An uncomfortable tale of sexual awakening, A Ma Soeur! is the follow-up to French director Catherine Breillat's 1999 hot potato Romance. The film received its UK premiere earlier this year at the Edinburgh Film Festival, accompanied by Breillat's controversial debut Une Vraie Jeune Fille, made in 1976. kamera.co.uk's Chris Wiegand caught up with Breillat to talk about her fourth decade of film-making.
CW: I saw both A Ma Soeur! and Une Vraie Jeune Fille at Edinburgh this year. The two films seemed to have a lot in common - both are set over the summer, both depict the sexual awakening of a young girl. How do you now feel about your first film, made 25 years ago?
CB: A film is always very revealing of oneself; you always reveal yourself in your work. When I came out [with Une Vraie Jeune Fille] and people saw me as the author, I felt like they saw me naked - there was an impression of real shyness.
Time hasn't changed what I wanted to do. Fundamentally, I haven't changed much. I've evolved but I haven't basically changed. It is more society that has changed, and that now accepts me rather than thinks my films horrible and vulgar. Society has accepted my film and given another identity to it now. Society has changed, I haven't changed. That's the impression I've got. I've fought a lot for society to have a different way of looking at things.
CW: Especially sexual issues. I've always thought that your films are about sex, as opposed to being sexy films.
CB: I take sexuality as a subject and not as an object...
CW: Une Vraie Jeune Fille was being shown for the first time in the UK at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Was it banned upon its release in France?
CB: No. I can speak very well to censorship! Even though new laws had come out, it wasn't X-rated because I was able to speak to [the board of censors]. Even though it's a film about sexuality it wasn't a 'sexy' film in the sense of making men masturbate. It was a film on the shame of sexuality. And that could not in any way be censored.
By fact, the film was 'censored', even though it wasn't physically censored, because there was a compulsion in society that was saying that films that talked about sexuality should be banned. Distributors, newspapers, critics ... everybody thought it was a horrible pornographic film. So as a fact, it was censored ... You can fight against censorship but if a society itself self-censors something, that's far more terrible.
CW: It appeared at roughly the same time as Last Tango In Paris ...
CB: Just after The Empire Of The Senses. I was shooting the film when the X-rating happened in France.
CW: It also makes an interesting companion piece to Belle De Jour, released in the previous decade. Did that film influence you in any way?
CB: I was influenced not by Belle De Jour but by the Russian literature that talks of the woman cut in two: one is the inaccessible woman up on a pedestal, the other in a brothel, and in fact they're the same. For me, Romance is really a re-make of Belle De Jour.
CW: Both Une Vraie Jeune Fille and A Ma Soeur! contain songs written by yourself. Are these songs there to work as a kind of commentary on the action?
CB: Yes. But it's not the same for the two films. In Une Vraie Jeune Fille I wrote a copy of the naïve, sexual songs of the 1960s. It's more a copy of what I would hear on the radio. In A Ma Soeur! it's completely different, it's songs that I wrote myself when I was 12.
CW: The scene that stuck out for me in A Ma Soeur! is the one where Elena gives herself to the Italian student.
CB: The scene with the boy and the girl lasted 15 pages ... I was very worried by it. There were 15 pages and several shots ... Everything was learnt very mechanically. It took all day. We shot it 20 times. The tenth time was absolutely perfect, but it was only 6 o'clock and I had every right to film until 11pm!
Actually, the scene was supposed to be shot over two days and there I was in the midst of finishing it in one! It had caused me so much anxiety, and it was so nice to watch it, that I felt like I wanted to carry on filming it ... One of my directives with actors is to be a sort of hunter. I'm always looking behind a scarf, waiting to catch the animal.
CW: How long did the shoot itself take?
CB: 33 days, I think.
CW: I'm interested in the order in which you shot the scenes.
CB: I don't care about the order. I want to manipulate the actor. If they don't know where they're at within the film, I do. And I can do what I want. If you film in sequence, the actors find themselves again because it's like theatre - being able to build your character. But I want my actors to be unable to build their characters. I use my actors like a painter uses his colours. The less they're aware of what I want to achieve, the more I can actually do it.
CW: You often use young stars. Are there any precautions you take - especially in the more explicit scenes - to protect them in any way?
CB: The first thing to protect is the film - from being bad. I am not a social worker. There is a certain responsibility but girls who want to be actresses have to take that responsibility because it's their job. I am not going to have a guilt trip about that. They are very well paid to do it - much better paid than you or me. And they are very well paid because of that. For Anaïs [Reboux, who plays a girl of the same name in the film] it's slightly different because she doesn't want to become an actress, and she's a child. There, I have a responsibility and it is complicated for me to make this film with my responsibility.
But for the other people, I don't take that responsibility. I don't see why I should. To interpret a character is also to lose a part of your identity. After the film you need to put your identity back together again. That's why actors are so fragile, and why maybe they can lend their sentiment to a role. But after that, they have to make a career. They need to learn to enter a role and get out of it.
