman," takes a look at her naked body, slowly inserts the handle end of a hoe-like garden implement into her vagina and then walks off screen, leaving it there sticking out from her body. They both watch. In a better film, this could have been played as an act of extreme sexual obsession, the work of a near-psychopath, or just a bored boyfriend looking for new kink. In Breillat's clumsy hands, however, it just looks like desperation; having stuck her two nameless actors in a four-night-long battle between the sexes, Breillat seems at a loss for some other way to violate her actress. So, to the garden shed he goes.
Anatomy of Hell starts off just dandy in a gay nightclub where the techno is thudding as we see "the woman" (Amira Casar) watching her boyfriend make out with some guy. She goes to the bathroom and slits her wrists, only to have "the man" (porn star Rocco Siffredi) walk in on her. He hauls her off to the doctor to get stitched up, they have a nice, tense walk, and after going down on him, she says she'll pay him to come watch her: "Watch me where I'm unwatchable." It's all rather dark and disconnected, but there's an insistent, punishing quality to these early scenes that highlight writer/director Breillat's abilities as a filmmaker. She has a slithery way with the camera - especially in a scene shot from above where Casar sidles across the nightclub dancefloor, grabbing hands and shouldering past the dancing men with a liquid malevolence - which should have made this a more enthralling film. As it stands, though, Breillat lets her talents as a sensual visualist go to waste in the name of sheer agitprop of the dullest kind.
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Romance Review
Terrible
It's not every day that you can see a well known porn star acting in serious cinema. Of course, Romance is not really worthy of being called a serious film. While its theme of one woman's struggle to overcome sexual oppression is innovative, it lacks tact and fails miserably due to the crudity of its approach. I refuse to believe that this film is some sort of groundbreaking phenomenon that French audiences will appreciate because it's a brilliant "character study" -- and, as such, that American's will scoff at it. I saw the movie with two French grad students who both walked out of the film disappointed and visibly queasy.
Marie (Caroline Trousselard) is a depressed nymphomaniac school teacher stuck in a relationship in which she cannot arouse her lover. The whole story involves her searching throughout Paris for the fufillment that her asinine boyfriend denies her. She defiles her body in the process as she encounters different men who satisfy her deprived erotic needs. She is willing to take on everything and everybody: from a vile stranger on the her apartment stairway who prosteletyzes her for oral sex, to a dominating masochistic school principal, to porn star Rocco Siffredi (whose character admits he hasn't had sex in four months). Can you imagine what happens there?
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