Barbebleu by Catherine Breillat

Barbebleu by Catherine Breillat

This film presents an outre take on a story by Charles Perrault.

Cathrine Breillat is a very provocative, creative, different, challenging and at times hard to cope with filmmaker.

There are a few scenes in this feature that are better suited for a horror film, in some ways a snuff movie.

A poor duck is killed on camera and there is no doubt about it.

This was not a special effect.

It involves the beheading of the beautiful animal, without contributions from computer experts, software design and imagery.

The duck is furthermore filmed as it jumps around without a head.

The body is convulsing and blood pools from the red, pulsating neck.

The wings flop and move the bird around aimlessly.

What was the point of this?

One possibility is that the screen writer and director has wanted to make us feel empathy, remorse and eventually stop making innocent creatures endure the pain we inflict on them.

If this is the case, it worked, in the sense that the images cannot be forgotten and it is something that audiences need to contemplate, seeing as we are pampered, unaware of the means by which meat comes cleanly, presented nicely on our plate or burgers.

As Karen Joy Fowler and others write in their exceptional books, one is We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves, humans tourture other beings in a multitude of ways.

In the beauty industry, for the big pharma corporations and in the food industry, where new tiles of birds are created, unable to even move anymore, packed to the brim in horrifying conditions in the the animal farms.

There is another, I fear more likely alternative, that the director-writer has a manner of telling stories which involves spectacle, flamboyance, fireworks, pushing the boundaries, entering unexplored territory, showing what had been anathema before, no matter what the cost.