The “angel,” conversely, represents the spiritual, the ideational, the pure—the law without the body. An angel is a messenger of a divine or absolute order. It has no genitals, no anus, no desires of its own. It simply enforces the Word.
Dirty Like an Angel is not an easy film. It is a labyrinth of ideas, a Sphinx’s riddle dressed as a police procedural. But for those who enter it on its own terms—who accept that it is not a story about people, but a combat about principles—it is revelatory. It is Catherine Breillat at her purest: a filmmaker who dares to suggest that the only truly angelic state is to be utterly, shamelessly, and irrevocably dirty. And that the law, in all its clean and starched certainty, is the dirtiest fiction of all. Dirty Like an Angel -Catherine Breillat- 1991-
In the vast, uncomfortable, and often brilliant filmography of Catherine Breillat, the 1991 film Dirty Like an Angel ( Sale comme un ange ) occupies a peculiar, shadowy throne. Sandwiched between her controversial debut A Real Young Girl (1976) and the international infamy of Romance (1999), this film is frequently cited by Breillat herself as one of her most personal and radical works. Yet, for decades, it remained one of her least-seen, a spectral title whispered about in cinephile circles, overshadowed by the more graphic provocations of her later career. It simply enforces the Word
For Breillat, “dirty” is not mere filth or vulgarity. It is the radical impurity of the living body. It is menstruation, sex, sweat, excrement, lactation—all the biological realities that patriarchal society, romantic cinema, and moral laws conspire to veil. To be dirty is to be unflinchingly embodied. But for those who enter it on its
Breillat, in a masterstroke, refuses to turn Barbara into a heroine. She is not likable. She is cold, cryptic, and often cruel. She toys with Georges not for revenge, but because it amuses her. This is not a feminist revenge fantasy. It is something far more unsettling: a portrait of a woman who has achieved a kind of post-human liberty, and who is consequently as amoral as a natural disaster. Casting the bubbly pop star Lio—famous for hits like “Banana Split” and her image as a sweet, kitsch ingénue—was a stroke of genius. In the early 90s, Lio was the face of a certain playful, retro-feminine French pop culture. To see her stripped of makeup, dressed in mundane clothes, speaking Breillat’s jagged, philosophical dialogue with a dead-eyed serenity is deeply uncanny.
Breillat forces us, alongside Georges, to listen . The film’s true action is dialogue. Barbara and Georges speak in long, spiraling, Socratic exchanges. They don’t flirt; they argue about the nature of wanting. Barbara’s speech is luminous and strange. She speaks of desire not as lack, but as plenitude. “When I desire,” she seems to say, “I am more fully myself than at any other moment. The object of desire is an afterthought.”