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Dir. Catherine Breillat
Rating: 6.4 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
At first glance the combining of France's notoriously controversial director and the precepts of a "costume drama" might seem at odds with one another. Catherine Breillat is, after all, responsible for such sensually nihilistic -- and modernist -- films as À ma soeur! and Romance. But, a few scant minutes into her adaptation of the novel by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, you start to understand it's not so much of a reach. "I hate you," Vellini (Asia Argento) informs her lover, Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou), immediately upon consummating their passion, once again, on the floor of her luxurious flat. Ryno has come to see her, in his mind, one last time, before marrying the vivacious Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). After a tempestuous ten-year affair, it seems, he has finally been able to shed his mistress. But, after a time, Vellini assures him, he'll be back. Theirs is a love borne first out of lusty passion -- but shortly thereafter, in classic Breillat theater -- extreme tragedy. What they hold onto is both a love and hatred of one another so intense, neither can manage to extricate themselves. Breillat being Breillat, there is a good deal of cruelty, conceit, sex, and bloodletting (the woman seems unable to make a film without the on-screen killing of an animal of some kind -- so animal lovers, be advised) as well as a few scenes of truly searing power. Both Argento -- whose obviously fake breasts are the only blemish on what is otherwise a fine performance -- and Ait Aattou sink deeply into their characters' anguish and fixation. To see Breillat's vision of 19th-century France, you understand just how unrefined and devastating we've always been to one-another. The past, it would seem, is just as execrable as the present only with a slightly different fashion sense.
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