At CINEMA REBORN - Beaudicea Smith-Davies' introduction to the Sydney screening of 36 FILLETTE (Catherine Breillat, France, 1988)

Beaudicea Smith-Davies is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on monstrosity in the works of contemporary French female filmmakers. This is a slightly edited transcript of her introduction to the screening of 36 Fillette during the Sydney season of Cinema Reborn 2026.

This is the fifth transcript of an introduction to a program in the Cinema Reborn 2026 season. Previous introductions published by Margot Nash on the Australian Social Realism program,  CJ Johnson on One Hour with You, Barrie Pattison on The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul and David Heslin on The Asthenic Syndrome can be found if you click on the author's names.

 

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Catherine Breillat 

36 Fillette (1998) is Catherine Breillat’s 3^rd film and was inspired by her novel of the same name. The untranslated title refers to the European dress size ‘36’ and ‘fillette’ means little girl: the equivalent of an Australian XS or calling someone ‘petite’. Breillat was born in 1948 in the provincial town of Bressuire near the city of Niort in north west France. As a teenager, she spent many of her summer holidays with her older sister on the south west coast, hitchhiking to bars and nightclubs in Biarritz, where this film is set. When it was first released in 1988 it was not a hit in France, but it proved popular with audiences in the US where it was billed as the French Lolita likely due to its focus on a relationship between a teenage girl and an older man. Breillat’s 14-year-old protagonist Lili is played by Delphine Zentout, who was 16 at the time the film was shot, and the relationship between her and Maurice, played by Etienne Chicot, is largely told from her point of view.  Her quest to use the summer to lose her virginity is the driving force behind the story.

 

At the beginning of her career, the teenage girl’s journey of self-discovery, her desire to explore her body and sexuality on her own terms as she morphs into a woman, arose as a central concern of Breillat’s work.  At 17, she wrote her first novel ‘The easy man’, L’homme facile (1968). A work of erotic fiction about the sexual awakening of a teenage girl. Her first film, ‘A real young girl’, Une vraie jeune fille (1975), explores this same theme. While teenage girl characters were already present in French cinema such as the teenage sisters in Eric Rohmer’s ‘Claire’s Knee’, Le genou de Claire (1970), and Claude Miller’s ‘The Impudent Girl’, L’effrontée(1985), starring a 14 year old Charlotte Gainsbourg, Breillat’s vision is neither festishing like Rohmers nor paternalistc like Millers but honest, and female — a rarity for its time. The metamorphosis of bodies, especially female bodies, Breillat films without ceremony and the gaze her camera produces is as direct and unscrupulous as her dialogues.

 

Lili (Delphine Zentout), 36 Fillette

Even though she is often thought of as a feminist filmmaker with a specific female or feminine gaze, when speaking about her manner of filming bodies and sex, she insists on the authority that being a ‘metteur en scène’, a film director, grants her. She says: ‘nothing must be censored[...] the director avoids filming what they don’t want to see and we see exactly what they want to see[...] this is what I call a ‘gaze’. The gaze is placed where the director wants[...] and nowhere else[...] and it’s there that the audience is going to look [...] and nowhere else.’ Sometimes considered provocative or shocking, Breillat offers an alternative to society’s moralising gaze and a refusal of puritanical censoring of what can be projected on the big screen. In her home country, audiences and critics only started taking an interest in Breillat’s cinema after the commercial success of her 1999 film Romance, which includes a scene of unsimulated fellatio and the casting of male porn star Rocco Seffredi. Rather than an anomaly, Romance situates itself within a broader movement of films that at the time flirted with the border between art cinema and pornography — Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny (2003) and Virginie Despentes’ Baise-moi (2000), loosely translated as ‘screw-me’, are two examples of this. 

 

J-P (Stéphane Moquet), Lili (Delphine Zentout)

Generally better known for her cinema, Breillat has since the start of her career always engaged with literary writing; many of her films are adapted from her written work or her films have provided the subject matter for her books. Representations of women’s lives dominate her body of work, of which a large portion is either semi-biographical, as is the case of 36 Fillette or entirely autobiographical. Like Breillat, our protagonist Lili, is precocious, aspires to be a writer, has outgrown her peers and is ready to burst through the tight seams of a world already too small to contain her. Still an adolescent herself when she first entered the French literary scene there is an apparent parallel between Breillat’s personal experiences and those of the fictional female protagonists she represents, and Breillat frequently acknowledges the translation of her own life into her work.Today 36 Fillette (1987) the novel is currently out of print, although in France, several of her novels are readily available. Her well-known text Pornocratie (2001) was translated into English in 2008, and includes an introduction by American writer Chris Kraus, and a very recent book, published in the form of a series of interviews with Breillat, ‘I only believe in myself’, Je ne crois qu’en moi (2023), appears in English as well. 

 

Lili (Delphine Zentout), Maurice (Etienne Chicot) 

After suffering a stroke in 2004, Breillat experienced a form of renaissance, in France anyway. Her stroke left her hemiplegic, and she published a book ‘Abuse of Weakness’ Abus de faiblesse (2009), which she adapted to film in 2013, about how she was swindled out of a fortune by a conman in the immediate period of her recovery.  Breillat’s highly publicised personal tragedy transformed public perceptions and ignited renewed interest in her as an artist. It prompted a return to her earlier, more avant-gardist works, such as the case for 36 Fillette.

 

The biographical impulse behind much of her work is evidence of a creative process that arises from a place of intimate personal experience, and throughout her career Breillat has written, filmed, re-written and reimagined what she knows constantly returning and revisiting bodies, sex, desire and intimacy. At the same time her stories move beyond the personal realm and extend to the universal. ‘Blue Beard’, Barbe Bleue (2009), and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, La Belle Endormie (2010), two films from her mid-career are reimaginings of Charles Perrault’s classical fairytales. 

 

Like Breillat’s films, Perrault’s tales were never intended for children. We know that he wrote them to prove to his peers at the academy that the popular tales of the common folk contained some of humanity’s oldest myths. Her most recent film ‘Last summer’, L’été dernier (2023), returns to relationship depicted in 36 Fillette, where a woman has a romantic relationship with her teenage stepson performing a gendered inversion of the dynamic we see between Lili and Maurice. ‘Last Summer’ is itself a remake of Danish film ‘Queen of Hearts’, Dronningen (May el-Toukhy, 2019), and Breillat self-consciously includes a reference to Hans Christen Anderson’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, acknowledging her film’s Danish roots. 

 

Lili (Delphine Zentout), Bertrand (Olivier Parnière)

36 Fillette equally reaches into the wondrous when Lili leads Maurice to a beach that takes its name from a local legend, a tale that itself recalls the tragic drowning of forbidden lovers Hero and Leander from Greek mythology. 40 years on from its first screening, Lili and her creator continue as forces to be reckoned with, and the film still feels as bold and incisive today in the wake of contemporary debates. Watching Breillat’s films, I find, can sometimes feel like trying to dry swallow a pill and staking a bet that the immediate discomfort will eventually give way to an enlightened sense of relief. I hope you enjoy the film!