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The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress is a frequently bloody movie, but not really a violent one. Blood is shed with a knife edge, gunshot, whiplash, scalpel, and broken glass, in a chicken killing and an aborted birth. Breillat isn’t exploiting brutality; she’s trying to make a point through the sanguinary imagery. The bloodshed is standing in for the harsh intensity of obsessional erotic attraction. Delicacy of approach isn’t her chosen mode; she virtually drums the point home.

Adapted by Breillat from Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s once notorious and semi-autobiographical 1851 novel, the movie’s obsessional lover is Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou), a young but sybaritically jaded aristocratic rake living in Paris in 1835. The object of his fateful attraction is a putatively homely “older woman” of 36, a boldly unconventional Spanish demimondaine, La Vellini (Asia Argento). At first causally dismissing her to a friend as a “mutt,” the 20-year-old Ryno is in turn rejected by this tempestuous Camille, who has overhead the remark. Still, eventually the two begin a conflict-ridden 10-year affair. Almost one-half of the film is given over to a flashback narrative of this alliance as Ryno confesses his story to the grandmother of the innocent girl whom he is soon to marry (Roxanne Mesquida).

Breillat’s film is sumptuously set and appointed, and photographed in brilliant, detail-illuminating light. Argento smolders, swaggers and explodes in a style that seems to be in accord with her director’s conception of the material. Breillat has interpolated gender-bending anachronisms into the rarified nineteenth-century milieu.

But Ryno’s terrible grand passion doesn’t really register, in part because of Aattou’s rather inert screen presence and performance. The actor, one of Breillat’s discoveries, is certainly as much a beauty as she has claimed, but in his first film appearance he has little technique or personality. And he looks more like one of the venally adventurous schoolboys from the novels of Colette and Cocteau than the world-weary, rueful 30-year-old he’s supposed to be.

Breillat evidently intended some trans-historical comment on mores, manners and human perversity, but the film ends up as an emotionally flat, sometimes preposterously posturing costume drama.

george sax


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