"Anatomy of Hell"
I think there is a certain point where cinema can cross a line into bad taste, and that is where it loses interest, and becomes nothing more than repulsive to most people – myself included. But then there are the films that go further still, that push bad taste over another line and into gleeful insanity. Matthew Bright's "Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby" did this for me, as did Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo" and E. Elias Merhige's "Begotten". There's vile, and there's unwatchably vile, and then there are these films. The directors ask themselves and their cast and crew just how far can they possibly go, and then they shoot for beyond that. I adore it. It's ballsy and it's passionate and it desires to give the audience something that no other film can.
"Anatomy of Hell" is one of these pictures.
The plot of Catherine Breillat's ("Fat Girl", "Brief Crossing") film involves a woman who asks a gay man to come to her apartment to watch during her most “vulnerable moments.” She offers money to do so, and he agrees. When he gets there, she immediately strips to nothing, lays down on her bed, and asks the man to reflect on how he feels about her nudity. An hour and a half of dramatic posturing, thick hammy philosophy (that man just HATES vaginas), and medium-core pornography later and well… Most likely you haven't gotten that far.
I don't know. I think what I love about "Anatomy of Hell" so much is that it challenges me to try decipher what the point of it all is. Is it attempting to be intelligent? I suppose it may be, but everything that comes out of these two people's mouths is profoundly pretentious bullshit. The views of these individuals make me laugh. Am I to be disgusted? Absolutely. But why would a movie like this want to disgust me? I don't see how being perverted is enhancing the picture's philosophy in any way. Is it meant to be sexy? It must be, to an extent. It is undeniably erotic for short spells, although you may really have to dig through the gross-out scenes and the stagy dialogue to realize it.
I have a fantasy where Breillat watches "Anatomy of Hell" and feels not self-important and snobby about it, but rather humoured like I am. She has a history of making sexually explicit films with bleak, pessimistic views about the female form, and with this picture I get the feeling that she is poking a little fun at herself. I hope that's true, because I don't see any other way to justify its existence. Not that I need to; just thinking about it makes me giddy, and for that I am thankful.
