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bedroom without sex –Marie’s boyfriend Paul has lost interest
in her sexually, setting in motion a chain of anonymous and explicit
sexual encounters for the young heroine. |
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Examining the ‘self’ – Breillat’s protagonists
frequently examine their bodies in the mirror. Much of her work
deals with the female’s attempt to understand and explore that
body which is reflected. |
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| This
graphic shot was used as the movie poster in France, a response
to the heavy censorship the work was experiencing around the world. |
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For
the most graphic of Marie’s sexual encounters Breillat cast
Italian Porn Star Rocco Sefredi. This caused such dissention amongst
her cast and crew that Breillat used the scandal for the subject
of her latest work, Sex is Comedy (2002), about the director's
struggle to film the key sex scene in her latest movie.
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If
the protagonist’s nightly encounters weren’t already enough
for some people to handle, Breillat reveals her to be a kind hearted
elementary school teacher by day. The school’s principal it
turns out is a bondage fetishist who claims to have slept with over
10,000 women.
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In
some of the film’s only comic moments, Marie gets involved
with the S&M practices of her school principal.
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A
stranger’s proposal for oral sex leads to rape in one of the
film's more difficult scenes. ("Turn over, slut!" the
stranger says. "Whore! Bitch!...I reamed you good." She
cries after he leaves, angrily calling after him, "I'm not
ashamed, asshole!")
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“I’m
just meat,” Marie thinks to herself while volunteering to have
her body examined by gynecological students.
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The
body in halves – The controversial dream sequence that was
cut from all of the film’s R-rated prints features the lower
torsos of women as anonymous men wander, free to fufill their most
perverted sexual desires. Sex is not an object in Breillat’s
films… it is the subject.
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Depicting
birth – Breillat holds no punches when it comes to depicting
the birth of Marie’s child by using real footage of actual
childbirth. This scene was later cut by Blockbuster Video and replaced
with what they deemed more “tasteful” footage.
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