Catherine Breillat is a master filmmaker in my opinion. Her films have always challenged me and made me think for months after I've watched them. However, this film challenged me in a whole new way. ANATOMY OF HELL is a film that challenged my stomach. The film tells the tale of a woman who asks a gay man to poke around and look into her labia. Does this sound pleasant? Well, considering that Catherine Breillat directed it, don't expect it to be anything east to watch. In fact, this is probably her hardest film to watch. I sat through FAT GIRL, ROMANCE, and BRIEF CROSSING, but I was unable to sit through ANATOMY OF HELL. The film grossed me right out. Yes, we do get some extreme close ups of the labia and it's uses and it's complexities, but we have our faces shoved into it so much that at some point we do become terrified. It is this part of the human body that is so intricate and unique. It is where all life begins. However, it is such an unpleasant and horrific thing to look at that the audience will grow rather unnerved by the whole thing and most people will not be able to take it and will turn it off or leave the theater. So Catherine Breillat has, in the end, outdone herself. She has now made a film that is too challenging. I don't regret seeing what I saw, but in the end I don't wish anybody else to watch it.

'Anatomie de l'Enfer' brings to the screen a young woman hiring a gay man to watch her in her intimacy during her 'inwatchable' period. Set in a minimally furnitured house, like the Parisian apartment in 'Last tango', it tries to be the opposite of the classic movie. Where 'Tango' was sexy, 'Anatomie' is disgusting. Attaction is transformed into repulsion. Meaningful silence is treaded for meaningless speech, and while the movie tries to say a lot about the relationship between sexes, it succeeds to say very little, and it does it in many many words on screen or off-screen, but none cinematographic or raising real interest. The film is well acted and the cinematography is good, but the feeling I got after watching it was of a badly spent amount of talent with a largely boring result.

I've watched this movie twice, and it was not until the 2nd time that I began to understand it. I am a woman, so at least I am competent for that perspective from the female sex. It all too possible lacks inclusiveness, but the female perspective is not so much an imposition of the director's prejudices as an invitation to seriously question the foundation of human race: the reign of male-dominated sexuality and the illusion of the ultimate achievement of sexual pleasure through a man and a woman. These two problems are inter-related to each other. One could be said to be the flip side of the other; they are the same problem.First here are some points I gathered from the movie. 1. Does sex need to be meaningful? Sex is just sex. The sensuality has nothing to do with love. Distinct though these two are, they are able to mingle. For love to have meaning, it must exhibit itself in that process of sexual practice, conscious or not. Surely this is not the only occasion for love to act for itself, but its great force is beyond all imagination. For sex to have meaning, it must attach itself to something. And then everything's beautiful. It seems that it cannot live alone, but why does it have to live? That's the problem. I mean we don't talk about eating as if there's some great myth about it. But we do dramatize sex. Human beings are fascinated by the study and practice of sexuality to such an extent that they, some intentionally, some not, deceive themselves. And the most funny thing is that they attach sex to love and make them inseparable. Don't get me wrong. I am not evangelizing the separation of sex and love. Nor did the director in Anatomy of Hell. We adore that. But the truth is set patterns of love victimize sex and sex in turn disappoints love. Why? Because we do not admit that they are two different things and it is we who relate them together. Where is the breaking-point? It lies at the definition of both, with love being supposedly more important. I will briefly discuss these definitions when I come to my 2nd point but now let me finish my first point first. The movie suggests that we not take too seriously sexual pleasure because first of all we tend to be trapped in those pre-defined patterns of love and then fantasize sex in this context. W-A-T-C-H the movie. I think it's really documentary in a great sense. It tells you that sexual pleasures are varied and it simply is not true that only sex between a woman and man is the most pleasant or that only certain practices (like foreplay, penetration, movement inside and orgasm after) could make the most pleasant. It tells you this from the beginning towards the end. So if you take that pleasure too seriously, you are doomed to be disappointed or indulged in self-deceit. Look at how little pleasure that woman got when that men finished the whole thing. She could feel at heaven by simply masturbating herself. She knows how to please herself better than anyone else in this world, organ-pleasure-wise.But this does not mean sex is no pleasure. It has plenty and why should we not be allowed to explore that? This brings us to my 2nd point. 2. Definitions of love and sex revisited. Love/sex is not necessarily between a man and a woman. Consider how simple this truth is. Yet few could accept that. Even those gay men and women are taking love as excuses for their being together; love is not an excuse, it's an initiation. Love should come as no excuse if you only want to explore sex with both or either sexes and no more. The desire for exploration is honest; the insert of such an excuse is not. Don't get me wrong again. Now I am so approval of any kind of love and I shall pass no judgment on how love works between any kind of people. I believe in its existence and everywhere. What I'm trying to say is this, even people who are supposedly in the positon of re-defining love do not know what they are doing. It's simple as this: virgins who have sex with men are not necessarily feminists; they might as well go to the hospital after that to regain their cherry or feel guilty all the time.So, it's only orthodoxy that certain types of sex are accepted; they are not true. It is a belief, yet a misbelief. The movie starts with two gay men with one doing the blow-job for the other. I know it's gonna fly in the face of all conventional wisdom and cultural bondage. And I'm right. People find something out, i.e., they find out that sex (and only certain sex) between a man and a woman is only supposedly right and they question it (probably because they just don't enjoy it) and then they abandon it. Some feel guilty and need discreetness; others don't. But what's wrong with the simple fact that when it comes to sexuality same sex knows better than the opposite sex does. I told you not to take too seriously. This is nothing, just knowledge and psychology. It is something to the extent that it reveals the misbelief of love also. Only certain types of love are accepted and this is wrong. These types are considered sacred and made so through manipulation, and now it is time to uncover that.3. Love and be true to yourself. Now that we find out everything about sex, its simple but misleading nature, all the evils it's generated and lies it's been telling, we should wake up. It's self-sufficient, but only part of life, not all. Love makes everything beautiful, including sex. Any kind of love, I mean.

SPOILERS! Another reviewer mentions "Irreversible" when talking about this film. "Irreversible" was horrific and very hard to watch, but at least one could say it had a point. I'm pretty sure "Anatomy of Hell" has no point at all. What is the point, for instance, of taking a used tampon, dipping it in water like a teabag, and then drinking the water? I suppose if one wanted to inspire intense nausea that would work. Or what is the point of inserting a garden implement handle into a woman's vagina--and leaving it there? This "movie" consists of LONG vignettes of lackadaisical upper-crust European types talking in monotones leading up to profoundly disgusting physical acts. Breillat must think this equals artistic significance, but it's more like a lousy geek show that overcharges for admission and then is boring. "9 Songs" was similar in some ways, but at least the sex in "9 songs" was erotic, and the music was hot. I just can't imagine what reason "Anatomy of Hell" has for existing.