A review: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348529/
It’s a controversial film that was supposed to open in the US today. Did it?
It was reviewed this morning in the L.A. Times, so presumably it’s opening somewhere.
I saw it a few months ago at the Seattle film fest.
I am intrigued by Catherine Breillat as a filmmaker; I think she works in a valuable and provocative thematic area and knows how to ask interesting questions nobody else is asking. And an artist doesn’t have to have answers to those questions, either; the simple fact of asking a thought-provoking question in such a way as to make us consider the issue from a new angle is valuable enough.
However, the more of her films I see, the more it seems like she’s asking the same questions over and over in exactly the same way. I get the impression that she’s become somewhat obsessive and is having trouble moving forward artistically. Either that or she’s found a business model that works (cheap movie, lots of sex, easy to sell in the overseas market) and is settling into it. I have my doubts, though. More in a bit.
Anatomy of Hell is, to me, her least successful movie for many of these reasons. The characters are so stripped of specificity as to become purely allegorical, and they speak in philosophical riddles. The sexual content is grossly heightened. In some ways, it’s the purest expression of what Breillat is about, but (a) because it’s so pure it’s hard to look at, and (b) it really isn’t any different from what she’s already been asking, regardless of how clearly it’s distilled. (It’s the sheer extremity of the film that makes me think it’s unlikely Breillat is relaxing into a comfortable business model that lets her keep making the same movie over and over. It’s not a safe film at all, content-wise. Bloody erect cock! Seriously.)
Strangely enough, I saw Anatomy of Hell in a double feature with her immediately previous film, Sex is Comedy, which is an extremely atypical project for her. It goes behind the scenes at a movie shoot to focus on how an obsessive director gets her actors to work on a difficult sex scene. (It’s based quite clearly on a scene from Breillat’s own Fat Girl, and even uses the same two actors. In an aside, I think Fat Girl is probably her best movie.) Sex is Comedy has many of the same thematic preoccupations as Breillat’s other work, but because the material is presented from an off-kilter angle, distracting us with the autobiographical elements the way a magician draws your eye away from the actual trick with a hand flourish, it’s actually a lot more successful than the staring-into-the-sun approach of Anatomy of Hell.
So, in summary: If you’ve seen more than a couple of other Breillat movies, you don’t need to see Anatomy of Hell, because there really isn’t anything new there. And if you haven’t seen any Breillat movies, Anatomy of Hell is absolutely not the one to start with.
…Hmmm. Parsing that out, I just said that nobody should see it. Well, that’s not what I meant, but— or maybe that is what I meant. 
Maybe I will check that one out first then. Thanks!