A_Ma_Souer

A ma soeur – in English, For My Sister (a.k.a. The Fat Girl) – is Catherine Breillat’s eighth film. Her cinema has always proved highly controversial and A ma soeur is no exception. The film deals with an immortal theme, spring awakening, also the topic of her Breillat’s first novel L'Homme facile (1967) and her first film, Une Vraie Jeune Fille, made in the 1976 but not released until recently. Awakening has always been a controversial theme but never more so than in Breillat’s hands. For her, sexual awakening is awakening into the fierce order of the wild, an unsettling image that draws attention to the violence at the edges of all our lives. No trivial violence this, it threatens the very existence of society. Thus the image of awakening in A ma soeur is a vision of evil, and Breillat’s cinema is a cinema of evil. What is meant by ‘evil’ in this sense' Bataille provides an answer. He writes, ‘If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it’ (Bataille 1973: 18). The evil Bataille has in mind is not merely non-utilitarian but profoundly anti-utilitarian. This is why Bataille equates it with childhood. Utilitarian society, he notes, would not survive for an instant if childish instincts were allowed to triumph (18). This relationship between pre-pubescence and evil is the key theme of A ma soeur, where sexual awakening appears as a time of waiting, waiting for the assault on utilitarian order that will bring about freedom. And freedom, Bataille notes, exists only in the instant (Bataille 1994: 66). Freedom and evil are conjoined. In a very real sense, Breillat’s cinematic achievement, culminating in A ma soeur, is a solution to a literary problem. Between the 1967 debut of L'Homme facile, a book translated into English as A Man For The Asking (Breillat 1969), and her first movie in 1976, Breillat published two further books and a stage play. The screenplay for Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl) is based on Breillat’s fictional work, Le Soupirail (1974). Her second film, Tapage nocturne was based on and named after another piece of fiction (Breillat 1979). Cinema has allowed Breillat to pursue a decidedly literary preoccupation with pubescent female sexuality. That her overall approach is fundamentally poetic is evident from her first book L'Homme facile, a genre-breaking work that continually recrosses the boundary between verse and prose. It begins with a poem and the text itself displays pronounced poetic characteristics. Lines are often terminated not at the margin but to emphasise to a phrase or a word, as in poetry. Blank spaces and lines are similarly used to create emphasis. The following is an example: L. turns her back on him and scampers away to the street corner […] where she disappears (Breillat 1969: 25) The three dots in the text represent ten line-spaces in Breillat’s book, while there is no stop after ‘disappears’ even though it marks the end of the chapter. And as indicated the phrase ‘where she disappears’ is right justified. As well as these devices, words are sometimes capitalised, and parts of paragraphs often perform the function of lines in standard verse. Breillat also creates her own terms, words such as ‘sexcitement’ (29) and ‘ivagination’ (39), and she uses phrases for their purely poetic allusion, like ‘he has pushed his balls too hard into a nebulous question mark’ (31). On the other hand, any narrative is difficult to discern. Indeed, L'Homme facile is hardly even a prose-poem. At best, it is poetry with occasional prose-like features. This peculiarly poetic character of the book has a specific, if unannounced, purpose. For Bataille, the goal of poetry is to express sovereignty, this being the dissolution or vacation of the self. He describes kings and dictators as the antithesis of sovereignty (Bataille 1989: 147). Marguerite Duras once asked him if sovereignty could be given an external appearance. ‘That of a cow in the pasture will do nicely,’ he replied (Duras 1986: 13). Bataille sees poetry as words never having to serve a useful purpose (Bataille 1994: 66), and be this he means a utilitarian purpose. Kierkegaard had earlier seen poetry as relating to ‘the location of depravity in human life’ (Adorno 1989: 6). The useless purpose to which poetry testifies for Bataille is the purpose of sovereignty. The self, a creation of utility, blocks sovereignty and must be smashed. He talks of ‘the hatred of poetry’ (Bataille 1991:10). For neither Bataille nor Breillat is poetry merely a form of convenience or a vehicle for some extraneous content. By its very nature, it is a form that hates utility and loves sovereignty. This core idea of surrealist poetics justifies situating Breillat within that