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Critics reviews

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS

Catherine Breillat France, 2013
It's impossible to know whether Breillat considers this film an act of revenge. She has said that the day she first met Rocancourt was the worst day of her life. But after exorcising the experience in a novel and this film, it's undeniable that she has regained the upper hand. Likely the most unnerving part of her brush with a career criminal was the dissolution of her sense of self, an identity she was able to partially rebuild by transforming her trauma into an object of cinema.
April 18, 2016
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You can practically sense Breillat standing outside of herself, recollecting a terribly painful period with staggering lucidity. It feels particularly on point when a wheelchair-bound Maud rolls through a hospital corridor right past Breillat herself, hobbling along with the aid of a nurse and a cane—a fictional analogue and her real-world counterpart passing each other like ships in the night.
December 9, 2015
The movie can ultimately be read as a bizarre sort of anti-confession regarding the choices Breillat made, but it only works on that level if the viewer knows the relevant real-world backstory. Otherwise, it's just some woman withdrawing her life savings from the bank and lighting the bills on fire for no reason.
August 21, 2014
If Abuse of Weakness is autobiography, it's a challenging, uncategorizable use of the form: based on personal events but decidedly resistant to resuscitating the subjective experience of living through them—or, especially, providing any discernible commentary on them. Instead, it's a film that studies its main subject as though part of an alien species, behaving according to unclear logic even in the face of certain disaster.
August 15, 2014
Having met Catherine Breillat more than once since her stroke, I have to say that Huppert seems somehow to have perfectly internalized her personality and her physical manner—even though it's clear that she's in no way impersonating her in the usual sense.
August 14, 2014
...Breillat remains too insignificant and too rudimentary a filmmaker to create compelling meta-commentary—the parallels between Maud's planned film, about the violent relationship between a movie star and a secret lover, and her real life (and Breillat's real real life) go largely unexplored. If taken as a straightforward portrait of soul-sucking codependence, however, Abuse proves disturbing in its moral inscrutability.
August 13, 2014
Breillat's impressive film is a study of bodies and how we carry them, and it explores the manner in which weakness seeks out strength on an almost primal level, bypassing the higher modes of human thought. Feral physicality is her true subject.
August 12, 2014
It's hard to imagine an actress other than Huppert so artfully layering frailty and toughness, self-delusion and self-awareness, and her complex portrayal is an irresistible foil to Kool Shen's blank expressions and wounded swagger. Maud herself often seems to relish the absurd aspects of the story as it unfolds, such as Vilko's hulking driver and ditzy, good-hearted wife—sometimes half-smiling as if, in fact, she were directing her own life.
July 7, 2014
Though she limps and holds her paralyzed hand like a claw, Huppert doesn't succumb to stunts of sympathy—her real achievement is in conveying the inner life of a paralyzed woman living out a fantasy of recovery through the help of a conniving Prince Charming come to her rescue. With unsentimental attention to detail, the film shows how a smart, accomplished woman as Breillat could be led so far down a path of deception.
June 16, 2014
Film Quarterly
The script offers no answers and no justification. Perhaps, having been betrayed by her body, Maud can at least choose to be conned. "It was me. It wasn't me," Huppert says, in the final close-up, her expression simultaneously puzzled and certain. This scene alone ranks among Huppert's very best, and the entire film is her tour de force.
February 21, 2014
Abuse of Weakness is a not an entry in the long and time-honoured tradition of films about filmmaking, but it is nevertheless among the most fascinating filmmaker auto-portraits in cinema... This is a film about the risks and dangers of the inter-subjective openness and emotional (super)investment that is integral to Breillat's unique working method.
October 14, 2013
Simultaneously an unsparing recapitulation of her bad choices—her bad love—and a disavowal of them,Abuse of Weakness is not a tale of victimization but of Breillat score-settling with herself.
October 5, 2013