The Comedo of Paris (2)

This is the second part of my short story.

Yesterday I watched Catherine Breillat’s 2001 film “À ma sœur!” for Gore (I wrote a story in response that I think will likely be in the forth Gore zine, released in the summer) and I'm still very much processing it. It has a strong resonance with my story which continues later in this article, and my feelings about the film have given me a lot to think about with my own work.

I'm quite comfortable with putting a line between artist and artwork, while still following Sara Ahmed’s call to live a feminist life, but this film pushed my boundaries in this regard. I feel that Breillat on some fundamental level hates women with vitriol that is genuinely staggering.

I feel that a realistic reading of the film is the director arguing that women are incapable of escaping their own brutalisation by patriarchy , not because of it's power but because of a lack of capacity in (some?) women. More to the point, those that suffer more from patriarchy , do so because of their failing to participate correctly. They fail to take control of their destiny. The film seems to say that the only hope for women is become not men, but agents of masculinity. To perform masculinity at a level with men.

It's also worth nothing how deeply uncomfortable the film is, not just as narrative but as document of real events of it's production. There has so far not been any complaints from the actors involved,. However given both the directors attacks on the #metoo movement, and that multiple actors from her other films report the exploitation on set, including allegedly non-consensual unsimulated sex scenes, the fact that this film features a rape scene performed by a then 12 year old actor who all but vanished from the film industry afterwards is impossible to overlook.

That said (!) as an object it has some incredible moments, largely held by the performances, especially those of aforementioned child actress Anaïs Reboux.

Reboux’s performance is never less than the central axis of the film. Her physical presence and conveyance of emotions largely through gaze transcends the film's repeated attempts to demean the character Anaïs (and I would argue, the actress Anaïs Reboux who plays her) by positioning her as the “fat girl" that the film’s original working title (and English release) defines itself through. Even while the film lingers on shots of Anaïs’s hand holding half finished food in her own lap, or applying sun screen to her body in an echo of the oversized banana split it has just shown her eating, her character remain one that is far more complex and powerful. The actress’s delivery in scenes such as one in the screenshot above, lost in a song and role play while in the pool are both tender and threatening because of the performance, and nothing else. It's worth noting as well the Reboux was cast (and one would assume, the scene written) after the director saw her doing something similar in a public pool.

I think there is a lot of things that are worth extracting from ‘À ma sœur!’, largely in spite of rather than due to it's intent. I think it reveals much about a reductive strand of second wave feminism, at least in how it has been interpreted by figures such as Breillat. I feel that regardless of intent, it shows a powerfully tender depiction of childhood, and it does identify that the use and exploitation of women acceptable in middle class society is structurally the same as the use and exploitation that same society knows is unacceptable. That said, there is no reason to have these two things the same film for anything other than shock value.

Now follows the second of three parts of my story The Comedo of Paris. The text version is currently paywalled while I wait to hear from some things it has been submitted for. Merci.

The Comedo of Paris (part 2)

I was the one that had seen the English boy in front of the Palais de Tokyo before it opened for the day, but it was my cousin that had decided to push him so that he fell down the wet steps, striking his head against the corner of the wide stone banister. A crowd quickly gathered around the boy, darkness flowing out from the hole in his closely shaved head while his bloody eyes spun and the lids fluttered like oiled birds trying to take flight. It was then that I noticed what my cousin had already seen, the expensive camera that the boy had just placed in front of him before he had taken his fall. She grabbed it up and bid me follow her immediately back to the hotel.

In our room with the camera, my cousin became like another person. Through its lens she gained a clarity of the world and of purpose that I had never seen in her through all the time we had been together. She directed me to lay in various parts of the cramped room and en-suit. Initially I was awkward, unsure of what to do with this suddenly strange body, but her passionate directions took me over as I wanted so much for her to be happy. She bade me push myself into the piles of slowly softening peaches and flimsy pint cartons of delicatessen soup, demanding specific gestures and poses, the results of which I could imagine but she would not allow me to see on the camera’s display that she jealously guarded.

