Interview. Catherine Breillat.

"The talkiness, the drawing-room intrigue, the frilly garments, and the slippery assignations might suggest all too much a Dangerous Liaisons redux," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "But [Catherine] Breillat is much too clever for that. What makes [The Last Mistress] so deliciously fun is the way she uses the narrative as a template for her own playful (and fever-ridden) ideas about the anarchy of passion and the disorder of decorum."

"Recovering from a dangerous brain hemorrhage at the end of 2004 that left her half paralyzed for several months, Breillat has returned to her artistry with a dazzling ferocity," writes Michael Guillén, introducing his interview. "The fire of trauma has lent her a searing voice of urgency."

"Their reputations precede them - Catherine Breillat, Asia Argento and their joint project, the courtesan Vellini in The Last Mistress - and always threaten to trap them, too," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Then you actually watch The Last Mistress and discover a patient film of novelistic subtlety and fine-tailored construction from screenplay up through rich cinematography."

"Having made her reputation as a sexual provocatrix with Romance, Breillat here tweaks the bourgeois from another, earlier perspective - namely that of the aristocracy," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "It was when French social distinctions blurred in the 1830s that dandyism emerged as an oppositional mode. If Louis-Philippe and his court endorsed the 'vulgar' bourgeois work ethic, the dandy - as embodied by Ryno [Fu'ad Aït Aattou] - embraced a program of ostentatious idleness and gratification."

"Ms Breillat's explorations of desire and pleasure are so far from the antiseptic world of most screen depictions as to seem far out," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "In truth she's just fearless, determined to show what others keep hidden - the good, the bad, the tumescent, the fluid - so she can keep puzzling through her ideas. The Last Mistress isn't as graphic as some of her other films, notably Romance, which features full-frontal and then some. The sex in this film is far from explicit, though it features geometric formations that may be better suited for Kama Sutra students, or at least the limber. What's explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It's terribly French."

"This is a movie whose over-the-top qualities sneak up from behind," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Breillat generally likes to go for the visceral response; The Last Mistress burns more slowly than her other pictures do, but it does so almost as intensely. It's more in league with Truffaut's The Story of Adele H, especially if you consider that in that movie, Isabelle Adjani's delicate-flower vulnerability is really a manifestation of raw romantic hunger."

"Taboos are indeed broken in this mature, masterful film that sets its sights on what might be the last holy commandment of our postmodern, capitalist world: that right and wrong is best defined by hardworking, upstanding, respectable middle-class society." Lauren Kaminsky in Reverse Shot.

"This 19th-century setting results, on the one hand, in something of a startling change of pace for Breillat, whose cinema has long been infused with a decidedly modern strain of provocation," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical. "And yet on the other hand, her preoccupation with love's thorny complications feels right at home in the drawing rooms and boudoirs of indolent 1835 Parisian aristocrats, whose public civility masks private conduct of a much more lascivious sort."

"Argento feels vaguely out of place in Breillat's film, a creature of the 21st century somehow transported to the 19th, but Breillat uses this incongruity to excellent effect," writes Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE. "Her defiant nonconformity confers upon the character the status of a perennial outsider, while making the film into an uncommonly playful star text."

"Though Argento's full-barreled performance hits some bum notes, her utter lack of reserve stands out as both reckless and courageous against the social rigors of Parisian high society," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "She's both relentless in pursuing Aattou and powerless to quell her self-destructive impulses; when she talks of the 'bottomless abyss' of their caresses, it's the perfect distillation of Breillat's feelings about relationships. For her, love opens the door to jealousy, humiliation, and bone-deep pain, and it isn't easy to close."

"Ms Breillat has forgone the anarchic force of her earlier forays into the still relatively underdeveloped realm of female sexuality," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "As a pioneer of sorts in her field, she has earned this temporary respite of classicism represented by The Last Mistress."

"Breillat may be brash and lewd, but she's a thinking bawd," writes Armond White in the New York Press. Still: "Not enough of Sex is Comedy's rigor is apparent in The Last Mistress."

"[I]t captures the absurd dimensions of romance with immediacy and unexpected compassion," writes Mark Holcomb in Time Out New York.

More interviews with Breillat: Fernando F Croce (Slant), Nick Dawson (Filmmaker), Sheri Linden (Los Angeles Times) and Martin Tsai (New York Sun).

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, the NYFF and the UK.

Posted by dwhudson at June 29, 2008 7:36 AM