Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Anaïs Reboux and Roxane Mesquida in Catherine Breillat’s FAT GIRL. And if you haven’t already, you really should read PR’s essay on Breillat’s ROMANCE.
As you can probably tell, the actors are looking in a mirror in this shot. Actors’ faces reflected in mirrors is a movie cliché I never tire of. I sometimes wonder if you could write a history of film performance and shot composition using just this one device. OK, maybe not a whole history, but surely a decent blog post, right? Hmmm…
Click on the image to enlarge.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Seriously, I need way more spare time to watch all the films this blog is turning me on to! Guess I need to start a list.
PS – “Fat Girl” is in the Hulu Criterion Collection, but it’s the only Breillat film there. NetFlix has quite a few on DVD. Many of them, including “Romance,” have terrible ratings. Funny that one of her films, “Anatomy of Hell,” features porn star Rocco Siffredi!
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Siffredi is featured in ROMANCE too. The college student who seduces the older sister FAT GIRL is played by actor Libero De Rienzo. Safe to say Breillat has a thing for Italian men.
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Curious to here Peterike’s take on Breillat. As PR is fond of pointing out, she’s often the last filmmaker you want to turn your friends onto. If you don’t have a thing for super-arty, Frenchie intellectualizing, you may not like.
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Now that you’ve seen “Fat Girl” you might enjoy Breillat’s “Sex is Comedy,” a film she made about the making of “Fat Girl,” and specifically about the challenge of filming “Fat Girl”‘s sex scenes. Not a great pic but fascinating anyway.
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Oh, cool, yeah I’m definitely interested in that. I’ll look for it on Netflix.
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“Sex is Comedy” is pretty fun, IMO. My fave Breillats are probably “Romance” and . . . that one about the affair on the boat.
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The giant dressing room mirror shot has to be one of the main subcategories of mirror shot.
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I feel like I should start watching DVDs on my computer so I can begin collecting mirror shot stills.
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Plus, I love when the mirror cracks or shatters in order to demonstrate some kind of psychological problem. One of the great movie conventions.
Another good one is the mirror shot that you don’t realize is a mirror shot until the camera moves or something, and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been looking at a mirror!”
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Oh, for sure, I love the shattered mirror thing too. My avatar here is my little homage to that.
Movie Mirror Shots. I think we have a new blog feature on our hands.
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I watched Blier’s MENAGE last night. Quite a few good mirror shots in that one.
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Loved “Menage,” though it isn’t one of my very fave Bliers. How’d you react? Plus: have you ever caught “Beau Pere”? Just great. Plus, given today’s priggishness about older-younger sex, it’s probably twice as scandalous as it was when it first came out.
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It was my fourth Blier — the others being GOING PLACES, HANDKERCHIEFS, and HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE ME? — and I’d rank it number 4, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t think I could ever get tired of Depardieu in a Blier film.
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Because Sax was talking about it, I watched JEWEL ROBBERY last night and it features one of those camera moves that reveals we had been looking in a mirror.
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