Anatomy of Hell

After attempting suicide, a young woman (Amira Casar) makes a startling proposition to the man (Rocco Siffredi) who rescued her: she will pay him to watch her naked body over the course of four nights as long as he provides “impartial” commentary about what he sees. Thus ensues ANATOMY OF HELL, one of the most controversial films of Catherine Breillat’s career—a singularly daring meditation on the pleasures and horrors of the flesh. Buoyed by the two leads’ fearless performances, HELL is as much a philosophical treatise on the hidden traumas of sexuality as it is an increasingly unsettling battle of the sexes, with Breillat using a hushed chamber-play setup to show the spectator no quarter throughout the transgressive proceedings. The result is like nothing else, even within the director’s audacious oeuvre: her deepest expression of anguish over the unspeakable ecstasies and degradations of the body erotic.