by SARAH ROWLAND

One by one, industry reps and film reviewers walked out of the Canadian premiere of Catherine Breillat's latest controversial neo-feminist movie Anatomie de l'enfer. With every gyno-row camera shot of female genitalia, a couple of deserters would get up, shake their heads and march up the aisle.

The first escapees left after Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi shoves a rake up a woman's ass while somehow she manages to sleep peacefully. A couple of scenes and a few defectors later, Siffredi fucks his leading lady, Amira Casar, with a rock. The biggest source of desertion, however, is the now infamous tampon scene.

But when the Parisian-based filmmaker sits down to talk about the controversy her psycho-sexual drama generated at the Toronto film fest, she is just as shocked to hear about reporters hightailing out of the screening as theatregoers were to see the two main characters drink tea steeped from a bloody rag plug.

"I can't understand and can't accept journalists walking out," says the unforgiving director. "It's their job to stay for the entire screening and report on what they've seen. As far as I'm concerned, by giving into their primary reaction, they are breaking their journalistic code."

It wasn't just the reviewers who didn't make it through all 87 minutes of the provocateur's movie, which chronicles a self-deprecating beauty who hires a hot gay stud to examine her body with complete objectivity. At a public screening the following night, an elderly woman reportedly vomited in her seat as she struggled to make a swift exit after seeing Siffredi and Casar sip the menstrual brew.

"I'm just amazed at the sense of shame she must have felt for herself, her body and her feminine condition," says Breillat. "Here's a woman who must have had her period for 40 years. So why hide it? Why must we pretend it doesn't exist?"

Okay, but must we drink it?

According to Breillat, she has an obligation to use shocking imagery. "As artists, we have to bring our audiences beyond the limits that have already been set up," she says, sickened that so many people consider a woman riding the cotton pony and using it as a teabag "obscene." "I want people to explain to me - using philosophy and not calling on tradition - why my film should be censored when we live in a world where religious intolerance, fundamentalism and oppression are so widespread. It brings me to despair that humanity doesn't revolt against that, but instead chooses to stigmatize my work.

Stigmatization is nothing new to the filmmaker. However, what sets her latest movie apart from her other contentious films - whether it's the sexually confused 14-year-old girl flirting with the idea of losing her virginity to a middle-aged player in 36 Fillette, or the anorexic masochistic woman drowning in a toxic relationship in Romance - is that there has always been some relatable element (no matter how small) in her stories. Not so with Anatomie de l'enfer.

Here she makes no attempt to connect the viewers to the story. A majority of the film is set in a sparse bedroom, where two unidentified strangers exchange abstract dialogue and act out a series of shocking images over a period of four nights. But creating a distance between the actors and the people in the theatre was Breillat's intention.

"I'm not trying to make sitcoms, nor am I trying to make normal type of cinema," she says with a sniff. "I don't believe in the idea that you have to lead the spectator to identify with the characters. In my films, I force people to accept that these other emotions exist. I make viewers my puppets, rather than allow them to feel as though they are the person on the screen. I like brutalizing and raping the audience."

The horror of Harry

Considering that Breillat's goal is to visually violate moviegoers, it's hard to imagine what images make her squirm in her seat. "When I see Harry Potter flying over France, even though I adored the novels, I'm just horrified at the poverty of imagination with the transposition onto to the screen," she says.

Given her dissatisfaction with Chris Columbus's interpretation of J.K. Rowling's wizardry, you would think her next project would include adolescent witches ramming broom sticks where they don't belong in the name of feminism. But no, her next movie promises to be her most shocking to date.

"I'm going to show my sweet side now," she says with a menacing smile. "I'm going to make a traditional film about romantic passion, a period piece that people will identify with and feel good about."

Anatomie de l'enfer plays at the Festival of Nouveau Cinéma at Ex-Centris, Tuesday, Oct. 19 at 7:15 p.m and Wednesday, Oct. 20 at 3 p.m. and at Cinéma du Parc Thursday, Oct. 21 at 3:40 p.m.

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