Brief Crossing

October 2024 · 5 minute read

A featherweight episode in Catherine Breillat's ongoing exploration of desire, sex and power, "Brief Crossing" is another ponderously intellectualized but trite post-feminist study in seduction and surrender from the director of "Romance." More likely to land festival and TV bookings purely on the strength of the writer-director's reputation than for its banal and humorless discourse on sexual politics.

A featherweight episode in Catherine Breillat’s ongoing exploration of desire, sex and power, “Brief Crossing” is another ponderously intellectualized but trite post-feminist study in seduction and surrender from the director of “Romance.” One of 10 works by different filmmakers commissioned by Gallic cultural Web Arte under the collective banner “Masculin/Feminin,” this first in the series is more likely to land festival and TV bookings purely on the strength of the writer-director’s reputation than for its banal and humorless discourse on sexual politics.

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Most of the action consists of a tiresomely circuitous round of verbal foreplay. During an overnight ferry crossing from La Havre to Portsmouth, 16-year-old French lad Thomas (Gilles Guillain) meets thirtysomething Brit Alice (Sarah Pratt) in line at the cafeteria. Pair find themselves sharing a table and within minutes, both have undergone a transformation. Alice’s chilly exterior dissolves into toying flirtatiousness, studying her dinner companion with cool intensity, as Thomas quickly sheds his boyish awkwardness and gains confidence.

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While the sexual frisson between them is palpable, it remains unspoken. As they head to the bar en route to the inevitable bedroom encounter, the unrelenting talk becomes more leaden. Not content to serve up the elementary symbolism of a stage act in which a magician locks his assistant in a box and impales her, Breillat has Alice spell out the metaphor in tedious commentary, indicating the low level of intelligence with which the director credits her audience.

After much sparring between youth, beauty and cockiness on one side and age, poise and experience on the other, the match ends with a predictable “revelation” in which Alice emerges as the supreme manipulator and Thomas undergoes a crushing loss of innocence.

Coming after Breillat’s nuanced exploration of a young girl’s loss of virginity in “A Ma Soeur,” the director’s account of Thomas’ transition seems especially pedestrian. Given their unsympathetic, uninteresting characters, neither thesp registers strongly, least of all Pratt, whose English character is too patently imagined and written by a French woman to ring true.

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