E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lip service Catherine Breillat’s Anatomie de l’enfer, and Peter Bogdanovich BY GERALD PEARY

Just when you think you’ve seen everything on the screen: in the middle of Anatomie de l’enfer/Anatomy of Hell, this year’s plunge by France’s Catherine Breillat (Romance, A ma sœur!) into the inferno of seedy sex, the unnamed heroine (Amira Casar) pulls out her bloody tampon and dunks it into a glass of water, and she and her unnamed demon lover (Rocco Siffredi) have a couple of sacramental sips each. And nobody blinks or gags . . . except the audience? Or will only some in the crowd be ruffled? Non-evolved guys? Will free spirits applaud Breillat’s chutzpah in forefronting a gushy discharge as a bloody natural time of the month rather than something loathsome and repugnant to keep lovers at bay? There’s even what smells of feminine-hygiene product placement in this scene: a box of Tampax sits on a table. Use at will!

No, Anatomie de l’enfer (which screens at the Brattle this weekend, October 1 through 3) isn’t for everybody. It’s mostly not for me, who found the shock moments numbing and the obsessive story quite tiresome, even at a minimalist 87 minutes. What happens? A melancholic, disturbed 30ish woman climbs the stairs of a gay disco, enters the men’s room, and slits her wrist. A gay man follows her in and takes her to the emergency room. Once released from the hospital, she’s anything but grateful: she accuses him of have been in the lavatory only because he was looking to get sucked off. We’re in the Breillat universe, so within seconds, the woman, a bandage on her wrist, is on her knees in the street. The man pulls out his donkey tool: we recognize it from Breillat’s earlier Romance, which also featured below-the-belt Siffredi. (He’s a famous Italian porn star.) The woman has a randy proposition: she will pay this man to come to her place for four nights and "watch me where I’m unwatchable." He can look but he needn’t touch. The fact that he’s gay is what she requires of her sadomasochist scenario: a haughty homosexual who has no need of females.

When the man arrives for night one, he’s perfect. He sneers at her coquettish flirtations. He sits in a chair and rails about the "obscene nature" of women: "When you spread your lips, we are revolted." The nights pass. There’s lots of post–Georges Bataille hot-air dialogue (so French!) between our antagonist/protagonist pair, and Breillat also throws in some prurient antics to keep the audience tantalized. The man takes lipstick and paints the sleeping lady’s vaginal lips. On another occasion, he brings a pitchfork into the room and, somehow painlessly, plants it in the lady’s rectum. Again, she’s asleep, or is she just feigning? Is it all a passive erotic game, like the "Doctor" game she submitted to in childhood (a flashback) with the smutty neighborhood lads?

Anatomie de l’enfer takes a familiar Last Tango in Paris turn in which the buggering man, a champion of anonymous sex, gets suddenly sentimental; he’s even bent out of shape because he doesn’t know the woman’s name! He cries! And then the implied death trip that we’ve been watching comes oh-so-true.

"The sexual issues are the kind that I used to care about when I was a feminist undergraduate" is what my wife had to say about the movie, which she still sort of liked. But I couldn’t be persuaded that Breillat’s film is more than a huff-and-puff, sex-soaked turn-off.

I’VE TWICE INTERVIEWED The Last Picture Show filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, at the Montreal Film Festival and at his New York home. Both times, he was gracious, open, and very glad to talk. He warmed to me, I think, because I’m a genuine fan of several of his most maligned pictures, Daisy Miller and Texasville, and I also speak highly of his cult films, Targets and Saint Jack. But even more important than my admiration for his work is our shared nostalgia for the golden days of Hollywood, when there were great directors and great stars.

A talk with Bogdanovich is a walk into the past. His conversation is peppered with lively tales of Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Ernst Lubitsch and right-on impersonations of his heroes: Jimmy Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock, Jerry Lewis. I got him to do his Bugs Bunny by quoting his daffy comedy What’s Up, Doc? Check out his new volume of interviews and memoirs with studio actors, Who the Hell’s in It?(Knopf). Although the 500-plus pages could have used some pruning, Bogdanovich’s book is the vivid journalist work of a true fan. My favorite pieces: a tart, forthright talk with Lauren Bacall and fond personal memories of the late Stewart, Cary Grant, and River Phoenix.