“Fat Girl” and “Romance” director Catherine Breillat is currently playing the role of Film Festival Jury Chief at Locarno, but in a recent Variety interview {via IndieWire] she decided to lambaste fellow French director Abdellatif Kechiche (“Blue is the Warmest Color” and “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo”).
“Well, I do think Kechiche spent way too long shooting that sex scene [in “Blue is the Warmest Color”]. He shot it over two weeks, whereas I would have done it in a day,” Breillait said. “You can’t put actresses in that position for 15 days. I’ve always shot such scenes very quickly, because being in an exposed situation like that for 15 days can make an actress feel like a prostitute. So I understand why they were upset.”
Breillat went on to add that “In any case, a director is by definition a manipulator. Once you start shooting a film, you isolate yourself from everything else in the world.” Breillat’s intense, disturbing films have been called out before, from graphic sequences of rape in “Fat Girl” to whatever is going on between a nymphomaniac exhibitionist and a gay man in “Anatomy of Hell.”
If you remember, the Palme d’Or-winning lesbian drama starred Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux as lovers. Both actresses condemned Kechiche of taking advantage of their bodies during the shoot of the graphically sexual movie — which included a 9-minute graphic sex scene between the two actresses.
Six years later and Kechiche is again in hot water for his latest Cannes polarizer “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo.” In June, French publication Midi Libre accused the director of purposely inebriating his lead actress Ophélie Bau in order for her to perform a non-simulated sex scene.
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