"Anatomy of Hell", the work of French female director Catherine Berle, once participated in the 2004 Berlin Film Festival.
The film has only two main actors, a man and a woman; two scenes: the gay men's ballroom, which is briefly used at the beginning, and a room in a woman's house, where the main plot takes place later.
The first scene blew me away: a straight blowjob scene, and I wasn't ready to watch porn with so many people. However, this was just the beginning, with close-ups of genitals and vaginal intercourse appearing N times. No wonder, the film is said to have caused disgust at the Berlin Film Festival.
Beginning: In a
dimly lit ballroom, couples of men dance, with only one woman passing through them, expressionless. She went upstairs, and a man came downstairs next to her, rubbing his arm against her chest. Maybe it was an unintentional act, maybe a little sexual assault? The sensitive woman frowned, but the man's face did not appear in the picture.
The woman went upstairs into the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and used a blade, almost skillfully, to her wrist, the blood trailing slowly. The door to the bathroom opened, and the man came in to stop the woman.
The two met again downstairs, and the man had the illusion of a woman slashing his neck with a blade, so he decided to follow the woman. The two strolled together, and the woman said, are you like everyone else, going to the ballroom to find someone to lick you? The man was furious, slapped the woman, and angrily called her a "bitch". The woman's response was to lean down, unzip the man's pants, and give him oral sex. With the man's semen in her mouth, she raised her head and made a request to the man: accept her money, watch her, be her audience.
First night:
The moon was dark and the wind was high, and the man with doubts and curiosity came to the woman's house on the desolate seaside. The room was big, but cluttered, and the woman said, I want you to see me, but I want more. She took off her clothes and lay naked on the bed, her complexion almost crystal white. Only then did I see that the woman was quite beautiful, with big dark eyes, plump lips, thick curly hair, especially her figure, plump and well-proportioned, very attractive. She looked lazy, depressed, gloomy, but at ease. Before the audience realizes that her beauty is actually the director's trick: to give the audience a reason to admit that she is admirable, and then to be shocked.
The man in the full suit looked stiff compared to the woman who stretched freely on the bed. He approached a woman and wanted to test what he didn't understand the most, but he thought he had a lot of opinions, a woman's genitals. The woman asked leisurely: Should I trim my pubic hair? The man said that that place was the source of the evil he knew. The woman acts out her addiction to masturbation by taking a bit of fluid from her fingertips from this so-called source of sin. It was the same black mess surrounded by quivering red flesh, evoking the memory of a man's childhood: a young bird in a nest. He had climbed close to the bird's nest, caught the bird and put it in his pocket, and took it down the tree, but the bird was so squeezed to death - what did he do? He took out the bird from the bag, fell to the ground, and stepped on one foot, causing the juice of life that was still quivering weakly to flow across. Is this ignorant cruelty in the nature of men, and what does it have to do with men's sexual dislike of women? The man muttering in the room, however, expressed more than disgust, but fear: the fear of a life force hidden deep within the woman's body that he dared not explore.
So far, one man and one woman have shown the division of labor given to them by the director, the man: the typical misogynist, of course, is also the spokesman for the most common male thinking; the woman, fed up, sees through men's misogyny, and To challenge their accusers with self-destructive and sexual swagger.
The woman's language is Elena Sikosu style, as if crazy, as if babbling, the difference is that it is calm, even cold. She is not playing the victim, and she does not want to extract false warmth from the man, which is very important for the later episodes.
It turned out that what was going to be staged in this claustrophobic little room was a struggle between two people, as well as a symbolic, sexual struggle. Between the two of them, her weapon, her source of victory, was her beautiful body, and his weakness, what drove him into confusion and ultimately led to his collapse, was his desire.
(Gay men also have desires for women, at least biologically, which is a vicious assumption made by the director. Under her arrangement, this gay man can immediately accept oral sex from a strange woman and eventually fall Under the sexual temptation of women. It seems that gay men are gay only because they are misogynistic in concept, because they are the most typical male-dominated thinkers. Seriously, I really doubt this Whether this setting is fair to gay men. That's my biggest question about this movie.) The
woman fell asleep as if nothing had happened. The man plays and studies the woman's lower body. With a tube of lipstick, he draws an outline outside the woman's anus and vagina, and then inserts it backwards. Strangely, in his intense rubbing, the woman never woke up. Then, the man curled up at the head of the bed and wept bitterly. Probably the first time a gay man has sex with a woman is as shocking as the first time a woman has sex with a man. His years of sexuality, along with his devaluation of women, and the sense of superiority he built up over them, were destroyed by himself.
