Breillat

I have always wanted to like Catherine Breillat’s films, but never have. I find her a cut-rate Eric Rohmer, trying and failing to equal Rohmer’s dialogue about sex and love and making up for it with shock value. People liked “Fat Girl” and most of it was pretty good but the ending was the kind of bullshit stunt she pulls way too often. Her other movies have see-sawed from incredibly boring (“Sex is Comedy”) to one of the most wretched, loathsome films I have ever seen (“Anatomy of Hell”). That said, I still occasionally sit down to watch one of her films with the hopes that her occasionally good dialogue will combine with her feminism and frank discussions of sex to create a truly good movie.

And last night that paid off when I watched her 2001 film “Brief Crossing,” which works very well. The story of a woman in her late 30s hooking up with a 16 year old boy on an overnight crossing from France to Britain has the potential for the typical Breillat disaster–making us feel uncomfortable instead of delivering us a solid film. But the dialogue works, the story works, the actors are good, and the twist at the end isn’t grotesque like the end of “Fat Girl,” but instead makes a lot of sense within the world of the character.