Edinburgh – Day 9

Let's talk about sex. Or rather, let's babble on pretentiously for 75 minutes about sexual identity and the nauseating, infernal nature of the female body as viewed by society (particularly Judeo-Christian society) and do it all in French and cast a real porn star and show everything in gynaecological detail. Yes, in case you hadn't guessed, it's the new film by Catherine Breillat. Anatomy Of Hell - the latest by the director of Romance, A Ma Soeur and Sex Is Comedy - goes one step further in both its graphic images and its inflated philosophising. As the director stated at the Q&A after the UK Premiere, this isn't "about day to day reality, it's a very symbolic movie". Yeah, right, in that it puts the "bollocks" in "symbolic", in more ways than one. A beautiful woman who has just attempted to slit her wrists ("Why did you do that?" "Because I am a woman.") pays a gay man to poke around in her private parts over four nights to confront the physical horror of female genitalia. That the actor in question is hardcore porn star Rocco Siffredi (who acted in Breillat's Romance and is actually rather good here) is one of Anatomy Of Hell's few meaningful ideas. "It is uncomfortable for Rocco to play a homosexual," Breillat told the rather reverential Edinburgh audience, "it is very against his identity." She noted that the Italian stallion had no misgivings about performing the penetration scenes with the actress's body double, but was upset about the scene in which he gives a man a quick kiss. "For him, that is a revolution." Throughout the Q&A, Breillat kept banging on about how she feels like a man in her head but a woman in her body. "This is the first movie I've made in the body of a man," she explained, referring to the film's philosophical perspective. Fair enough, but like most of her work, the audience is distracted from what could have been a thematically interesting line of argument by controversial shock tactics. The woman extracts a bloody tampon, puts it in a glass of water and drinks it with the man. At one point, she wakes up to nonchalantly discover that he has stuck a garden fork (handle-end first) inside her and it is projecting out from the bed at 90 degrees - a sillier image you're unlikely to see in cinema this year. Breillat never seems to have the courage of her convictions; she always goes for the cheap talking point. But at least her distributors can argue that Anatomy Of Hell isn't pornography as its intention is clearly to disgust rather than arouse. Anyway, from the ridiculous to the sublime - the music of Zbigniew Preisner. The Polish composer most famous for his work with Krzysztof Kieslowski was in town to discuss his career in a 90-minute masterclass that showcased his dry humour and healthy contempt for Hollywood. His problems with the American approach to film music boil down to three things: those who want him to simply repeat his best known tunes, those who want him to copy the temp tracks they've used for editing purposes, and those who want to pass on his melody lines for production-line arrangements and orchestrations. Praising the genuinely collaborative relationship he had with Kieslowski, which triumphed in the Three Colours Trilogy and The Double Life Of Veronique, Preisner told the crowd that "film music is like the soul, the blood, the metaphysical part of film." Now that's philosophy with some significance - take note, Catherine Breillat. Flashforward Tips for Saturday *The Big Red One (UGC, 2pm) * Samuel Fuller's war-time epic has almost an hour of footage restored, bringing it back to the director's original, hard-bitten conception. A rare big screen event before DVD release later in the year. *Blinded (UGC, 6pm) * The always excellent Peter Mullan stars as a bitter blind man who senses that his young wife (Jodhi May) is falling for the Danish hitchhiker working at his farm. *Anatomy Of Hell (9.30pm, Filmhouse) * If the report above hasn't put you off, then there's an additional factor to make this screening worth catching - for one night only, Breillat will be joined by star Rocco Siffredi at the Q&A.