No Breillat thread? I just caught up with
Une vraie jeune fille and
Tapage nocturne and found them really striking. The first is something of a Bressonian fetish film with a heroine that throws herself headfirst from sensation to sensation with no lines drawn between the pleasant and the unpleasant. The tone is set when, on her first night of summer vacation, she strips in front of a mirror, but instead of things getting steamy, she throws up on herself and then stays up writing all night covered in vomit "because the smell clears her head."
Breillat goes from punk to new wave for her second film, but despite its glossier style and less aggressive content, I can imagine it irritating many viewers much more. The protagonist is another spiraling sexual adventurer, juggling a handful of affairs at the same time, but here a tortured ego is the center of her character instead of an id, with many scenes hinging on her changing her mind multiple times or attempting reverse psychology on herself. Breillat does some pretty extraordinary work with the actors and her clinical approach to her obsessive heroine as well as the film's casual boundary-breaking make it a predecessor of the work of Annie Ernaux, among others. In looking up the film to get a better handle on what it's doing, I stumbled across some pretty interesting things. Breillat
calls it a "hidden remake of
Une Femme est une femme" and Luc Moullet considers it
a masterpiece:
Luc Moullet (trans. mine) wrote:Tapage nocturne was my first real encounter with Catherine Breillat. It came out the same week as Apocalypse Now. For me, there was one dud and then the perfect film that was Tapage nocturne, explosive even in its imperfections. It was the discovery of a new universe. After that, I read all of Catherine Breillat's literary work. It's the prototype of the love film, not a film of mad love but of the madness of love. I even asked myself if it wasn't something more than cinema. It's a very moving story. We feel someone carried away by passion who expresses herself completely, a heart stripped bare. I was particularly surprised by the ending when the heroine cries. It's not a melodrama at all, but there is such a tension in the film's design and in its "Breillatian" dilemma that we find ourselves confronted with a profound pathos. There is also a real formal novelty with, for example, the appearance of comic book bubbles to highlight texts or characters. With this film, I understood the importance of Breillat. It's a shock to find yourself like that, face to face with a giant of cinema.
I think his memory is a little hazy, though, since a comic book bubble only appears once, during the opening credits.
