Catherine Breillat isn’t a fire-breathing feminist. At least, she never set out to be one, even if that’s how critics and scholars have characterized the filmmaker and her work in her more than 30 years of writing and directing. Indeed, Ms. Breillat’s reputation has grown out of a singularly fiery and sexualized vision of comfort and suffering.

What little else we know about the French auteur, whose new film, “The Last Mistress,” arrives in theaters next Friday, stems in large part from Anne Parillaud’s leading role as the fickle and manipulative artiste plodding around with a cane in “Sex Is Comedy” (2002), Ms. Breillat’s fictionalized account of the making of her own film “Fat Girl” (2001). “Sex Is Comedy” centered on the story of a director who struggles to film an intimate sex scene between two actors who hate each other.