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Movie Review
"Sugar Town"
John Taylor, Michael Des Barres and Martin Kemp play -- what else? -- faded '80s rock titans in this slight L.A. music-biz satire.
By Daniel Mangin
[09/17/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
Four years ago, Leftfield were contenders in the Fatboy Slim-Chemical Brothers-Prodigy poptronica pantheon. Now they're back, but where's the hype?
By Michelle Goldberg
[09/17/99]

Movie Review
"Stop Making Sense"
Fifteen years later, the delightful Talking Heads concert pic is still the kind of miracle movie that comes about once in a lifetime.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[09/16/99]

Column
Welcome to ... the Godlight Zone!
"Stigmata," "The Sixth Sense" and "Stir of Echoes" give us that New Age religion.
By Michael Sragow
[09/16/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
Puff Daddy's audacious "Forever" captures a paranoid success spitting in the face of his own demise. Is the Ebenezer Scrooge of rap losing it?
By Jon Dolan
[09/16/99]

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Like the film itself, Breillat is a study in contradictions: ambitious, provocative, occasionally arrogant. Here, she explains why no man could have made her movie.

Also Today Romance Director Catherine Breillat and star Caroline Ducey follow the urge wherever it leads.

Given the exact same script, could a man have made this film?

I refuse to make a difference between men and women. But directors -- they are not interchangeable. I think that the director is a singular artist. It's as if we said Michelangelo could create Titian's painting -- they are different people, they cannot do the same thing.

That being said, I am profoundly a woman, and a man couldn't do this, ever. Had I been a man, I wouldn't have been able to do it.

The film is not in the end very romantic -- it's really about desire, not love.

For me, romance is the illusion of love. Paul doesn't understand Marie. He has a hard time expressing who he is, and she doesn't listen to him. And he doesn't listen to her either. He is the object of her love, he is her idol, he is beautiful, and she placed her love on him because she needed to. And he placed his love on her because he also needed to reassure himself. And this moment where the spark of their encounter, of the romance which makes us believe in the illusion of love, when this moment is finished -- they are at [that] stage of the illusion. Paul has a real problem of identity, and Marie doesn't take this into account at all. She is in her own closed world. But with me as director, Marie has the love of the camera, so we excuse her -- while Paul, we accuse him. But one is as egocentric as the other.

So you deliberately created Paul as little more than a sex object?

(laughing) "And God created man." So beautiful.

You say Marie has the love of the camera -- is it because you identify with her character?

Am I identifying myself with Marie? No! She is also my creature.

But it's true, Marie has a deep sincerity. The depth of a person is the depth of their sincerity. She goes deep in her own emotions, and this is an honest approach. But she doesn't know that she is not honest with herself.

She is left to live out her fantasies, and Paul confronts her with the reality of this [by withholding sex from her] -- and it's a test lived by both of them. What she's after is not a sadomasochistic pleasure -- it's what we call curing the ill by the ill, to take the road to hell in a quest for the Grail.

Love is the road of hell. We pass through things which we'll never know what they really are -- they have the appearance of one thing, but they are something else, effectively. For instance, Marie's sadomasochistic attachment with Robert [the school principal] has the appearance of a perversity, but it's something that makes her pass through to the other side.

I was very honest when I wrote this. I had to be. I wanted to make sure that no matter what Marie does, she doesn't get destroyed. I wasn't conscious of this when I wrote it; it was like a drawing that grows under the eye. I didn't want this young actress, who is very pure, I didn't want her accepting this role [if it was going to be] a vision of her own lack of self-consideration; she needed to have grace, and then it would become the contrary.

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