Anatomy of Hell

Catherine Breillat's rigorously intellectual exploration of sexuality, about a woman who employs a gay man to spend days watching her naked.

Welcome to the feminist world of Catherine Breillat, mauvaise fille of French cinema, whose specialty is female sexuality, of the Cixous/Kristeva/Irigaray persuasion.

The story begins in a gay bar where a woman (Amira Casar) picks up an Italian stallion (porn star Rocco Siffredi). For four days she pays him to watch her, naked on a bed, in a lonely house by the sea. The man looks, smells, pokes and probes inside and out. You may want to laugh, but Breillat is up to something serious here; she has made a rigorously intellectual, sexually transgressive theoretical film that is not afraid to show the shock of the vagina. Boys, you have been warned.