UNE VIEILLE MAITRESSE

The Last Mistress (Une vieille Maitresse), 2007, dir Catherine Breillat, with Asia Argento, Fu’ad Ait Attou, Roxanne Mesquida. Adapted from the novel by Jules Barbey

Taken from the Les Liasons Dangereuse era rather than the subsequent Madame Bovary one, Une vieille Maitresse takes as its subject a male predicament: marry the woman you hate, retain the woman you love as a mistress. (it seems, in fact that the novel is a 19th century retrospective of the 18th century, the mores certainly seem to belong to a pre-feminist era.) That’s a bit stereotypical and this film will certainly please men, even if it is by a feminist. The subject of the film is not so much infidelity or adultery but pornography itself. The director is poised to ask the audience: is this pornography I am making, am I, a committed feminist, a pornographer, what indeed is the difference between pornography and the genuinely erotic? For the reviewer this seems a stunning non-question which should be self-evident or not at all.

Porn aside the film has a number of interesting images which could have been teased out a bit more. Ryno’s mistress Vellini (Asia Argento) is dark, handsome, Spanish. In flashback an earlier incarnation intimates that she had an Arab lover. Their child has died. They burn it on a tiny funeral pyre. Desolate and grieving, they make love beside the burning corpse. That’s a powerful, suggestive image, left to hang like a very typically Spanish upside down question mark. But clearly Ryno is fascinated by the exotic, exciting himself with its intimation but not wishing to marry into it, principally because it is poor, provincial, erotic but illegal. Obviously he seems a bit of a twat (Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s family disowned him because of his marriage to a Latin American Indian woman. French small f fascism at its most repellent.)

But period detail is intimated effectively, even if the film itself often seems not to know what it is: a period romp, darkly erotic glimpse into the social mores of 18-19th century France, real pornography. Sometimes the images employed by Breillat are embarrassingly (for her) obvious, such as the love-making scene on the tiger skin rug and much much more could have been of the Oriental backdrop, or even the Spanish backdrop. For all that we have lots of things that fans of Alexander Dumas (or even The Flashing Blade) will love: duels, dinner parties, sadism, erotic despairingness. Fancy dress needing the context of a nice Gallic revolution or even some Gallic bloodyminded rudeness. The love-making contest could have been juxtaposed beside scenes of revolutionists defending barricades from the military in the spirit of Les Mis but Breillat is unconcerned with the means of production, simply a set of characters poised in an empty landscape, only concerned about their next liason or fine pair of gloves and if that’s what interests you, then you will undoubtedly love Une vieille Maitresse.

Paul Murphy

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