Anatomy of Hell

Director: Catherine Breillat, Catherine Breillat, Catherine Breillat

2004 / 77min / 35mm

Adapting her own novel, Pornocracy, Breillat’s highly sexually explicit film reteams her with gonzo porn star Rocco Siffredi, of her 1999 Romance, here playing a gay man who is picked up at a disco by a straight woman (Amira Casar) and hired for four consecutive nights—nights during which he will be asked to examine her in intimate and minute details, and explore all that he finds distasteful about the female form. The attitudes towards sex in The Decameron and Anatomy of Hell differ starkly, but both films are united in the supreme importance that they afford the flesh and their frontal, unflinching gaze, as well as in the painterly approach of their cinematography.