French Connection

Catherine Breillat's latest frames intense performances with relative restrain.

by Sam Adams

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Asia Argento is no one's idea of a period heroine, which is exactly why Catherine Breillat cast her in The Last Mistress. Although it's based on a scandalous 19th-century novel by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, Breillat's film makes few concessions to the conventions of costume drama. The images look more like worn marble than burnished wood, without the gloss and decorum of past-life fantasies.

Argento is a passionate, volcanic actress, but she has little in the way of technique, which makes her deliberately out of place among the coded interactions of French courtly society. A Spanish courtesan in her mid-30s, Argento's Vellini is estranged from the world around her, which makes her both despised and, to a select few, irresistible. "Vellini does not justify for many the power she has for some," one observer sniffs. But to those who feel her pull, there is no escape.

Even as Ryno (Fu'ad Aït Aattou), a dissolute nobleman as lacking in tact as he is in funds, readies himself for his long-needed marriage to the wealthy Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), he is drawn back into Vellini's orbit, tumbling into what she calls the "bottomless abyss" of their attraction. Once, they were lovers in earnest, a bohemian couple who gave birth to a child in the African desert. But now all that remains is an annihilating passion whose satisfaction provides release but not pleasure.

Although The Last Mistress' nihilism is alien to the genre, it is perfectly of a piece with the blunt provocation of early Breillat films like Fat Girl and Romance. What's unusual is the relative restrain with which Breillat puts forth her message, and the intensity of the performances, which have tended toward a certain flat abstraction in her other movies. The movie has its share of sex scenes, relatively tame by Breillat's standards, but it's Argento's emotional nakedness that's most startling. When she wails in pain, or sneers with a mixture of lust and contempt, there seems to be no boundary between the actress and the character; what she's doing seems too unpremeditated to be something as simple as acting.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Last Mistress | Written and directed by Catherine Breillat |An IFC Films release