Catherine Breillat's 'Pornocratie': A Double Remake of Romance and Duras

Catherine Breillat's novel 'Pornocratie' (2001) is a double remake: refilming her own 1999 movie 'Romance' and rewriting Marguerite Duras's 'The Malady of Death'. The book explores the political power of women, a concept Breillat terms 'pornocratie'. She rejects narrative and sociology to address sexuality through mythic themes of masculinity and femininity. Breillat wrote the novel after failing to secure film rights for Duras's text, feeling an urgent need to return to literature. The language is deliberately excessive and lyrical, risking bad taste to confront the 'disease of death' that she equates with sexual desire. Breillat claims the word 'pornocratie' itself frightens people because it signifies women's power. The book's protagonist is a woman who pays a young homosexual to watch her, inverting Duras's original scenario where a man pays a woman. Breillat argues that women and homosexuals share a language of sexual desire that transcends social order, while heterosexual men remain trapped in animalistic reproduction. She plans a film adaptation starring Rocco Siffredi, with inner voices (possibly Jean-Louis Trintignant) to articulate male consciousness, which she believes men lack. The novel avoids crude language, using archaic terms instead, as Breillat considers modern obscenity mere fashionable tics.