The Last Mistress
Directed by Catherine Breillat
The most erotic female performance on film this year is not Asia Argento in The Last Mistress, although that’s clearly what director Catherine Breillat intended. No, the most alluring, captivating contender would be Evan Rachel Wood casually evoking sensual stages of girlhood in the woeful Life Before Her Eyes. Cult-figure Argento should have achieved her apotheosis with Breillat’s costume drama, portraying a woman breaking the social restrictions of 18th-century France. The role of La Vellini, a mixed-race libertine who ditches her fossilized meal-ticket husband for a young aristocrat who she haunts during his marriage to a virgin, seems ideal for Breillat’s particular kind of post-feminist provocation.
Breillat likes to test the boundaries of proper behavior with explicitly depicted sexual license (that’s the precis of her films A Very Young Girl, Romance, Anatomy of Hell, Fat Girl). She not only wants to pull women down from the pedestal of objectification (as created by male filmmakers) but she wants to celebrate female sexual indulgence—even to the point of depravity—while sentimentalizing any repercussions women might suffer. That’s the pattern of an intelligent French auteur who quotes feminist texts while venturing into pornography.
As if to legitimize her unorthodox approach, the period drama of The Last Mistress brings Breillat into the haughty realm of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the infamous (often adapted) 18th-century novel of sexual gamesmanship as psychological and political intrigue. And Argento seemed an ideal co-conspirator. Asia Argento’s post-Madonna, slutty modernity comes across as a period joke that cuts through to the truth of loucheness—unabashed sexual behavior. Yet, she’s a bad actress. Like Madonna, Asia puts her personality forward, and untutored fans applaud the exhibitionism. Argento tips characterization toward her own brazen personality as when La Vellini causes a lover to be wounded in a duel and then hungrily leaps upon his body (“I want to drink his blood, no one can stop me!”). This could be a scene in one of her father’s own movies, dredging up instances of macabre sacrilege. It suits Breillat’s fascination with female outlawry—of La Vellini, illegitimate child of an Italian and a Spanish matador; gossiped about as “A flamenca who can outstare the sun, she’s Moorish.” But she’s also childlike, a flirt with pouty circles under her eyes who licks ice cream when not sucking blood.
Problem is, Argento cannot reveal the emotions underneath these gestures. Ironically, Angelina Jolie’s vampirish turn in the videogame-like Wanted provides the spectacle of a real actress in an Asia Argento–type role. Jolie struts through Timur Bekmambetov’s runway show, over-tattooed and ghoulish but firing weapons with a lunatic spirit of both vengeance and arousal. Yet when La Vellini attends a costume party and is asked, “What are you disguised as?” Her answer, “The devil,” is all there is. No daring, because Argento’s every move is already a self-satisfied dare. But most disastrously, no humor. Argento’s fans are late to the game. Asia’s angry eyes, snarling lips, uneven teeth and unconventional girlishness are nothing new; she’s just a Sandra Bernhard manque.
La Vellini’s tortured life never rises to the grand torments of Senso or Camille. Breillat can’t make up for Argento’s shallowness, and her own political imprudence gets in the way of her romanticism. Scenes of pretzel-like couplings, unions on a tiger-skin rug plus other brazen acts and licentious discussions aren’t compelling. Rather than achieving a breakthrough via Laclos, it’s obvious that Breillat already fulfilled her ambitions with Sex is Comedy (2002), her headiest film. That autobiographical, behind-the-scenes sex farce presented a serene contemplation of Breillat’s issues: film as erotic expression, actors as projection of an artist’s libido and sex as an easy, often uncomfortable, manipulation of that unruly vessel, the body. She used the actors as children, naughtily bending their innocence into profane postures yet loving—mothering—them for it. Here, Breillat shows the same affection for the androgynous young actors playing La Vellini’s lover Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) and his wife Hermengarde (Roxane Mesquida).
Breillat may be brash and lewd, but she’s a thinking bawd. Her candor is an antidote to the disingenuous sexual politics in movies like Sex and the City, Paranoid Park and 4,3,2. Had Breillat directed 4,3,2, she would not have cheated a cut away from the sex orgy with the abortionist. She would have forced those girls to examine their sexual desire and allowed us to relate matters of individual choice to the paradox of fascism and the delusions of bourgeois student life. The Last Mistress presents a better personal-political connection, but it’s distanced by period and by Argento’s attitude.
Not enough of Sex is Comedy’s rigor is apparent in The Last Mistress. There’s a striking catastrophic image of La Vellini and de Marigny fucking out their grief near a burning funeral pyre, but there’s only one genuinely witty moment: When DeMarigny confesses the story of his affair with La Vellini to Hermengarde’s grandmother, a cut to the old lady listening (Yolande Moreau as the Comtesse d’Artelles) reveals who this film’s sponsored character really is. Moreau’s look of a gossip’s delight and vicarious sexual recall suggests that porno-polemicist Breillat isn’t humorless after all.