The woman gave him a little relief: it was only the first night. As if all this was expected by her, at least she had successfully fulfilled her initial wish and wanted more. In short, what will happen next, men must be powerless to control. The original pattern was that he was a watcher and listener who could be at ease and indifference, while a woman was a performer and a confidant. From then on, it was going to change.
The second night: The
woman greets the man at the door. She dresses up like she is going to a dinner party. On this occasion, the woman is required to be both seductive and grand and noble in front of the man.
However, the man immediately lifted her shell and stripped her completely naked. This unobtrusive plot is a very interesting interaction between the two, and from the perspective of the whole film, it is a loop: after the first night, the woman is actually aroused by the tenderness to please him according to the heterosexual model , and what the man strips is not only her clothes, but also her active delusion to occupy a woman in the heterosexual mode. In this minute, he has the advantage.
The woman fell asleep again... what does the man think? He went out and found an iron rake in the yard. He aimed at the woman with this iron rake... However, in the end, he chose to insert it into the woman's vagina, and the rake stopped in the woman's body at a strange angle. When the woman woke up, through the branches of the iron rake, people saw that her expression turned out to be unusually calm. She just smiled and asked the man: Last night, were you going to kill me? The man is speechless.
This is a very strange scene, not because a man has a desire to kill a woman - the latter is quite reasonable. I think that every minute in this world, at least a million men and women have a desire to kill a woman. The idea of mutual vendetta, if the hatred between the sexes can be manifested like waves, the dark continent of the entire earth will definitely be turbulent from time to time. Even between two people who love each other, the curse of wanting to let the other party die often appears. To change it, put it positively, it is "can't wait to die in the same year, the same month and the same day". However, when women want to kill men, it is often out of extremely suppressed resentment. Men want to kill women because of a cruel sense of superiority. "I want to kill you" is equivalent to "I can kill you." "By asserting and trying this advantage, a man restores the dignity that he thinks he has damaged, and restores the integrity of his self that he thinks he has been hurt by women. That's what this gay man wants to do with the woman who sparked his desire.
The iron intrusion, as an insult, replaced his act of killing the woman. Using the most unbearable and tough objects to symbolically rape a woman's vagina is worse than a man himself trampling on a woman. This is what men do too.
The picture taken from the middle of the iron rake is extremely frightening. Iron and a woman's body, the most incredible combination. But the woman's calm expression solves the mystery: it disrupts the effect the man is trying to create. What if it's iron? In fact, what a woman's vagina can hold is not only the penis that men think is the most occupied function, but don't forget that women have developed and used all kinds of unbelievable masturbation devices, and it is precisely with these devices (such as the back It was only through the contact with the stone phallus that appeared that the woman had a deep understanding of her own body, and she had the ability to establish a comfortable relationship with them all. The symbolic rape of an iron weapon can destroy a woman's dignity and make her grieved. That's not the case in the traditional socialization scene, the most real one, where a man and a woman are facing each other.
Third night: The
man walked straight in, he questioned the woman: Why is the door open and anyone can come in? The woman didn't care, and just used the topic to play: Yes, you just want us to be locked up.
The questioning of the man is not for the safety of the woman, but as the woman reveals, it is an outpouring of control anxiety. It's worth worrying about "anyone can come in". Of course, it's not just the woman's room, but also the woman's body, an open vagina that doesn't care about letting men enter. For men, it's probably the most terrifying thing in women. , because, as a person to be entered, it can actually take the initiative, just like this man is experiencing.
It should be from the second night that the woman has her period. It would have been a bad event, but it wasn't in the movie: the woman was always free to lie naked on the white sheets, not in the least bit restrained by it. He must have been surprised when a woman's blood smeared a man's hands for the first time: it was completely unknown to him, the secret of another sex's body. He must be a little afraid, but menstrual blood, between men and women, can be regarded as the last secret bottom line. As long as it touches it, it can be said that there is no longer any physical separation between the two people.
Why menstrual blood is considered to be the most "dirty", the most shameful, carefully hidden, and treated with fear by women is no longer a new topic. Menstrual blood represents a woman's biological adulthood, her sexual cycle and her fertility, which are alien, unknown, and uncontrollable to men. What is surging in a woman's body? It is impossible for them to understand and they are beyond their ability to manipulate, so they are naturally afraid. Their fear of menstrual blood has developed to the extent that it gives it the power of a magic spell, and it is superstitious that men who are contaminated with women's menstrual blood will be unfortunate. ——From fear to hatred, this is the logic of men dealing with all things related to women. However, they have to internalize this taboo to women, so that women also agree that menstrual blood is unclean and taboo.
