Sometimes, no matter how carefully you choose your film, you find yourself watching a dog. If it's Scooby Doo 2 then it's probably because you've found yourself babysitting an 8-year-old and the choice was out of your hands. But sometimes you have no excuse. Sometimes you ignore the warning bells ringing in your head and choose to see a film you know might suck. Usually it's an art film. An ART in capital letters film. Pretentious, portentous, self-indulgent, and self-important. Which brings me to this year's EIFF and Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell.
Depending on whom you listen to Catherine Breillat is either a courageous libertine, justifiably notorious for 1999's Romance with its frank, explicit depiction of a woman's search for sexual fulfilment. Or she's a pornographer who courts controversy by livening up her ennui-laden films with the sort of hardcore sex scenes more suited to mail-order.
Her latest film, Anatomy of Hell, based on her own novel Pornocratie, is another challenging voyage (or wallow) in the limits of sexual discovery. When a young woman's attempted suicide in the toilet of a Paris gay bar is thwarted, she embarks on a perverse, joyless, masturbatory relationship with her saviour. When the heroine removes her soiled tampon, dips it in a glass of water and gives it to the hero to drink, or the hero inserts the handle of a garden fork into the sleeping heroine's vagina, I defy anyone to keep a straight face. With scenes like these, Anatomy of Hell was the funniest film I saw during the Festival. Shame it didn't realise it.
Laughs were thin on the ground in Edinburgh this summer, with two big, fat, dark shadows hanging over this year's Film Festival programme. Despite …