Met with a torrent of negative (even angry) reviews after it was released in 2004, Catherine Breillat's sexually explicit and transgressive film might seem on the surface to play — as Roger Ebert argued at the time — "like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians". In my view it's a minor triumph of serious intellectual and emotional examination of social perceptions of female bodies and sexuality.
Better yet, it overcomes what I disliked most about her 1999 picture, ROMANCE, which was almost…
