Plot
A sad woman stumbles into a gay nightclub and looks at the gay men dancing on the floor. She later goes to the bathroom and slits her wrist. A gay man enters and stops her. He takes her to a doctor. The woman gives the gay man a blowjob outside. She proposes a deal of making him watch her for four nights in exchange of money - but he cannot touch her and can only watch her impartially, to make sure he doesn't like women.
FIRST NIGHT
The man comes to the woman's isolated villa as per the deal, to come and watch her. He sits on a small chair as the woman gets naked and lies down on the bed. The man describes how the woman's flesh causes him disgust and points out many problems he has with women's anatomy.
The narrator then describes the pubic hair of a woman to a hatch-ling. In a flashback, a young boy is shown sitting on a tree, feeding worms to a newborn hatch-lings. He then takes one of the hatch-lings and puts it in his pocket, climbs down the tree and then throws the bird on the ground and stomps on it repeatedly, killing it.
The woman starts masturbating. The man leaves the room and prepares a drink for himself and returns. She asks him to touch her. The man drinks the alcohol and touches her. In a flashback, the woman is showed to be a little girl who is harassed by other boys, only to become friends with them. Then those boys play "Doctor" with the girl as she hides in the bushes and reveals her vagina, as the boys laugh and make fun of it.
The gay man touches the woman's vagina and sees clear discharge on his finger. He then inserts the finger deeper, and the woman starts laughing. He suddenly pulls out the finger and explains why he prefers having sex with men than women. The man leaves. He smokes by the ocean, and comes back to find the woman asleep. He goes to her bathroom and finds a lipstick, which he brings to the bed. While the woman is still asleep, the man pushes her legs from behind and draws a red circle around her anus, vagina and her lips with the lipstick. He gets naked and rapes the woman in her sleep, ejaculating inside her. The gay man sobs, as the woman wakes up and comforts him.
SECOND NIGHT
The gay man arrives at the villa again. The woman takes him into the bedroom. Before she could undress herself, the gay man zips it off her and leaves as she settles in the bed. Meanwhile, he scours alcohol from the kitchen and sits on his usual seat, watching her as she sleeps. The gay man suddenly falls asleep on the bed, with his hands and head on the woman's thighs. He wakes up, adjusts the woman's legs and sniffs her vagina. She lays on her back as the gay man fingers her vagina and sees blood on his fingers, licking them.
He goes outside and brings a garden pitchfork. He inserts the wooden end of the pitchfork in the woman's vagina as she sleeps. The gay man falls asleep and wakes up in the morning. The woman describes the urges a man has to kill women. But she says the gay man can't kill her and knows nothing of it.
THIRD NIGHT
The woman asks the man to pull out her bloody tampon from her vagina. He pulls it out and she says how periods are considered a mark of impurity and even the creation of tampon-like devices are made by a man who hates women. She puts her used tampon in a glass of water that reddens. She makes herself and the gay man drink the water.
FOURTH NIGHT
The gay man, naked, inspects the woman's vagina closely as it pushes out a stone dildo. The man pushes it back in and out, pleasuring her. Fully erect, the gay man has sex with the woman. After ejaculation, the gay man and the woman kiss each other for the first time. As the gay man pulls his penis out of the vagina, menstrual blood gushes out. Later, the gay man masturbates his penis with the blood still on it.
The gay man leaves for good as the deal has been completed, but he still thinks about her. At the bar, he chats with another man about the woman and berates her and describes his hatred for her, even if he declared that it was the most intimate relationship for him. He leaves the money she gave him at the bar, not needing it anymore. The gay man leaves and goes back to the woman's villa, wanting to rekindle the relationship. But he finds her bedroom empty; just a sheet blotted with her menstrual blood. At last, a scene is shown where the gay man pushes the woman off the cliff and into the ocean, killing her.
Production
The film was adapted by writer/director Breillat from her novel Pornocracy. The sexually explicit film stars Amira Casar as "the woman" and Rocco Siffredi as "the man". Leonard Maltin summarizes: "After attempting suicide in the bathroom of a gay disco, a woman hires the man who rescues her to spend four nights in her company, challenging him to 'watch me where I'm unwatchable'." [5]
Breillat allowed Casar to use a body double in the explicit sex scenes. Siffredi's performance, however, is all his own work. [6]
Siffredi recalled that when Breillat described one scene to him, she took his penis in her hand and explained to Casar how she should play the scene. [6]
Reception
The film polarized critics. Leonard Maltin gave the film zero stars and said the film was "homophobic" and "unintentionally funny". [5] Roger Ebert stated: "I remember when hard-core first became commonplace, and there were discussions about what it would be like if a serious director ever made a porn movie. The answer, judging by Anatomy of Hell, is that the audience would decide they did not require such a serious director after all." [7]
BBC film critic Jamie Russell gave the film four stars out of five:
- "The plot is hardcore thin: a woman (Amira Casar) cruises a gay club and pays broody stud (porn star Rocco Siffredi) to spend four nights with her. A challengingly explicit delve into the female body (often quite literally), it's a unique cinematic example of feminist existential porn.... Yet perversely, it's also one of the most groundbreaking films in recent memory in terms of both the explicitness of its sexuality and its commitment to such an austere intellectual discourse. No wonder Rocco looks so shell-shocked: this is sex not as comedy, but as the deepest, darkest male nightmare." [8]
The film went on to win Best Feature Film at the Philadelphia Film Festival. [9]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , 26% of 35 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 3.9/10.The website's consensus reads: "Ponderous, pretentious, and—considering the subject matter—dull." [10] Metacritic , which uses a weighted average , assigned the film a score of 29 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. [11]
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