I was likely too indulgent of her, I see this in hindsight. I allowed her excitement to pull us both along so that when she began to demand more I did not squeeze the brakes when there was still time to do so. It began with my cousin demanding I fulfill a series of poses that seemed to be focused on my navel, the rest of my body folded and obscured so that it blended into the background. In trying to squeeze into the space next to the radiator that was already filled with soft unwashed potatoes, their eyes screaming upwards toward the light, I slipped on the layer of slurry that had overtaken all of the room’s floor between our trophies and its grey laminated wood.

In the moments between slipping and falling I saw the glass soda bottle amongst the ruin of green beans collapsing in their shells and profiteroles that oozed a thin liquid sweet and clearish like plasma. Of course the glass bottle, a bulbous sphere textured like an orange or a testicle in its sack, would find its way to the palm of my hand. It shattered while clumsily I tried to break my fall. ‘Of course this must happen’ I thought, as in shock I pulled myself up to sitting, soured cream and warm sweating pâté collecting in the grey pleats of my skirt. ‘Of course this would happen to me’.

I watched the velvet rivulet of blood run down my pastry and fat covered arm from my hand, where almost the whole palm had been opened like a window, the skin still held only on one side and exposing a wet and swirled raw interior. My cousin had not moved since I had begun to slip. She was frozen in place with rapt attention, kneeling just in front of me with the camera dangling loosely from its strap and almost forgotten, its lens dipping into the soup that was our floor.

In an instant she reached past me and within a single movement she grasped a sharp splinter of the glass soda bottle, its surface mottled like a brain, and slit three cuts in her open hand. She then tugged once and hard, allowing the fillet of volar skin to hang loose like my own. Two windows facing one another across an avenue of crusted meringue and chopped eels turning in jelly. Then without waiting for me to even acknowledge this action she forced our filthy flayed palms together and wrapped my other hand and hers around them all. I struggled once, tried to pull away, but either in my injured weakness or her hungry strength I knew immediately there was nothing to be done. Only when my cousin decided it was time, did she release her taut grip and slowly peel my raw skin from hers.

I was the one who had the presence of mind to suggest we attended different walk-in clinics to get our stitches. However this was already less motivated by my desire to reduce questions as it was my desire for a few hours alone. My cousin opened her mouth with the cruel tension that I had come to recognise as preluding a complaint, and then a thought seemed to cut this off and she just nodded. We each wrapped our injured hands in the hotel’s towels. Mine smelling of souring blood oranges and hers of Toulouse sausage. We then exited the hotel in silence and headed our separate ways.

In the waiting room of the second nearest Urgences I first briefly considered abandoning my cousin. The experience with the hands had been shocking, and for a moment I had felt unusually helpless. I quickly rationalised this observation as containing its own explanation, I had been shocked, nothing more. An accident had occurred. An utterly unforeseeable outcome of random chance had resulted in my injury and therefore my lapse of self control. This was unfortunate, but it neither spoke to any larger trend of either my cousin's ascendant will or my own waning one.

I got back to my hotel room to find my cousin opening the door ahead of me. I had considered that her injury might arouse suspicion from the medics as she is so incapable of any deception. However in her words she had simply ‘told them the truth’ and that she had ‘fallen at a party’. Inspecting our respective sutures made me once again feel at peace. It was clear that anything can be repaired, not that my relationship with my cousin was even damaged. She reached past me for the phone and asked the boy at the desk to order us a taxi cab.

In the back of the car I watched the wet streets drip by. I had asked the driver to let me open the window but he had gestured that he did not want the rain to get on his leather seats. I shifted myself to obscure the smear of something I had brought in on my tights and replied ‘c'est normale’, the French that can salve any social injury. Nevertheless Paris seemed nauseatingly distant through the glass, like I was trying to walk with thick lenses pressed to my eyes.

I paid the ungrateful driver who merged back into the morning traffic while my cousin and I stood together under a single umbrella, staring up at our destination. Against the dark rain clouds the dome of The Observatoire de Paris is glaring in its whiteness, like an old bon-bon or a ripe comedo.

·

May 10

This is third and final part of my short story.