36 FILLETTE (CATHERINE BREILLAT, 1988)
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
6:45 PM
Friday 08 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:40 PM
Saturday 16 May
Rating: R18+
Duration: 88 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Delphine Zentout, Étienne Chicot, Olivier Parnière, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Berta Domínguez D., Jean-François Stévenin, Diane Bellego, Adrienne Bonnet
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
6:45 PM
Friday 08 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:40 PM
Saturday 16 May
Rating: R18+
Duration: 88 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Delphine Zentout, Étienne Chicot, Olivier Parnière, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Berta Domínguez D., Jean-François Stévenin, Diane Bellego, Adrienne Bonnet
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘Impressive, painfully candid … Lili is played with devastating realism by Delphine Zentout.’ – David Stratton, The Movie Show
Furious at what she perceives as the hypocrisy and banality of the world around her, fourteen-year-old Lili (Delphine Zentout) has only one goal: to lose her virginity while on a family holiday along France’s Atlantic coast. Sneaking out one evening to drink alcohol and club with adults, she meets fortysomething Maurice (Étienne Chicot), a jaded playboy who has few compunctions about taking advantage of her. Unsure of how far she’s willing to go and incensed by the older man’s indifference, the assertive yet vulnerable Lili is placed in increasingly unsafe situations, caught in a battle of wills in which the power dynamic is far from tilted her way.
Featuring a key supporting role by French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud, Catherine Breillat’s international breakthrough film – based on a novel she wrote about her own teenage experiences – was controversial in its day, and time has if anything only increased its transgressive charge. It remains a frank, unsentimental and singularly pungent depiction of feminine coming-of-age, anchored by Zentout’s fearless performance.
Introduced by Beaudicea Smith-Davies at Ritz Cinemas and Philippa Hawker at Lido Cinemas.
‘Impressive, painfully candid … Lili is played with devastating realism by Delphine Zentout.’ – David Stratton, The Movie Show
Furious at what she perceives as the hypocrisy and banality of the world around her, fourteen-year-old Lili (Delphine Zentout) has only one goal: to lose her virginity while on a family holiday along France’s Atlantic coast. Sneaking out one evening to drink alcohol and club with adults, she meets fortysomething Maurice (Étienne Chicot), a jaded playboy who has few compunctions about taking advantage of her. Unsure of how far she’s willing to go and incensed by the older man’s indifference, the assertive yet vulnerable Lili is placed in increasingly unsafe situations, caught in a battle of wills in which the power dynamic is far from tilted her way.
Featuring a key supporting role by French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud, Catherine Breillat’s international breakthrough film – based on a novel she wrote about her own teenage experiences – was controversial in its day, and time has if anything only increased its transgressive charge. It remains a frank, unsentimental and singularly pungent depiction of feminine coming-of-age, anchored by Zentout’s fearless performance.
Introduced by Beaudicea Smith-Davies at Ritz Cinemas and Philippa Hawker at Lido Cinemas.
FILM NOTES
By Jane Mills
By Jane Mills
Jane MIlls is Honorary A/Professor at UNSW and programmer for Antenna Documentary Festival. She has taught, written about, viewed and loved films for a very long time.
Shame and No Shame in 36 fillette
Most articles about French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat (b. 1948) start by mentioning her reputation as a ‘porno-auteuriste’ of ‘porn dressed up as art’. You’ll certainly see adolescent sexuality, paedophilia, male and female nudity, masturbation, fellatio and sexual intercourse in 36 fillette, Breillat’s break-out third feature. But to call her a pornographer fails to acknowledge that her work explicitly challenges pornography’s objectification of women as mere flesh. Her focus is intense intimacy, gender conflict and the internalised sense of shame young women brought up in a repressive male-dominated world can feel when puberty arrives.
36 Fillette has much to say about the subtle evolutions of female teenage desire, the quest for sexual identity and Breillat’s notion of the ‘tyranny of virginity’, in terms of how society makes 14-year-old Lili (in a fabulous performance by 16-year-old Delphine Zentout) feel: simultaneously sexually desirous and deeply ashamed of her body. The title refers to the final dress size for the pubertal girl who, as Lili makes clear, can’t help but feel shame about her developing body and almost uncontrollable sexuality. This shame is induced in Lili by her parents, the Church and the rest of society, just as it was in Breillat, who recalled being inducted into the hall of shame when, reaching puberty early, her breasts seemed to outgrow her bras every week – as is clearly happening to Lili.
Breillat contextualised her ideas about this shame. The day before she was about to direct her first film, Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl, 1976), about a 14-year-old girl’s sexual awakening (which would depict her naked breasts, an earthworm being pushed into her vulva and mutual masturbation), she had a tense conversation with Italian neo-realist Roberto Rossellini. Responding to her boasts of her (as yet untested) directorial, skills he demanded: ‘What else can you bring to the depiction of young girls that men haven’t already captured?’ Shamelessly, Breillat replied: ‘The look of shame. Because it’s you who gave us shame, and we are the ones who carry it.’
