Catherine Wheatley

Contested Interactions: Watching Catherine Breillat’s Scenes of Sexual Violence

Catherine Breillat’s cinematic universe is replete with allusions to violation and sexual assault. Yet despite the prominence of sexual violation within Breillat’s films, the subject has received little extended critical attention, and those theorists that do acknowledge it seem to fall victim to the paradox that Tanya Horeck sees as characterizing many critical accounts of cinematic rape: that the concern with questions of reality and representation effaces any substantial consideration of the issue of rape itself. In light of this failure to acknowledge the full significance of the act of rape, it is important to ask, Horeck argues, how rape is being used to communicate ideas about the relationship between audiences and texts. It is precisely this concern that shapes the author’s discussion of Breillat’s rape scenes in this article. Focusing on a “twinned” pair of scenes of sexual violation in À ma sœur! (2001) and Sex Is Comedy (2002), the author examines how Breillat blurs the boundaries between constraint, consent and collusion whilst simultaneously drawing an explicit link between sexual violence and the cinematic institution that encourages an analogous reading of these scenes as commentary upon the cinematic experience itself. The author’s intention is to investigate the myriad manners in which women (and, arguably, men) are taken against their will not only within Breillat’s films, but also by them, and ultimately to ask how this might raise significant questions about the power dynamics not only between the sexes, but also, and perhaps more importantly, between films and audiences.