The Last Mistress (2007)NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's P

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The Last Mistress (2007)
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

IFC Films
Asia Argento and Fu’ad Aït Aattou are lovers in a tempestuous relationship in Catherine Breillat’s film “The Last Mistress.”

June 27, 2008
The Sex and the Fury, French Aristocracy Style

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: June 27, 2008


The first time you see the courtesan called La Vellini, she’s stretched out on a divan and wearing a smile, or perhaps a scowl. It’s hard to tell with this woman, whose lips restlessly tremble and twist with rage and pleasure. She’s dressed like the supine subject of Goya’s painting “The Clothed Maja,” which, like its sister image, “The Nude Maja,” was condemned as indecent by the Spanish Inquisition. To look at the figure on screen writhing like a pampered cat is to understand why those paintings made some observers uneasy.

“The Last Mistress” is unlikely to make anyone truly uneasy, because its deepest provocations — the casting of Asia Argento as La Vellini aside — occur at the level of narrative rather than through its style. Written and directed by Catherine Breillat, it relates the unhinged affair between La Vellini and Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou, a luscious newcomer), a penniless nobleman and libertine somewhat her junior. Opening in 1835 and based on a novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly from 1851, the story is cruel and enthralling.

Much of it transpires in flashbacks, sometimes in bed or the equivalent: a tiger-skin rug, a patch of desert sand. Like all of Ms. Breillat’s films, it is also an emotional, often raw inquiry into troubling, cursed desire.

The film’s original French title, “Une Vieille Maîtresse” (“an old mistress”), is not as sexy as the new one but fits the story better. La Vellini, a Spaniard living in Paris with her decrepit though titled husband, Sir Reginald (Nicholas Hawtrey), is already well seasoned when she meets Ryno, who has recently returned from licentious doings abroad. The future lovers become aware of each other when a mutual friend points out La Vellini enjoying some ice cream in a park. Ryno loudly mocks her as “an ugly mutt,” earning him a dark look from the object of his scorn. From the violence with which she began licking her ice cream in his direction — Ms. Breillat abhors subtlety — he should have known what he was in for.

A passion is born, followed by rivulets of blood, near and decisive death, a torrent of words, carnality. The story opens on the eve of Ryno’s wedding to a delectable moneyed aristocrat, Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida, suitably decorative if scarcely virginal). He’s ready to settle down, or maybe just settle. One evening Hermangarde’s grandmother, the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute, wonderfully sly and twinkling), confronts Ryno about his scandalous reputation. Confessing all, he relates the highs and bitter lows of his affair with La Vellini, which unfolds as a series of overheated, assaultive (rarely tender) encounters between erotic equals. The two are duelists in a continuing war — one monitored by society busybodies humorously played by Yolande Moreau and Michael Lonsdale — perhaps not of their making.

Ms. Breillat’s explorations of desire and pleasure are so far from the antiseptic world of most screen depictions as to seem far out. In truth she’s just fearless, determined to show what others keep hidden — the good, the bad, the tumescent, the fluid — so she can keep puzzling through her ideas. “The Last Mistress” isn’t as graphic as some of her other films, notably “Romance,” which features full-frontal and then some. The sex in this film is far from explicit, though it features geometric formations that may be better suited for Kama Sutra students, or at least the limber. What’s explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It’s terribly French.

It’s also gloriously unpredictable, even if the ways in which Ms. Breillat frames and puts together scenes tend to be less than surprising. A stubborn individualist, she is also a generally unremarkable, even on occasion awkward stylist, though one sensitive to color. You gasp at her ideas and words, not her setups and camera moves. Set amid the rarefied realm of the French aristocracy — Louis-Philippe, the last king to rule France, sits on the throne — the film has many of the trappings of a conventional costume drama, from the rustling gowns to the glowing candelabra. Everything from the costumes to the cinematography works to advance the story. Everything, that is, except La Vellini, who, like Goya’s Maja, rocks her world by the public spectacle of her desire.

Like all the unruly women who populate Ms. Breillat’s films, La Vellini rubs hard against the grain. She’s the fly in the ointment, the stick in the eye, and it’s her howls, her spit and her fury that keep everything off kilter, disturbing the peace, its keepers and the narrative flow. Ms. Breillat reserves her most adoring close-ups for Mr. Aattou, a delicate beauty with feminine pillowy lips. (She loves her boys.) But she never denies Ms. Argento, who hurtles into her scenes, at times literally, gobbling up a lot of space. She’s playing a woman whom others deride as a creature — as if she were a beast. In truth, La Vellini is a woman of pleasure, and Ms. Breillat makes certain her cup runneth over, furiously.

THE LAST MISTRESS

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written (in French, with English subtitles) and directed by Catherine Breillat; director of photography, Yorgos Arvanitis; edited by Michaël Weill; production designer, François-Renaud Labarthe; produced by Jean-François Lepetit; released by IFC Films. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Asia Argento (La Vellini), Fu’ad Aït Aattou (Ryno de Marigny), Roxane Mesquida (Hermangarde), Claude Sarraute (the Marquise de Flers), Yolande Moreau (the Comtesse d’Artelles) and Michael Lonsdale (the Vicomte de Prony).


The Last Mistress - Movie - Review - The New York Times