Strong weak woman As a result of the stroke, independent film director Maud found herself in an extremely difficult position, becoming in fact a hostage to the weakness and weakness of her own body, in which the passionate fire of sexual passions and bodily desires is still burning. At one point in her life, first on the TV screen, and then live, she meets a brutal macho with a criminal past Wilco, who becomes for Maud obsession, blind fatal attraction and inspiration at the same time.
With the onset of the new millennium in the career of the main radical feminist of all modern French cinema and a faithful student of the Italian master Bernardo Bertolucci, writer-intellectual, screenwriter, actress and director Catherine Breia, there was not a crisis of ideas and creative stagnation, but a period of maturity, if we take a report from the actually synephile-autobiographical “Intimate Scenes”, in which the main Freudian question with a correlation from Breia was replaced by ironic reflections on the realism of a cartoon, and a separate historical film in the context of the “Tombrantine”.
Having survived a stroke and a meeting with a swindler Rocancourt, Catherine Breya almost for three years fell out of the cinematic spectacle of critics and viewers, but in 2013 at the international film festivals in Toronto, Paris, Warsaw and Belgrade, the last film of the once main French scandalist called “Abuse of Weakness”, in which Braia, having been revived as a phoenix, radically left her former shocking antics, filming this time not even about a woman (although without women in French cinema in general and in particular, not a rock girl in the network), was presented. The pressing personal, private, speculative and frustrating, is soon replaced by the general; the author’s confession, reflection acquires new facets, and the disease of love in French rhymes with the disease of cinema.
Initially, the film is somewhat confusing, presenting to the audience almost the story of a wolf and an innocent sheep, a vicious man and an innocent woman, used both financially and sexually, a shocking drama about a disabled woman and a moral freak who wears a mask of piety in the name of his obscene goals. But in fact, Catherine Breia has prepared for the audience not another sentence alpha males and alphonse, not a psychological drama with an autobiographical beginning and ornate ending (although the notes of autobiography in the picture is too transparent and obvious to be simply ignored, although excessively emphasize them should not be due to the multipolarity of the tape), not the drama of human addiction and sexual blackmail.
The film “Abuse of Weakness”, aged in warm pastel colors, is a powerful, but in French elegant drama not about the monstrous power of men over women, but about the power of women over men and looks at women in the picture through a damning magnifying glass, through the prism of the main character of the actress Isabelle Huppert named Maud. Maude in the brilliant performance of Mademoiselle Huppert, who, probably for the first time after the outrageous anti-bourgeois pamphlet “The Pianist” Haneke and the naturalistic-deviant invective “My Mother” Honoré appears in an extremely ambiguous but very elegant image of an independent filmmaker, is an example of a deft manipulator of her own feelings, emotions and instincts, who managed to seduce a man she liked with the most attractive female traits – weakness and defenselessness. The insidious villain Vilko performed by the famous French composer and singer Cool Shen, this brutal brazen macho, becomes a victim of Maud’s skillful play, which, despite the body affected by the disease, remains sexual and hypnotizing-attractive. Yes, her character feeds her victim with finances, yes, she actually decides for Vilko who he is and what his role is not only in her film, but also in life. And in fact, the really weak is not Maud, but the hero of Kul Shen, whose moral weakness she uses to the fullest.
Behind the mask of a weak defenseless and helpless woman lies a real spider who weaves a luxurious web for her lover, builds a golden cage, and Vilko, in which deceit is much less than compassion, comes across. But paradoxically in the picture, everyone abuses weakness: Maud, manipulating others, and Wilko, amenable to this game and simulation, and the society surrounding them. The vicious circle of human weakness closed, the heroes attracted to each other like a magnet. But will they have the strength for a new stage in their lives, the strength for complete liberation from each other, and will the abuse of weakness become an abuse of power?