Directed by Catherine Breillat
The most erotic female performance on film this year is not Asia Argento in The Last Mistress, although that’s clearly what director Catherine Breillat intended. No, the most alluring, captivating contender would be Evan Rachel Wood casually evoking sensual stages of girlhood in the woeful Life Before Her Eyes. Cult-figure Argento should have achieved her apotheosis with Breillat’s costume drama, portraying a woman breaking the social restrictions of 18th-century France. The role of La Vellini, a mixed-race libertine who ditches her fossilized meal-ticket husband for a young aristocrat who she haunts during his marriage to a virgin, seems ideal for Breillat’s particular kind of post-feminist provocation.
Breillat likes to test the boundaries of proper behavior with explicitly depicted sexual license (that’s the precis of her films A Very Young Girl, Romance, Anatomy of Hell, Fat Girl). She not only wants to pull women down from the pedestal of objectification (as created by male filmmakers) but she wants to celebrate female sexual indulgence—even to the point of depravity—while sentimentalizing any repercussions women might suffer. That’s the pattern of an intelligent French auteur who quotes feminist texts while venturing into pornography.
As if to legitimize her unorthodox approach, the period drama of The Last Mistress brings Breillat into the haughty realm of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the infamous (often adapted) 18th-century novel of sexual gamesmanship as psychological and political intrigue. And Argento seemed an ideal co-conspirator. Asia Argento’s post-Madonna, slutty modernity comes across as a period joke that cuts through to the truth of loucheness—unabashed sexual behavior. Yet, she’s a bad actress. Like Madonna, Asia puts her personality forward, and untutored fans applaud the exhibitionism. Argento tips characterization toward her own brazen personality as when La Vellini causes a lover to be wounded in a duel and then hungrily leaps upon his body (“I want to drink his blood, no one can stop me!”). This could be a scene in one of her father’s own movies, dredging up instances of macabre sacrilege. It suits Breillat’s fascination with female outlawry—of La Vellini, illegitimate child of an Italian and a Spanish matador; gossiped about as “A flamenca who can outstare the sun, she’s Moorish.” But she’s also childlike, a flirt with pouty circles under her eyes who licks ice cream when not sucking blood.
Problem is, Argento cannot reveal the emotions underneath these gestures. Ironically, Angelina Jolie’s vampirish turn in the videogame-like Wanted provides the spectacle of a real actress in an Asia Argento–type role. Jolie struts through Timur Bekmambetov’s runway show, over-tattooed and ghoulish but firing weapons with a lunatic spirit of both vengeance and arousal. Yet when La Vellini attends a costume party and is asked, “What are you disguised as?” Her answer, “The devil,” is all there is. No daring, because Argento’s every move is already a self-satisfied dare. But most disastrously, no humor. Argento’s fans are late to the game. Asia’s angry eyes, snarling lips, uneven teeth and unconventional girlishness are nothing new; she’s just a Sandra Bernhard manque.
La Vellini’s tortured life never rises to the grand torments of Senso or Camille. Breillat can’t make up for Argento’s shallowness, and her own political imprudence gets in the way of her romanticism. Scenes of pretzel-like couplings, unions on a tiger-skin rug plus other brazen acts and licentious discussions aren’t compelling. Rather than achieving a breakthrough via Laclos, it’s obvious that Breillat already fulfilled her ambitions with Sex is Comedy (2002), her headiest film. That autobiographical, behind-the-scenes sex farce presented a serene contemplation of Breillat’s issues: film as erotic expression, actors as projection of an artist’s libido and sex as an easy, often uncomfortable, manipulation of that unruly vessel, the body. She used the actors as children, naughtily bending their innocence into profane postures yet loving—mothering—them for it. Here, Breillat shows the same affection for the androgynous young actors playing La Vellini’s lover Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) and his wife Hermengarde (Roxane Mesquida).
Breillat may be brash and lewd, but she’s a thinking bawd. Her candor is an antidote to the disingenuous sexual politics in movies like Sex and the City, Paranoid Park and 4,3,2. Had Breillat directed 4,3,2, she would not have cheated a cut away from the sex orgy with the abortionist. She would have forced those girls to examine their sexual desire and allowed us to relate matters of individual choice to the paradox of fascism and the delusions of bourgeois student life. The Last Mistress presents a better personal-political connection, but it’s distanced by period and by Argento’s attitude.
Not enough of Sex is Comedy’s rigor is apparent in The Last Mistress. There’s a striking catastrophic image of La Vellini and de Marigny fucking out their grief near a burning funeral pyre, but there’s only one genuinely witty moment: When DeMarigny confesses the story of his affair with La Vellini to Hermengarde’s grandmother, a cut to the old lady listening (Yolande Moreau as the Comtesse d’Artelles) reveals who this film’s sponsored character really is. Moreau’s look of a gossip’s delight and vicarious sexual recall suggests that porno-polemicist Breillat isn’t humorless after all.
