Breillat brilliance Controversial and confronting . . . novelist and film-maker Catherine Breillat and, below, a scene from an earlier work, Romance. It's hard to ruffle the French where sex is concerned. Unless you're Catherine Breillat. By John Baxter Love is the road to hell", says French novelist and film-maker Catherine Breillat in a sound bite of the sort that has made her famous. This autumn, Breillat, pronounced "Brey-ah", 52, black-maned and mocking, stares from almost every magazine cover, TV screen and Web site in France. Her new novel, Pornocratie, is exciting controversy, her latest feature, @ Ma Soeur (To My Sister), has just opened in England after considerable success in France and the United States, and she's just won a prize in Zurich for her TV film Brhve Traversie (Brief Crossing), about a sexual encounter on a cross-Channel ferry between a French boy and an older English woman. In Pornocratie, a woman takes home a male gay from a disco in a calculated attempt to get a truly dispassionate opinion of the way she looks and acts from someone who can't possibly be interested in her sexually. Admirers of Breillat recognise the self-doubt about her attractiveness that has suffused her life and work. Like her earlier novels and the screenplays for Une Vraie Jeune Fille, 36 Fillette, Dirty as an Angel, Perfect Love and Romance, Pornocratie depicts the sex drive the way an amputee might think of a severed limb - as an unpleasant but unignorable element that influences the way others perceive you and which, from time to time, torments you with an unassuageable itch. Driven, it seems, by feelings of low self-esteem dating back to her dumpy adolescence, Breillat returns repeatedly to the theme of transcendence; the body forgetting itself in the throes of intercourse. As she told The Guardian recently, "To make love is not just to have the pleasure of flesh, but to have the pleasure of flesh escaping flesh. The sexual act involves a mental transfiguration, too." Part of that transfiguration lies in forgetting that you are being watched and judged. "Real sex is a kind of divine abandon," she says, "during which everything achieves a sort of grace. That grace turns into abandon; you find your way back to your real self, no longer mutilated by others staring at you. I believe that we are born radiant, but that others mutilate us with their staring; that we are in a society which has mutilated the grace of movement." Whether or not the French have mutilated sex by a tendency to stare is a point much debated, though nobody denies that France, not for nothing christened "the woman of Europe", finds sex a matter of compelling interest. Praising the Franco-German cable channel Arte for funding Brhve Traversie and the other films in the series Masculin/Feminin, Breillat called the chain "an ally of desire". But one could attach that label to almost any arm of the French media. Thanks to TV, billboards and magazines, the French are confronted at every turn with rounded bums and pert breasts, grappling couples and sexual innuendo - all to sell mineral water, car insurance, even the high-speed TGV train. Most nights, they can catch an X-rated movie on TV, even if they don't subscribe to one of the all-porn cable channels. The five free networks stick to soft-core, but some cable channels, even the prestigious Canal Plus, broadcast a Saturday night slab of what they call in France "le hard". The fact that there is A Lot Of It About affects the whole of French society. Sex is simply too large a segment of the national culture to leave room for Victorian pudeur, adolescent ignorance, Hollywood sentimentality or PC complaints about "commodifying the body". In any debate on this subject, Breillat will usually have something to say. She's the acceptable face of erotica (a word she despises), a distinction won by conspicuous valour in the battle between the sexes. Podgy in adolescence and voluptuous in her 20s, she's on the chunky side these days, with a tendency to "arrange herself", as one reporter wrote, "like a stately boxer. Her shoulders are broad. Her jaw is wide. She looks like a woman capable of absorbing a mountain of shocks." Breillat accentuates this with a characteristic slouch, elbows on thighs or hands on knees, as if ready to launch herself in an instant at a critic's throat. While her films may not be entirely autobiographical, audiences draw their own conclusions from her recurring plot of an overweight adolescent with a throbbing libido whose sexual adventurism ends in anything from despair to violent death. Catherine and her prettier sister Marie-Hilhne learnt about sex from liberal parents who gave them the Marquis de Sade and Lautriamont to read. The girls also, if Catherine's films are to be trusted, indulged in some precocious experiment. In 36 Fillette (the title refers to a dress size), the overweight heroine captivates an older lover, while in @ Ma Soeur, the dumpy sister has sex with an