Shame infuses the origins of 36 fillette. After the moral outrage her sexually explicit films and novels had created – her first novel, L’Homme facile (1968), written when Breillat was 17, was banned to readers under the age of 18 – she later related: ‘I was a pariah in France, its worst director, the shame of the nation … I went into a movie theatre [where] they played films on a loop. So I went in at noon and stayed until midnight watching Baby Doll [Elia Kazan, 1956] on repeat. And the next day I wrote [my novel] 36 fillette.’ In Kazan’s film, adapted by Tennessee Williams from his own fiction, Carroll Baker plays a virginal teenager whose confused innocence, ignorance and lack of shame outraged audiences at the time: the very feelings Breillat had known.
Autobiography plays a large part in Breillat’s work. In 36 fillette’s long central scene, Maurice (Étienne Chicot), a balding, 40-something, fast-failing playboy, tries to force himself upon the young Lili. This is a replay of Breillat’s own experience when, when she was 14, an older man attempted to rape her. Breillat, like Lili, eventually avoided being raped and then insisted he take her back to the night club where she’d met him and, in front of his friends, demanded he give her a lift home: ‘it didn’t destroy my sense of innocence,’ she recalled, ‘because I came out the victor.’ She gives Lili greater self-awareness: when her parents attack her, verbally and physically, for staying out late and for being a slut, Lili bursts into tears and screams that she did want to have sex but didn’t dare because she felt ashamed.
For Lili, ‘being a virgin is horrible.’ So, too, is being thought a slut. Referencing Freud’s famous question, Maurice continually asks her what she wants. Lili knows, or thinks she knows, but is ashamed of what she wants. Maurice will never understand that Lili wants to be taken seriously, to have profound discussions and sex only with a man who likes all of her, not just her body: ’I have a horror of being taken for a stupid cunt who swallows flatteries like a dog being stroked.’ When Maurice thinks she’ll let him fuck her if he pays her, she retorts: ‘I don’t want to cost. I want to matter.’ Lili and Breillat echo each other when Lili asks scornfully if Maurice wants to cut her in two; Breillat’s version of this is her later comment about the horror of pornography which effectively cuts humans, who are sexual and spiritual, in two.
Amid the storm and stress of Lili’s adolescent hopes, desires, burgeoning sexuality and feelings of shame, she meets famous concert pianist, Boris Golovine (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The only person to take Lili seriously, he listens to her childish boasts and chatter and respects her intention of becoming a writer. It’s fair to say so far that her writing is pretentious juvenilia, but he listens attentively, always interested, never judgmental. Understanding her confused, internalised sense of shame and desire, he advises her to treat the world like a giant box-spring mattress: ‘You bounce on it, then you land somewhere else.’ This scene is Breillat’s nod to the adventurousness of 1960s French New Wave cinema and to Léaud himself who, when Lili’s age, made his acting debut in François Truffaut’s seminal Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959). Not until the last scene does Lili understand Golovine’s advice.
It would be a spoiler to reveal how Lili finally loses her virginity – for she loses it, of course. But as the glorious smile on her face in the last freeze-frame shot (a shot surely evoking the spectre of Truffaut’s celebrated final frozen shot of the young Léaud in The 400 Blows) shows, she now realises that, far from loss, she’s gained: she’s gained experience and the knowledge that there need be no split between mind and body. Lili, Breillat shows us, has shamelessly bounced on a mattress and landed elsewhere. We know she’ll keep on bouncing.
Most articles about French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat (b. 1948) start by mentioning her reputation as a ‘porno-auteuriste’ of ‘porn dressed up as art’. You’ll certainly see adolescent sexuality, paedophilia, male and female nudity, masturbation, fellatio and sexual intercourse in 36 fillette, Breillat’s break-out third feature. But to call her a pornographer fails to acknowledge that her work explicitly challenges pornography’s objectification of women as mere flesh. Her focus is intense intimacy, gender conflict and the internalised sense of shame young women brought up in a repressive male-dominated world can feel when puberty arrives.
36 Fillette has much to say about the subtle evolutions of female teenage desire, the quest for sexual identity and Breillat’s notion of the ‘tyranny of virginity’, in terms of how society makes 14-year-old Lili (in a fabulous performance by 16-year-old Delphine Zentout) feel: simultaneously sexually desirous and deeply ashamed of her body. The title refers to the final dress size for the pubertal girl who, as Lili makes clear, can’t help but feel shame about her developing body and almost uncontrollable sexuality. This shame is induced in Lili by her parents, the Church and the rest of society, just as it was in Breillat, who recalled being inducted into the hall of shame when, reaching puberty early, her breasts seemed to outgrow her bras every week – as is clearly happening to Lili.
Breillat contextualised her ideas about this shame. The day before she was about to direct her first film, Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl, 1976), about a 14-year-old girl’s sexual awakening (which would depict her naked breasts, an earthworm being pushed into her vulva and mutual masturbation), she had a tense conversation with Italian neo-realist Roberto Rossellini. Responding to her boasts of her (as yet untested) directorial, skills he demanded: ‘What else can you bring to the depiction of young girls that men haven’t already captured?’ Shamelessly, Breillat replied: ‘The look of shame. Because it’s you who gave us shame, and we are the ones who carry it.’
