Though they mostly deal with desire, films by French
provocatrice Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl,
Romance) tend to be cold, hard little objects, so knotted with
theories about sexuality that they never get far under our skin. What a
surprise that in her new film, The Last Mistress, Breillat
transforms a 19th-century novel about the affair between a Spanish
courtesan and a Parisian libertine into a vibrant and modern-feeling
tale that generates both sensual and emotional heat.
Breillat is in many ways not terribly well suited to this material.
She’s never been a particularly dynamic crafter of images, and there
are patches of her new movie that sag with the look of drably staged
costume drama. But Breillat’s unflinching instinct for the doomed,
all-consuming pull of sexual obsession shakes the story up in rewarding
ways. The film is about a young dilettante (newcomer Fu’ad Aït
Aattou) who tries, with diminishing success, to extricate himself from
the older temptress La Vellini (Italian badass Asia Argento). Breillat
looks beyond their erotic tug-of-war to locate the link—by turns
arousing and devastating—between individual desire and societal
expectation. The lovers’ passion is made rawer, lonelier, and more
hopelessly addictive by the shock and disapproval of everyone around
them.
If The Last Mistress hits harder than
Breillat’s
previous, more sexually explicit work, it’s in large part thanks to
Argento. The actress stalks, gnarls, gnashes, and vamps her way through
the movie, yet it never seems like she’s hamming it up; hers is one of
the most vivid portrayals of lust that I’ve seen. Then Argento layers
her swagger with wounded pride, turning La Vellini into an original
creation: a femme fatale who’s hungry for more than she thinks.