older man while the more glamorous one watches and learns. Perhaps because of her own complex sexual initiation, Breillat condemns the calisthenics of TV-ad erotica and the acrobatics of le hard, both of which, she feels, give impressionable adolescents a false picture of sex. Porn she dismisses as offering "a sort of occult sex education for the young - terrifying and completely inauthentic". Children should be left to discover sex for themselves, as she did. "Must we banish sexual education?" Le Monde asked her. "Absolutely," she replied. "Perhaps sexuality is important. But children must learn about it alone and, above all, without us 'transmitting' our own experience." Catherine's first novel, L'homme Facile (The Easy Man), described how readily a girl, even a plain, fat one, can seduce men if she puts her mind to it. Censors banned its sale to anyone under 18, ironically making it illegal for Breillat, then only 17, to buy her own book. Since then, she's scorned the very idea of censorship, suspecting another stratagem in the sex war. Libertarians were startled at last year's Edinburgh Film Festival when she dismissed film censorship as "a male preoccupation" and suggested that the X certificate was "linked to the X chromosome" - a major signifier of maleness. By her 20s, Breillat was writing screenplays for films as diverse as Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, Maurice Pialat's introspective cop story Police, and Bilitis, directorial debut of David Hamilton, king of the budding-breasts-and-muslin school of photography. She had a small acting role in Last Tango in Paris and acted in a few films with Marie-Hilhne, while the two, off screen, accumulated almost as sensational a reputation as those other high-stepping movie sisters, FranGoise Dorliac and Catherine Deneuve. Marie-Hilhne contracted a stormy marriage with Edouard Molinaro, director of La Cage Aux Folles, then went into near-seclusion, only re-emerging in the past few years. Catherine married a Parisian publisher, as much, it seems, for his looks as for anything else, and had two children with him. In case anyone, particularly her sister, doubted he was a "catch", Breillat and spouse posed nude for a series of magazine photographs. In 1975, she directed her first film, Une Vraie Jeune Fille. With deceptive simplicity, it followed a girl returning from boarding school to spend the summer with her parents. Being Breillat, however, the holiday is anything but an idyll. The girl's father has incestuous designs on his daughter, which she, if not exactly welcoming, at least connives at. She becomes obsessed with a worker in her father's factory, incorporating him into sexual fantasies which become more fevered the more he rejects her. The film was banned in France, though it's recently been dusted off and released, to no particular furore. We've come a long way since then. Just how far was dramatised by the sarcastically named Romance. Its heroine, Marie, dotes on her photo-model husband, Paul, even though he refuses to make her pregnant and finally even to have sex, arguing that it makes him look tired on camera. She might have endured this had Paul not also been, to put it delicately, genitally challenged. Embarking on a crash course in sexual discovery, Marie picks up a friendly foreigner in a cafe. Experiments with bondage, anonymous sex and anal rape follow, until, finally pregnant, she bombs the family apartment, building and husband going up in smoke as the baby is born. In secret, Breillat hired Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi to play the well-hung stranger, a fact that scandalised the industry when it became public. For all the supposed freemasonry of showbiz, a "Gentlemen v Players" mentality still prevails and, whatever else they may be, porn performers are not, and cannot ever be, in the eyes of the profession, real actors. Caroline Ducey, who played Marie, didn't know Siffredi's identity until he walked on the set for their first scene, and was so spooked that she fled at the end of that day's shooting and hasn't worked for Breillat since. Romance, on the other hand, launched Siffredi as a media star in France. He can now be seen on the sides of buses, advertising mobile phones. Breillat is unrepentant about her sexual iconoclasm, which she regards as essential if she is to conserve her sense of self. "I believe that 80 per cent of our selves is made up of the way other people look at us," says Breillat - which, in a culture like that of France, is probably true. There are few countries where people are so ready to look and evaluate for themselves rather than listen and learn from others. A few years ago, a Parisian couple tried explaining sex to their pre-teen son and daughter. After a few minutes, the 12-year-old boy stopped them. "Look, it's all too complicated," he said. "Next time you do it, just give us a call. We'll come and watch." http://smh.com.au/news/0201/12/spectrum/spectrum2.html