The film was Fat Girl. It featured sex, coercion, sex, anal sex, sex, rape, sex, murder and more sex. In other words, it had all the hallmarks of a Catherine Breillat movie. Though she’s been making films for more than twenty years, Breillat’s films have only recently begun to cross the Atlantic. Romance caused quite a stir in America because of an unedited scene featuring oral sex. Though I hadn’t enjoyed screening Fat Girl and didn’t find it to be a particularly great bit of moviemaking, I was nonetheless excited to talk to Breillat — being a world-renowned troublemaker and provocative director can have that effect on a film journalist.
With Fat Girl opening at select theatres across the nation and playing simultaneously at the 2001 Chicago International Film Festival, Breillat flew to Chicago in the early part of October to promote the movie. She stayed at the Hilton Garden and, being hungry, wanted to do her interview with me in the hotel’s first floor dining area. When I arrived, I was greeted with a bit of bad news: the French-speaking, French citizen Catherine Breillat, director of the French film, Fat Girl, was flying solo during her interviews for the day... her translator was MIA. To make matters even worse, with the breakfast hours just over, the hotel staff began to vacuum the carpeting in the restaurant... and refused to stop when asked.
Despite this auspicious beginning, the interview went better than expected. Breillat’s points — the ones that I understood — were insightful and clever and more than enough to make for a good article. Sadly, though, fate conspired against me: the tape of the Breillat interview is a veritable jumble of sound; part vacuum, part woman with a heavy French accent. This is the one interview that I have done that I genuinely regret not being able to use. There will never be another interview that will have worse sound quality either.