But why is menstrual blood dirty? That's what women challenge. She made a glass of water out of her tampon, gave it to the man, and drank it herself. This scene is probably the most "disgusting" in the whole film. However, this is exactly what the director wants to practice: to let a man who used to talk about the evil of women speak for himself. This is one of the two episodes in the whole movie that made me applaud the most.
In this act, the man is completely silent and submissive. Drinking a woman's menstrual blood also breaks another taboo: the taboo on other people's secretions. ——In addition to the fact that Chinese people don’t care about eating other people’s saliva at the dinner table, civilized people have to control and hide all the secretions of the human body, which has developed many civilized etiquette and further developed many commercial product. In this way, two people who can even share menstrual blood, what kind of uninterrupted relationship should they have? This kind of incessant, but the most naked and thorough. Of course, the power relationship that this inexhaustibility implies is the woman's dominance, because that's her secretion.
—Unconsciously, women became the dominant animal between them. At the beginning of the film, the man is the savior, the woman is the one who is saved and beaten, and she has to bend over to give a man oral sex and ask him to come to see her - but in fact, as the game she designed unfolds, She became the dominant player, while the man was dazed and passive, and then became more and more helpless after several struggles, and finally became a character who completely lost his initiative. The tacit understanding between the two of them was established in the calm and calm cooperation of women and the willing cooperation of men.
Fourth night:
A man and a woman have real sex: the man moves violently from the front while the woman is awake. I appreciate this episode not because, once again, the man shows the uncontrollable desire, but because it breaks another traditional taboo, namely menstrual intercourse.
There are all kinds of negative stories about menstrual intercourse, and a lot of danger to women's health. In fact, the relationship between menstrual intercourse and female reproductive system diseases such as endometriosis is very uncertain. Negative attitudes towards menstrual intercourse, whether it is routine or academic, are rooted in taboos. . However, in this film, the director brings out a lively menstrual intercourse, where the woman's blood drips onto the sheets and the man gasps with a blood-stained penis.
Concepts of filth and cleanliness are in fact cultural products, but to maintain these concepts, people expend a great deal of energy and resources, rationalize them, and endow concepts with an exclusive, fixed quality. And if you do a conceptual test, it will definitely be far less subversive and more pleasant than a straightforward action. As this director did.
This is different from "Vagina Monologue", a more thorough subversion. "Vagina Monologue" makes the actor say: My vagina is a village, with a clear river and the smell of snowflakes. It allows women to express their subjective feelings about their bodies, praises women's bodies, and encourages women's body confidence. And "Anatomy of Hell" goes even further: it doesn't compliment, it's just a close-up without the slightest glorification, making a woman's genitals, including menstrual blood, appear in an unadorned, magnified form, and forces the audience to be caught off-guard. to stare at them. ——This is not beauty, this is not dressed up to please men, and it is not hidden to appease the shame of women, but this is the most real.
Everyone has sex or wants to have sex, but everyone pretends not to have sex or doesn't want to have sex, and that's civilized society. If you really want to talk about sexual intercourse, it has to be twisted in every possible way, lyrical in every possible way, and elevated in every possible way, as if you can't talk about it, or you have to talk about it as a matter of supreme goodness and beauty. There are a few people who are as honest as Mark Twain: sex is as pleasurable as shit. It’s okay to appear in a book, but to appear in a movie, it has to use all kinds of technical means to beautify it. Even the professional pornographic actors in the A-movie have to work hard to be immortal and intoxicated. Only this director dared to express sexual intercourse in the most straightforward way without using foreplay, and it was still in an art film for literate people. An erotic art film that straddles two perceived incommensurable genres may result in a double dilemma: both no audience and moral reproach, as Belle did. But the elitist art-film judging system can save her, and it even welcomes this subversion, prides itself on showing that it can tolerate, understand, and create this "spectacle," and returns her money and prestige. Probably, this is the only possible unique space for this kind of revolutionary film.
Conclusion:
In the four nights, the most dramatic interaction has been experienced, and there is no one like the most peculiar tacit understanding between these two people. However, the end of the story goes in another direction: the
man and one of his friends, an old man with a wretched face, talk about his experience. The old man insisted: she was a bitch, a whore, nothing to say.
The old man didn't realize at all that "bitch" can only be a change of heart here, because women are not prostitutes. In short, in the eyes of traditional men, all women who open their vaginas to men, even all women who have vaginas, are shameful and lowly and should be allowed to be insulted. In the realm of sex, there is not a word that cannot be used to insult a woman, and there is no act of a woman that a man will not say that they have humiliated themselves.
