The Movie:

If you start off Abuse of Weakness judging the protagonist's highly questionable decisions, you are in for an extremely frustrating experience. Why would an intelligent, independent, successful film director let herself get swindled by a man she knew to be a con artist? How can she fall victim to not one, but all of the simplest, most obvious tricks this man throws at her?

When talking about fictional narrative, we always bring up the importance of believable character motivations, trying desperately to explain why a character acts the way they do. Yet sometimes decisions in real life don't make sense, and are not backed by a convenient list of reasons. As passive audience members, we watch Maud (Isabelle Huppert) write one check after the other, totaling in hundreds of thousands of Euros, to certified con man Vilko (Kool Shen), and we want to reach into the screen and knock the pen out of her hand.

One option is to dismiss Abuse of Weakness as an example of bad writing with nonsensical character motivations. Yet we all know someone, even someone we know to be otherwise smart and careful, get taken in by the most simplistically obvious scams via unhealthy and destructive relationships. When the dust clears and they're left with nothing, none of what happened to that person makes much sense in hindsight.

This is what happened to Catherine Breillat, one of the most revered and successful filmmakers in French cinema and writer/director of Abuse of Weakness. The film works as a brutally honest confession, the haunting, fourth wall breaking final shot makes that obvious. When Breillat suddenly suffered a stroke, she let a con man into her life, one who took her for almost everything she had.

Breillat strips out any possible convenient character motivation from the fictionalized account of her story. Of course the easy go-to answer would be that Maud, who obviously represents Breillat, was physically and emotionally vulnerable as a stroke victim, which almost worked as an invitation for Vilko to rob her blind. Yet instead of composing Maud as a traditional victim, Breillat creates a character who hangs on to her wit and senses, even while making the most obviously disastrous decisions.

On the other hand, instead of creating Vilko as an irresistibly charming con man like a character out of The Sting or even the recent American Hustle, she offers a tacky, gauche and irritating personality, the dictionary definition of a douchebag. So much so that we wonder how "this" man could manage to rip off even the dumbest people on the planet, let alone an intelligent and sophisticated artist.

As the story develops, Breillat brilliantly closes in on this toxic relationship, letting the impressive performances by Huppert and Shen take the foreground. More and more, details of Maud's life outside of her relationship with Vilko disappears until the characters find themselves in an absurd situation that could never fly if Breillat let a smidgen of Maud's outside life in.

The DVD:

Video:

Abuse of Weakness sports an impressively clean standard definition presentation that doesn't have a lot of noticeable video noise. This is an intimate character study, therefore the cinematography is understandably not very flashy, resulting in an adequate decision to check the film out on DVD.

Audio:

The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 track could have easily been presented in stereo, since this is a dialogue heavy film with a very subdued music score. This is of course understandable, considering the film's simple approach to the subject matter. Otherwise, this is a clear mix and dialogue is heard very clearly.

Extras:

The Future of Cinema: A cute, two-minute short film where Breillat talks about the relationship between art and commerce in cinema.

Interview with Catherine Breillat: In this 17-minute piece, Breillat talks about her working relationship with Huppert, as well as the awkwardness of directing her as a character that represents herself.

We also get a bunch of Trailers for Abuse of Weakness and other Breillat films.

Final Thoughts:

Breillat is a filmmaker known for dealing with intense and abusive sexual relationships in her work, therefore her real life experience ironically becomes the perfect subject for her to tackle. What we get with Abuse of Weakness is a maddening yet honest and intriguing experience.

Oktay Ege Kozak is a film critic and screenwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He also writes for The Playlist, The Oregon Herald, and Beyazperde.com