tradition. The term ‘surrealism’, as it is being employed here, refers first and foremost to a particular idea, the notion that humans are plenitudes seeking dissolution. This idea was famously adumbrated during debate between Sartre and Bataille in 1942 (Heckman 1974: xxv). Independently of Sartre and Bataille, Gombrowicz made essentially the same point (Gombrowicz 1985: 6). Hobhouse describes this surrealism as a surrealism that is still concerned with ‘the potency of images, the life to come of mysterious forms’ but not necessarily committed to expressive devices such as formal ambiguity, conjunctions of disparate objects, and surreal dream spaces (Hobhouse 1988: 219), just as it is not inextricably tied to automatic writing. These are simply tools. Essentially a poet, Breillat’s problem is that the written cannot quite capture sovereignty precisely because it is the written word (Breillat undated). Bataille also recognised this (Bataille 1994: 84). The words may allude to it but there is something about sovereignty they simply cannot capture. By their very nature, words are utilitarian and so they are always trying to do the impossible, to express that ineffability beyond utility, to say what cannot be said (Wittgenstein 1955: esp.189). Painting is one solution to this problem, for what cannot be said may nevertheless be shown. In this respect, Magritte’s art is central, for it too represents an attempt to express sovereignty. A good example of this is his painting, Rape (1934). The work presents a paradoxical image, a head that is also a female torso. The expression on the face is extreme, an expression of shock, with eyes bulging and lips pursed, or at least that is how it seems, for the face has actually been erased. It is nothing more than nipples, a navel, and a pubis. The head is a body and its expression is a bodily expression. This painting communicates something no poem can express. Nonetheless, as a medium for the expression of sovereignty, it remains limited and in a sense its limitation is the complement to that of writing. Octavio Paz describes this problem: No painting can tell a story, for none can render passing time. Painting confronts us with definitive, unchanging, motionless realities. There is no picture… which gives us the impression… of movement… In a picture things are, they do not happen (quoted in Dobyns 1982: vii). Bataille says of sovereignty, ‘It would be incommunicable if we could not approach it in two ways: through poetry and through the description of those conditions by which one arrives at these states’ (Bataille 1973: 26). From this perspective, it is not so much that poetry is a failure, but there is also another way, in this particular case it is via the moving image. The connection between poetry and the cinema of evil is emphasized at the very beginning of A ma soeur, in exactly the same way that it is highlighted near the start of L'Homme facile: through verse. A comparison of these verses immediately indicates a connection between A ma soeur and L'Homme facile. The verse in the book begins: A man for the asking No need for unmasking He’s yours on sight In the park In the dark The very first night. Breillat wrote the corresponding verse in A ma soeur when she was twelve (Weigand undated). It begins: I get so bored from six to twelve, From twelve to six, From twelve to twelve, All the time… If only I could find Alive or dead A man, a body An animal … A body, a soul, A Werewolf – I couldn’t care less – Just to dream. The first verse describes a man for the asking, the second the longing of a pubescent female for such a man. Both verses imply a link between this man and sovereignty but they also do something else. They emphasize the essentially poetic character of the work as a whole. A ma soeur tells the story of two sisters, Elena and Anaïs. Elena is fifteen, Anaïs two years younger. Whereas Elena is beautiful, made-up and alluringly dressed, Anaïs the fat sister, is unadorned and apparently yet to reach the stage of caring about her appearance. She’s a slob. Her hair is unkempt; she eats most of the time. She seems lost in some pre-adolescent fantasy and is incapable of polite conversation, either with her parents or with the only eligible male on the scene, Fernando. The scene is the beachside. It is summer holidays, a time away from the world of work, just as it is in Breillat’s earlier film, 36 Fillette. In one scene the sisters are reflecting on how they would like to lose their virginity. Elena says that she wants it to be in the circumstances of love, gentleness and intimacy. Anaïs prefers a savage and anonymous encounter. ‘I want my first time to be with a boy I don’t love. Because afterwards to realise that he doesn’t love you or you don’t and you feel dumb.’ Elena thinks she knows better. ‘You’ll see when you fall in love,’ she says. Anaïs replies, ‘I doubt it.’ As the film unfolds the sisters live out their fantasies. In typical bourgeois fashion, first Elena brings Fernando home to meet her parents. Later, when they are alone, Fernando brags about his sexual prowess. He is indifferent to his lovers. Responding when Elena asks if he loved any of the women that he seduced, he says, ‘I slept with them because I’m a guy.’ He enjoys humiliating and scorning them. ‘Sometimes its so easy it makes me sick,’ he says. Of course, he tells Elena, he feels differently about her. There is some heavy petting and soon Fernando is being secreted into the sister’s bedroom. Anaïs has little choice but to pretend to sleep while the lovers go about their business. Elena wants Fernando but at the same time she resists him. She has her virginity to consider. He tells her that if she loves him she’ll let him sodomise her, which will protect her virginity while demonstrating her true feelings for him. He assures her that it is an established practice and nothing to worry about. But she finds the experience agonising instead of exciting or pleasant. Nonetheless she submits. The next night Fernando returns and takes Elena’s virginity. While critics such as Stratton (2001) typically found these sex scenes to be ‘sensitive to the feelings of … female characters’ – and by implication, if explicit still a depiction of fairly standard sexual activity – for Breillat they signify the true rape of the film. Fernando steals his mother’s ring to consecrate his dastardly deed. It is all a fraud, as the stolen ring signifies. Elena has been duped and not just by utilitarian order. She has also been cheated by her own deluded fantasies, by her own domesticated adolescent dreams of true love. Now she must pay the price. All the while Anaïs listens on, weeping silently for a sister. She knew what Fernando had in mind right from the start, the most calculated libidinal gratification without any genuine reciprocity – not that Anaïs is concerned with reciprocity. Fernando’s deception is the general deceit of bourgeois romance, exposed so ruthlessly in Breillat’s previous film. But Anaïs is not an innocent abroad like Marie, the central character of Romance. The defilement Anaïs must witness is mere confirmation of what she already knows. Hers is the innocent knowledge of a child who is not fooled by the allure of utilitarian existence. She waits, all the while knowing the truth of sexual relations. Her waiting comes to its eventual end during a stopover on the way back to Paris, the holidays cut short because of the scandal over the ring. The film offers various omens heralding this final deflowering as the tension relentlessly builds. As they speed down the highway David Bowie is on the car radio singing ‘The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell’ (Stratton 2001). Car horns blare. Lights flash in the women’s faces. Finally they pull over into a parking bay to rest and as a truck passes the driver’s and Anaïs’s eyes meet. There is something strange, something slightly sinister in the exchange. Then, while they rest, a night stalker suddenly, violently strikes. He shatters the windscreen with a monkey wrench and dispatches Elena with a single blow, as if she was nothing more than vermin. The mother is summarily strangled. All the while Anaïs watches on, chewing on a strip of green-blue toffee. As the attacker drags her from the car she mutters something in a little, barely convincing voice. He stuffs her panties into her mouth and has intercourse with her. Remember, this is not a rape scene for Breillat. This is the truth about sex, about real sex and not the Hollywood fantasy. Just before he disappears, there is a suspended moment as the stalker suddenly recognises a kindred spirit. No words are exchanged. A fleeting look, an animal glance is all that is needed. Then he is gone, vanishing back into the darkness whence he came. The last scenes are set the following morning. As police lead Anaïs out of the wood she denies any violation. A policeman reports, ‘She was in the woods. She says he didn’t rape her,’ and Anaïs adds, ‘Don’t believe me if you don’t want to’ – a rather childish retort. She is protecting her lover, her man for the asking who came along and saved her from the hell of utility, the destination of all pretty things. The final scene is a freeze-frame. Anaïs is a wild, staring, savage figure, hair askew. The cinematic apotheosis of Magritte’s Rape, she is poetry visualised and then rendered in a moving picture. And the picture tells a story, a tale, an account of the experience of sovereignty.