Shame infuses the origins of 36 fillette. After the moral outrage her sexually explicit films and novels had created – her first novel, L’Homme facile (1968), written when Breillat was 17, was banned to readers under the age of 18 – she later related: ‘I was a pariah in France, its worst director, the shame of the nation … I went into a movie theatre [where] they played films on a loop. So I went in at noon and stayed until midnight watching Baby Doll [Elia Kazan, 1956] on repeat. And the next day I wrote [my novel] 36 fillette.’ In Kazan’s film, adapted by Tennessee Williams from his own fiction, Carroll Baker plays a virginal teenager whose confused innocence, ignorance and lack of shame outraged audiences at the time: the very feelings Breillat had known.
Autobiography plays a large part in Breillat’s work. In 36 fillette’s long central scene, Maurice (Étienne Chicot), a balding, 40-something, fast-failing playboy, tries to force himself upon the young Lili. This is a replay of Breillat’s own experience when, when she was 14, an older man attempted to rape her. Breillat, like Lili, eventually avoided being raped and then insisted he take her back to the night club where she’d met him and, in front of his friends, demanded he give her a lift home: ‘it didn’t destroy my sense of innocence,’ she recalled, ‘because I came out the victor.’ She gives Lili greater self-awareness: when her parents attack her, verbally and physically, for staying out late and for being a slut, Lili bursts into tears and screams that she did want to have sex but didn’t dare because she felt ashamed.
For Lili, ‘being a virgin is horrible.’ So, too, is being thought a slut. Referencing Freud’s famous question, Maurice continually asks her what she wants. Lili knows, or thinks she knows, but is ashamed of what she wants. Maurice will never understand that Lili wants to be taken seriously, to have profound discussions and sex only with a man who likes all of her, not just her body: ’I have a horror of being taken for a stupid cunt who swallows flatteries like a dog being stroked.’ When Maurice thinks she’ll let him fuck her if he pays her, she retorts: ‘I don’t want to cost. I want to matter.’ Lili and Breillat echo each other when Lili asks scornfully if Maurice wants to cut her in two; Breillat’s version of this is her later comment about the horror of pornography which effectively cuts humans, who are sexual and spiritual, in two.
Amid the storm and stress of Lili’s adolescent hopes, desires, burgeoning sexuality and feelings of shame, she meets famous concert pianist, Boris Golovine (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The only person to take Lili seriously, he listens to her childish boasts and chatter and respects her intention of becoming a writer. It’s fair to say so far that her writing is pretentious juvenilia, but he listens attentively, always interested, never judgmental. Understanding her confused, internalised sense of shame and desire, he advises her to treat the world like a giant box-spring mattress: ‘You bounce on it, then you land somewhere else.’ This scene is Breillat’s nod to the adventurousness of 1960s French New Wave cinema and to Léaud himself who, when Lili’s age, made his acting debut in François Truffaut’s seminal Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959). Not until the last scene does Lili understand Golovine’s advice.
It would be a spoiler to reveal how Lili finally loses her virginity – for she loses it, of course. But as the glorious smile on her face in the last freeze-frame shot (a shot surely evoking the spectre of Truffaut’s celebrated final frozen shot of the young Léaud in The 400 Blows) shows, she now realises that, far from loss, she’s gained: she’s gained experience and the knowledge that there need be no split between mind and body. Lili, Breillat shows us, has shamelessly bounced on a mattress and landed elsewhere. We know she’ll keep on bouncing.
THE RESTORATION
Source: Cinedis-Les Films du loup
Restoration by Éclair Laboratory with Le Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée involvement and oversight by Emmanuel Schlumberger and Catherine Breillat.
Director: Catherine Breillat; Production Company: French Productions, CB Films; Producer: Emmanuel Schlumberger, Valérie Seydoux; Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Roger Salloch; based on the novel by Catherine Breillat; Photography: Laurent Dailland; Editor: Yann Dedet; Music: Maxime Schmitt; Production Design: Olivier Paultre; Costume Design: Valérie Seydoux // Cast: Delphine Zentout (Lili), Étienne Chicot (Maurice), Olivier Parnière (Bertrand), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Boris Golovine), Berta Domínguez D. (Anne-Marie), Jean-François Stevenin (le père).
France | 1988 | 88 mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | R 18+
Restoration by Éclair Laboratory with Le Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée involvement and oversight by Emmanuel Schlumberger and Catherine Breillat.
Director: Catherine Breillat; Production Company: French Productions, CB Films; Producer: Emmanuel Schlumberger, Valérie Seydoux; Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Roger Salloch; based on the novel by Catherine Breillat; Photography: Laurent Dailland; Editor: Yann Dedet; Music: Maxime Schmitt; Production Design: Olivier Paultre; Costume Design: Valérie Seydoux // Cast: Delphine Zentout (Lili), Étienne Chicot (Maurice), Olivier Parnière (Bertrand), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Boris Golovine), Berta Domínguez D. (Anne-Marie), Jean-François Stevenin (le père).
France | 1988 | 88 mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | R 18+