From the age of 17, when she wrote a novel banned for its "pornographic" content, French provocateur Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Romance, the also-banned A Real Young Girl) has been spinning frank variations on the theme of human sexuality. Usually, her films build to an explicit and crude deflowering or a long sexual negotiation, freighted with weighty issues of exploitation and power—a battle of the sexes that almost always ends with a clear loser. For Breillat, sex is never just sex; it's a political arena in which men and women vie for advantage as much as they vie for pleasure, because the two impulses are often connected. Emotions are merely the consequence of desire.
By those standards, Breillat's unheralded 2001 gem Brief Crossing is surpassingly gentle, a winning contribution to the one-night-only romantic tradition of films like Before Sunrise and Friday Night. Power and control remain an issue, especially in the piercingly sad coda, but in dealing with a young man's deflowering for the first time, Breillat softens up to moments of real tenderness and innocence, revealing an attitude toward first love that's uncharacteristically sensitive to both parties involved. This is a particularly notable achievement considering that the players are a married mother in her mid-30s and a doe-eyed 16-year-old virgin.
On an overnight ferry ride across the English Channel, luxuriantly shot by ace cinematographer Eric Gautier (Irma Vep), self-possessed Englishwoman Sarah Pratt picks up a chance conversation with shy French boy Gilles Guillain. Throughout the long evening, both are angling for physical affection, but their interaction remains awkwardly verbal while they work up the courage to overcome their inhibitions. The inexperienced Guillain has little in common with the worldly Pratt, so she does most of the talking, launching several bitter assessments of the male species even as the soft-spoken teenager chips away at her defenses. The question is, who is the seducer?
For most of the way, Brief Crossing resembles a classic acting exercise: Given one actor who moves around the stage talking and another who sits quietly in a chair, the latter holds most of the power by expending the lesser amount of energy. In this sense, the young Guillain seems at an advantage over Pratt, because he can play sexual rope-a-dope while she wears herself down. But Breillat knows better than anyone that love wields the indelible mark of experience, so those who have been spurned by it have a greater ability to control their own destiny in future affairs. True to form, Brief Crossing's ending is more bitter than sweet, but by extending her sympathies to both sides of the gender divide, Breillat has made her warmest and most humane movie to date.