The man gave an interesting response: Even a prostitute, she is the king of prostitutes. In part, he tacitly acquiesced to his companion's statement, which means that when he returned to the man's world and re-examined himself with male standards, he encountered a serious crisis of dignity, and he had to insult women with his companions in order to gain balance, however, , and he had to admit that women are amazing. This is the secret of male anxiety: refusing to acknowledge the possibility of remodeling, perpetually worrying about gain and loss for so-called dignity—the superiority they think they should have naturally—, being extremely aggressive in order to hide vulnerability, verbally or otherwise in action.
So, the man said viciously: I have made her as big as possible, and no man wants to have her any more - boasting about his sexual ability, and making up his own destruction and possession of women.
However, what distressed him was the fact that he took women's money, which confirmed that he was a passive party to women's services. He regretted it. Looking back, it's understandable why, at the beginning of the film, women and men are arguing over who pays.
The director is ruthless towards this male anxiety. The performance is that, instead of letting the man leave and leaving him with the possibility, on the contrary, she makes him go to extremes and perform to his heart's content: he set foot on the road to the sea again, this time No longer at a loss, but thought clearly that he was going to kill the woman.
Killing this woman is tantamount to erasing the story, erasing the fact that he had sex with a woman as a gay man (still having a problem with his attitude towards gay men), and all the shame that those four nights gave him, to restore his broken masculine ego. However, this in itself is a very shameful and despicable practice.
However, the man has no chance to practice his maliciousness. The woman's room has long been empty. He can only kill the woman in his imagination and throw her into the dark sea.
This ending, like the whole film, shows a strong director's artificiality. First of all, she will never let women die at the hands of men, so women's death can only be a man's delusion; secondly, she wants to expose the evil of men, and turn him from the original savior into a murderer. The introduction of the film can be used here: it reflects the director's long-term dislike of men. Probably in her opinion, they are such a hopeless group.
As for the woman, her murder in the man's imagination is not a tragic devastation, and this plot helps to understand her fate only in one way: Attempting to make peace with men to any degree is delusional. Disappointed by heterosexuals, women turned to homosexuals to find opponents in the game, but the director made it clear to her that they were all the same.
A symbolic war between the sexes is over, and the director's conclusion seems to be: It is not even necessary to distinguish right from wrong through war, to distinguish between superior and inferior, only decisive. However, there are also desires involved with them - after all, a woman is a heterosexual, her body is only attractive if she is seen by men, and her desire is only to interact with men, which is the only problem that the director cannot solve.
Attached report: "Anatomy of Hell" Reveals the Appetizing Sex Scene
http://ent.sina.com.cn February 15, 2004 13:40 Shenzhen Evening News
Among the world's three major film festivals, Berlin has been giving People feel more serious and less energetic. Generally, you can hardly see the bold expressions of sex and love that are often seen at the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. Unexpectedly, in the middle of the film festival, with "Romance" "The new film "Anatomy of Hell" by the French female director Catherine, who shocked the film industry, set off an "erotic storm", and many viewers left the scene and even vomited because of the large number of nudity and erotic scenes in the film.
Almost all the works of French female director Catherine The discussion of the nature of sex between men and women is the theme, and the camera is also very bold. We have experienced her "power" in films such as "Romance", "My Sister" and "Sex is a Comedy". This time at the Berlin Film Festival The "New Film Forum" invited her new film "Anatomy of Hell" for a special screening. For this famous female director, the film festival is very generous in highlighting it in the brochure, and the movie posters can be seen everywhere. They even took the initiative to arrange interviews with journalists from various countries.
Based on Katherine's own novel, the film tells the story of a gay man who is hired for four days by a woman with a broken heart. In 4 days they went from being indifferent to warming each other. The director said that what she wanted to explore through the film was: why are men so weak? Because after Berlin, Catherine will take "Anatomy of Hell" to other film festivals, so the film is only shown in Berlin once, and the tickets are booked out as early as two days ago. The reporter found that there were almost no empty seats at the opening, but as the film went on, audiences continued to withdraw because they couldn't stand it. The male and female protagonists were originally pornographic actors, so in "Anatomy of Hell", they exposed their bodies for a long time, and there were many extremely bold love scenes. Some older audiences even felt sick to their stomachs and left the scene on the spot. By the time the film was over, almost 20% of the audience had left in the cinema.
In fact, even in France, which is relatively open, Catherine's film career only relies on participating in various film festivals to gain attention and sponsorship. The domestic box office is miserable. "If there is no international attention, I can't survive." But now the censorship in France The system is getting tighter. It turned out that Katherine's daring film could be released untouched, and currently it may face "scissors".
The organizing committee of the film festival also stated that the Berlin Film Festival has always advocated cultural diversity. "Anatomy of Hell" may arouse some audiences' disgust, but some audiences like it very much. This is the charm of the film.
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