Even in its very first shot, which in large part suggests a relatively straightforward period piece, Catherine Breillat's new film, adapted from a novel by 19th century author Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, contains a hint of its auteur's insistence on sometimes ugly truth. The ever-great Michael Lonsdale, as the Vicomte de Prony, is tearing away at a chicken quarter, and we cannot help notice that the leg he may or may not lay into at any moment is a very unhealthy looking deep pink. Watch out for that salmonella, Michael!
One is glad to see Lonsdale not bite into that dicey area, and similarly gratified to hear him tell his hostess that gluttony is the most effective handle she has on him, as it's the last of the deadly sins he's able to enjoy. Wherever Breillat is going to take this film—the novel is not new to the screen, it was adapted for French television in the mid-'70s, with memorable Belle de Jour stiff Jean Sorel in the lead—it's at least going to be replete with a particularly Gallic irony.
But not to worry. It's replete with more than that. Soon Lonsdale's chastising the Spanish adventuress (or so it seems) Vellini, the "old mistress" of the title, played by a feral Asia Argento. And soon after we learn that her lover Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou, sporting lips that make '60s-era-Jagger look like Mark Linn-Baker) is soon to marry the innocent heiress Hermangarde (Roxanne Masquida, whose relationship with Breillat is, I imagine, quite fascinating), and that all those in this particular social circle of the 1830's is very concerned about Ryno's libertine ways.
Confronted by Hermangarde's grandmother the Marquise des Flers (Claude Sarraute), Ryno, whom we expect to be nothing more or less than a snivelling shit, actually comes clean about his ten-year passion for Vellini, and it's here, in an extended and beautifully handled series of flashback sequences, that Maitresse earns its bonafides as a Breillat film. At first repulsed by Ryno, Vellini becomes obsessed after Ryno's duel with her English sot husband, which earns Ryno a chestful of pellets. As he's being operated on, Vellini bursts into the room and begins sucking at his chest. "I want to drink his blood," she cries as she is torn away from him. Damn. And people thought Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons brought new frankness to the period film. (Hey, wait. Frears is the president of this year's jury. Will he take this as one-upsmanship?)
What follows is a tale of amour fou from a time when such compulsions were seen in terms of "destiny" rather than psychology. It is also, among other things, a gratifyingly strong recovery from Breillat's retrograde Anatomy of Hell .
Comments