Catherine Breillat’s first film, the 1976 French drama “A Real Young Girl,” reminded me of John Water’s 1972 cult comedy, “Pink Flamingos.” Chickens and sex are a common theme between the two pieces. In Pink Flamingos, a live chicken is crushed between the characters Cookie and Crackers while they make love (the director and crew ate the bird afterwards). In A Real Young Girl, the title character Alice and her mother slit the throat of a chicken and drain the creature of its blood, before plucking all its feathers. The mother reaches into its arse and pulls out the organs, which are then thrown to the other chickens in the yard. “Stupid, aren’t they?” the mother asks, while the chickens tear at the intestines. “Chickens are the one animal I feel no pity for.”
Catherine Breillat has not abandoned the chicken metaphor after all these years. In her 2008 novel “Pornocracy,” Breillat describes a woman’s mons pubis like a “plucked chicken.”
The top image shows another of Breillat’s metaphors that has been carried forward many decades. At this point in the film, Alice has taken off her panties and placed them on a half-buried dog skeleton up the beach, and she runs to the water’s edge. Alice pulls up her skirt and opens her legs to the surging sea foam. There is a similar scene in Breillat’s 2001 film “Fat Girl,” that I previously screen-captured. The acts of intimacy between each girl and the sea are demonstrative of each film’s larger themes. In “A Real Young Girl,” a film about sexual awakening, Alice chooses to spread her legs. In “Fat Girl,” a film about rape, Anaïs lies passively on her back and lets the waves take her. Breillat seems to be saying that sex is salty, and tastes like chicken.
3rarm taking the view of the deep cut, the unstudied angle. Where some of us see `book of eli’ on a Friday night and thereby waste our lives in the storyboard of a money-machine, the 3rarm take the chicken side, where the art dwells. I am coming over!