Catherine Breillat is well known as France’s provocatrice by excellence. Her films are an assault on societal and moral traditions that tend to explore the world through sexuality and the concept of being a woman. However during the past few years she’s been working on different projects that stay away from her frank depictions of sexuality. Some of her most recent films have included her own adaptations of famous fairy tales by Charles Perrault (including “Sleeping Beauty”) but in “Abuse of Weakness” she takes an experience from her own life to deliver one of her most complex movies to date.
In 2004, Breillat suffered a stroke that left half her body paralyzed. During the years when she was in recovery she met Christophe Raconcourt; a notorious conman who passed himself off as French member of the Rockefeller family to swindle some of France’s wealthiest people. Breillat cast him in a movie (opposite Naomi Campbell) and he ended up stealing almost 700,000 euros from the director, who then blamed her deteriorated state for the scam, calling it an “abuse of weakness”.
The film version stars Isabelle Huppert as Breillat’s surrogate, a film director named Maud Schoenberg who suffers a stroke on the film’s very first scene and then engages in a twisted relationship with Vilko Piran (played by French rapper Kool Shen) a conman she becomes obsessed with after seeing him on TV. Postrated in bed, her body not her own, she is determined to tame this wild man, even if she knows she’s entering a Faustian pact from the get-go.
The director never shies away from showing the inhumanity so inherent to our human bodies. During the film’s opening scene we see the familiar look of sheets on a bed and movement underneath, but in truly perverse Breillat fashion it’s not two lovers moving below but Maud while realizing she’s losing control over her body. Her sick attachment to Vilko seems to be her own way of reminding herself she’s still alive. When her best friend (Christophe Sermet) warns her of Vilko’s reputation, she laughs and dismisses him but Huppert is too smart an actress to make Maud a completely naive woman or a victim. In her eerily determined eyes, we see that she’s fully aware that she’s staring right into the depths of hell, but her sly smile suggests she’s loving the view more than even she expected.
