Romance & Sharp Stick

Rotten Rewind

TW: This episode contains discussion of rape and sexual assault.

Some filmmakers court controversy wherever they go, but few have been as polarizing as Catherine Breillat and Lena Dunham. For our third installment in the Rotten Female Gaze miniseries, we'll be dissecting two films from Breillat and Dunham that offered an uncompromising and often uncomfortable look at the complexity of female sexuality.

Beginning in 1999 with Breillat's visceral and painful "Romance," a film that shocked audiences during its initial festival run and continues to divide critics and fans of the French auteur to this day with its bleak vision of one woman's sexual unravelling. After that, we'll move onto Dunham's thematically thorny and tonally messy comedy, "Sharp Stick" starring Kristine Froseth, Jon Bernthal, Taylour Paige, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Scott Speedman as a feminist porn star.

Is the backlash Dunham received over the last decade harsher because she's a young, female filmmaker? Are we so desensitized that seeing unsimulated sex in a film feels tame today? Does Dunham double down on her racial blind spots in "Sharp Stick?" Is the Scott Speedman Revival Tour the hottest ticket in town you never saw coming? Find out right now on the hottest podcast on Patreon.

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