Abus de faiblesse (2014)
Directed by Catherine Breillat

Film Review

One of France's most idiosyncratic and provocative auteur film makers, Catherine Breillat has carved out a distinctive niche for herself with her strangely alluring studies in human perversity.  In her latest film, Abus de faiblesse (a.k.a. Abuse of Weakness), she turns the camera on herself and relates a scarcely credible episode in her own life, one in which she allowed a notorious conman to enter her life and rob her of most of her personal fortune.  Adapting her novel of the same title. Breillat recounts how, whilst recuperating from a near-fatal stroke in 2007, she attempted to make a film with Christophe Roconcourt, an out and out scoundrel who was known for fleecing wealthy celebrities.  Breillat soon became dependent on Roconcourt and the latter abused their (platonic) friendship to extort money from the filmmaker, ostensibly for investment purposes.

In her film, Breillat makes no attempt to account for her seemingly irrational behaviour and leaves it to the spectator to draw his or her own conclusions.  Was the director incapable of making rational decisions during her period of convalescence, or was she consciously manipulating Roconcourt, effectively turning him into an overpaid man servant?  As you watch the film you begin to wonder who is abusing whom, and you can't help thinking that Breillat might actually have been a consenting partner in the crimes that Roconcourt casually perpetrated against her.

Abus de faiblesse is (for Breillat) a surprisingly humane film, and the two main characters are developed in sufficient depth for us to see good and bad in both of them.  Isabelle Huppert bears no physical resembance to Breillat but she is perfectly suited to play her alter ego, having largely built her career on a succession of athentic character portrayals of perverse, manipulative and vulnerable women.  Against this experienced diva Breillat took a brave (or bananas) decision to cast comparative newcomer Kool Shen in his first lead film role.  Shen first found fame with the popular rap group NTM, alongside another rapper-turned-actor, Joey Starr.  Judging by his subtle and compelling performance in Breillat's film, Shen looks set for a dazzling new career as a screen actor.  Breillat may have cast Shen as a complete rogue but his portrayal is far from being the conventional, one-note villain.  His ambiguous characterisation both fascinates and grabs our sympathy, and it is Huppert's dominant female that proves to be the more unsettling character in the drama.

On the strength of the scalpel-like precision of its screenwriting and the remarkable performances from the two lead actors. Abus de faiblesse easily rates as one of Breillat's most satisfying films to date.  The twin traumas of a stroke and then falling foul of a con artist no doubt left their mark but Breillat seems able to see the lighter side of both incidents as her film is more a black comedy than a sentiment-tweaking straight drama.  It may be less provocative and shockingly graphic than the director's previous work but this latest Breillat offering makes for another uncompromising excursion into the darker precincts of human nature, that realm of the subconscious where primeval desires and primitive instincts govern our actions and make us do things which, in the cold light of day, appear sublimely idiotic.  Breillat's art, along with her own costly personal experience, serves to remind us that sanity is a mere illusion.  We are all, in fact, quite bonkers.  We just don't realise it most of the time.

Film Synopsis

Having suffered a brain haemorrhage, Maud wakes up one morning to find that she is paralysed on one side of her body.  Bedridden but determined not to give up her career as a filmmaker, she finds an ideal subject for her next film whilst watching a television talk show.  He is Vilko, a man who makes his living by swindling celebrities.  They meet and Maud soon becomes Vilko's next victim, gaining in return the attention she craves...