Sex and Power: The Provocative Explorations of Catherine Breillat

The work of Catherine Breillat, the French filmmaker and novelist whose movies frequently explore the perversity animating male-female power dynamics in Western society, has always been fearlessly pertinent. These days, as more and more revelations about the sexual predations of high-profile men come to light, they may even be more pertinent.

The Criterion Channel section of the streaming site Filmstruck recently unveiled its Catherine Breillat Collection, which offers all the movies the director has made in this century, with the exception of “Anatomy of Hell,” the 2004 movie about men’s fear of menstruation, and one of her most extreme works in terms of explicit content.

The first picture of the collection is the still-shocking “Fat Girl,” from 2001, which centers on a 12-year-old. Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), chubby, pouty and red-cheeked, feels out of sorts while on holiday, watching her older sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), being romanced by a local Lothario, Fernando (Libero De Rienzo). The movie’s central jaw-dropper is a scene, about 20 minutes in, when Fernando visits the girls’ shared bedroom one night. A wide-awake Anaïs is witness to Fernando’s wheedling, inveigling “seduction” of Elena. When Elena instructs her beau to go only so far, he responds “I swear on my mother’s head.” Seconds later, Fernando says that he’s not sure if he can hold himself back and that it would be a shame if he had to go to another girl to get what he wants. And on it goes. It’s excruciating.

Not all of Ms. Breillat’s observations are specific to the vexation of women. This movie, and others of hers, feature intimate implications of the cosmic. I saw “Fat Girl” for the first time in 2001, at the Toronto International Film Festival. This is not quite a spoiler — because believe me, the scene in question is not one that you are going to see coming, even with this reveal — but the movie ends with the central character subjected to a mini-apocalypse: The world she knows ends before her eyes. It’s a shattering scene, constructed with an assurance that is kind of terrifying. On the day I saw the movie, Sept. 8, 2001, I found it too abrupt and arbitrary. Little did I know. Interviewing Ms. Breillat a couple of years later, I told her how my perception of the film changed after Sept. 11; her response was an enthusiastic nod of agreement — and a Gallic shrug.

All the other films in the collection are rich in wit, emotional tumult and philosophical trenchancy. “Sex Is Comedy,” from 2004, is a genuinely funny movie about moviemaking, inspired by the shooting of that startling sex scene from “Fat Girl.” Here Anne Parillaud plays a put-upon stand-in for Ms. Breillat. “The Last Mistress,” from 2008, is a 19th-century tale of a woman who refuses to take her lover’s rejection in stride. This movie’s subversions begin with the casting of a thoroughly modern screen presence, Asia Argento, in the title role.

There has often been a recognizable streak of fantasy in Ms. Breillat’s work, and in recent years she has given her tendencies in that direction freer rein by making films of well-known fairy tales. Her perspectives on “Bluebeard” (2010) and “Sleeping Beauty” (2011) are more than fractured; they are radical. Lola Créton, known in the United States mostly for her work in Mia Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love” (2012) and Olivier Assayas’ “Something in the Air” (2013), gives a fierce performance in “Bluebeard” as Marie-Catherine, the title character’s clever young wife who is confounded by the temptation of a secret chamber in their shared castle.

The collection is completed by “Abuse of Weakness” (2014), Ms. Breillat’s most recent film, and possibly her greatest, so far. It’s a largely autobiographical account of catastrophic events after Ms. Breillat’s brain hemorrhage in 2004. (She also wrote a novel based on her experiences.)

In that film, Isabelle Huppert, in an even more astonishing performance than what she usually serves up, plays Maud, a writer and director we first see sliding out of her bed, half-paralyzed. Ms. Huppert portrays her suffering character, who remains partly paralyzed throughout, with incredible physicality. At times, Maud seems to masochistically luxuriate in her incapacitation. Watching television one evening, Maud is entranced by the bragging of a ruggedly handsome con man, recently released from prison and promoting a book about his swindles. She asks him to star in her next film; he agrees, and he almost immediately starts a psychological game with her.

“I don’t meet with my actors until I start filming,” Maud says, her left hand still crabbed from her stroke. Slumped in a chair opposite her, the con man, played by the French rapper Kool Shen, responds, “You are going to see a lot of me.” Soon Maud is writing him enormous checks and imperiously insisting to herself that she understands what’s going on and has some control over it. This is a subtle but unflinching psychological horror picture with a devastating finale.

If you’re in the mood to do more cinematic exploring, this month the cinephile site Filmatique, which specializes in international movies that normally get scant attention in the United States, focuses on North African directors and films. So far it has posted Mohcine Besri’s 2011 kidnapping drama, “The Miscreants”; Nadine Khan’s “Chaos, Disorder” (2013), a scrappy love triangle set in Cairo; and a female character study from 2012, “Coming Forth by Day,” from the Egyptian filmmaker Hala Lotfy.

On Dec. 22, the Tunisian picture “Challat of Tunis” debuts on the site. Directed by and featuring Kaouther Ben Hania, this mockumentary posits the existence of a criminal in prerevolutionary Tunisia called the Challat. (The word means blade in a Tunisian dialect.) In 2003, the movie tells us, he rampaged through Tunis on a motorbike, hunting down provocatively dressed women and slashing their buttocks with a straight razor.

The movie begins 10 years after, with Ms. Ben Hania trying to visit the prison where the Challat was supposedly held. Stymied, she goes to neighborhoods where he was reputed to have struck. Interviewing local residents, she finds men disparaging the Challat’s supposed victims and their scanty wear. They say things like “One must dress correctly. In a respectful fashion.” The movie teems with such upsetting, but not surprising, instances of victim-blaming. The filmmaker also interviews the maker of a “devout” video game in which the player is the Challat, and gains points for slashing inappropriately dressed women. If the player attacks a hijab-wearing woman, points are deducted. Ms. Ben Hania also explores the home life of a creepy braggart who claims to be the “real” Challat.

This is a satire that stings. The misogyny and threatened masculinity on display half a world away is no different from what exists in the United States; the only distinction is in the pretext. (Many of the men in this movie claim that their retrograde views are endorsed by Islam.) Like the films of Ms. Breillat, “Challat of Tunis” is uncomfortably timely.