How the mighty have fallen. Catherine Breillat, the French director so auteur that she is even a professor of auteur cinema at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, premiered her new film The Sleeping Beauty at the Venice film festival last week. Showing a film at Venice means having to hold a press conference in a room with 392 seats. For directors such as Sofia Coppola, Darren Aronofsky and Antony Cordier, the room has been more or less full. For Breillat, there were 370 empty seats.

But this was, in truth, no more embarrassing than her film, which follows a precocious six-year-old princess through a montage of fairy stories. There are topless fairies, creepy dwarves, albino children and a boil-covered hairy giant. This might make it sound interesting – but alas, it isn't. It's tedious, self-indulgent nonsense.

This from the director who once made such waves, and courted so much controversy, with her sexually explicit films Romance and Anatomy of Hell. Breillat will no doubt blame the lack of interest on the fact that, as she once told an interviewer, "all true artists are hated". At the press conference, she railed against the "lack of respect" that French critics have for her, unlike those from Protestant countries such as the UK. It was all, regrettably, as self-regarding as her latest film.