(2002; French) The title is in English, everything else is French, in director/writer Catherine Breillat's behind-the-scenes take of a film in the making, with the look of a candid documentary but a sly attitude of a drama.

"It's always a last minute thing," Jeanne (Anne Parillaud), the director and writer, reminds herself as the weather refuses to cooperate, too cold with threat of storm for a sunny beach scene, and her disagreeable actor (Grégoire Colin) and 18-year-old actress (Roxane Mesquida) dislike each other. "He kisses badly," she tells Jeanne, who insists that the passion "must be interminable."

Osculating mechanically in a lousy love scene - the pair appear to be performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - he exposes his flesh, not his soul, to the camera. Determined to bring her "corpse of a film" alive, Jeanne arrives the next day on the set - this time a studio where she will have more control - with a cane and her foot in a cast: "I put my foot down to save this film."

The actor is the son of an actor, whom she chose for his charm as a hustler off camera (as someone points out, she's made the same mistake before in going after looks rather than human quality in her male leads), has a fetish about not wanting to remove his socks for a nude scene. "Emotion is never dirty or obscene," she says to him.

Unable to sustain an erection with the actress, the actor (who confesses to a nightmare in which he became an enormous cock) will wear a fake penis (which Jeanne believes will also make it easier for the girl) for the intimate love scene of a virgin's first sexual encounter.

Both the actor and the actress accepted the script, knowing what would be expected of them (though there is ambiguity whether or not full nudity was clearly indicated), but once they must actually do the scene, fear sets in; male actors change once they've been hired for the role, Jeanne says to her first assistant Leo (Ashley Wanninger), in part to extract revenge.

Male actors must hate her, she further confides to Leo, in order for her to "drag the emotion out of them." In her love/hate relationship with the actor - he dislikes her shouting at him and accuses her of being a tyrant in her always demanding "obedience or destruction" - Jeanne alternatively pampers and cajoles him; each says it has been "sheer agony" working together and pleads for the other to "just trust me."

To prevent either from escaping from her need to capture the authenticity of the lovers, the reality of their reactions to each other, Jeanne decides to shoot the entire scene of intimacy in a single take; but just before the camera rolls, she feels lost with a meaningless scene and dismisses everyone (the actor, protesting he's not a mimic, especially feels hurt by being excluded) except Leo to work through her intention: "Words are lies, bodies are truth."

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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