The Last Mistress Movie Review
The Last Mistress marks the monumental pairing of cinema’s premiere provocateur, director Catherine Breillat (ROMANCE, FAT GIRL) with the most fearless and explosive actor of our generation, Asia Argento (MARIE ANTOINETTE, BOARDING GATE). A penniless rogue, Ryno de Marigny (newcomer Fu-ad Ait Aattou), shocks 19th century France with his engagement to the virginal gem of the aristocracy, Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida of FAT GIRL). As lurid speculations of Ryno’s ten year affair with the carnal Vellini (Argento) manifest, a supremely erotic and wickedly humorous depiction of human lust is revealed - overriding the brittle facade of nobility and reverence. Producer: Jean-Francois Lepetit
Director: Catherine Breillat
Writer: Catherine Breillat
Release Date: 27-Jun-2008
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Asia Argento, Fu’ad Ait Aattou, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute, Yolande Moreau
Screenwriter: Catherine Breillat
Review Summary
The first time you see the courtesan called La Vellini, she’s stretched out on a divan and wearing a smile, or perhaps a scowl. It’s hard to tell with this woman, whose lips restlessly tremble and twist with rage and pleasure. She’s dressed like the supine subject of Goya’s painting “The Clothed Maja,” which, like its sister image, “The Nude Maja,” was condemned as indecent by the Spanish Inquisition. To look at the figure on screen writhing like a pampered cat is to understand why those paintings made some observers uneasy. “The Last Mistress” is unlikely to make anyone truly uneasy, because its deepest provocations — the casting of Asia Argento as La Vellini aside — occur at the level of narrative rather than through its style. Like all the unruly women who populate Catherine Breillat’s films, La Vellini rubs hard against the grain. She’s the fly in the ointment, the stick in the eye, and it’s her howls, her spit and her fury that keep everything off kilter, disturbing the peace, its keepers and the narrative flow. — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Movie Review
“I detest anything feminine, except in men, of course,” remarks La Villini (Asia Argento), the ravenous center of Catherine Breillat’s glorious new film based on the controversial novel by 19th century author and dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly. The alluringly vulpine Villini is the Spanish mistress of Parisian roué Ryno de Marigny (striking newcomer Fu’ad Ait Aattouto) and the rude, sensual, commanding counterpart to his foppish, bee-stung beauty.
By her own account, The Last Mistress is Catherine Breillat’s most accessible film, the only one that doesn’t set out to break any taboos. On first blush her claim seems indisputable, since the shock-loving director of Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell, and Romance has here made a corseted nineteenth-century costume drama. But I have to respectfully disagree with her assertion, even though it comes from the queen of on-screen female sexuality herself.
The heaving bosom, the siren glare and the fated embrace have been reclaimed with thrilling sensuality in Catherine Breillat’s “The Last Mistress,” the French filmmaker’s bid to put aside the extreme sex of her most notorious work (”Romance,” “Anatomy of Hell”) and indulge instead in the extreme cinematic pleasures of a well-told yarn of merciless desire.
The Last Mistress is bookended by scenes of two nosy, gluttonous members of the gentry (Michael Lonsdale and Yolande Moreau) attempting to concoct a scheme to save pure-as-snow Hermangarde (Fat Girl’s Roxane Mesquida) from a doomed marriage to Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou), a womanizer with a scandalous reputation.
