Une vieille maîtresse

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2007

Une vieille maitresse | The Last Mistress
Catherine Breillat
FRANCE, 2007
French 114 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Flach Film/CB Films/France 3 Cinema/Studio Canal/Buskin Film
Producer: Jean-Francois Lepetit
Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on the novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
Cinematographer: Yorgos Arvanitis
Editor: Pascale Chavance
Production Designer: Francois-Renaud Labarthe
Sound: Yves Osmu, Yves Levéque, Sylvain Lasseur, Roland Duboué, Emmanuel Croset Principal Cast: Asia Argento, Fu’ad Ait Aattou, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute, Yolande Moreau
Production: Flach Film

Heroically returning to the cinema after a near-fatal stroke, Catherine Breillat has lost none of her provocative brio. In fact, she has taken on the greatest logistical challenge of her career with Une vieille maîtresse, a gorgeous period piece that took eight months to shoot and cost as much as all her other films put together.

The film represents what one might call a “consistent change” for Breillat. While it does not engage in the shock tactics of À ma soeur! or Anatomie de l’enfer, she is still very much interested in women and sex, and their centrality to any discourse about gender, power and social construction: She also loves telling a titillating story—and this is a great one. Roughly inspired by early nineteenth-century writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s notorious novel of sexual intrigue, Une vieille maîtresse concerns the attempts of sexual libertine Vellini to interrupt the plans of her dissolute young lover, Ryno de Marigny, to marry the virtuous gem of the French aristocracy, Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). The film plays out through a series of extended conversations among aristocrats, deploying that hilarious and sophisticated dialect of French sexual intrigue associated with Les Liaisons dangereuses and its ilk. These wonderful exchanges are punctuated by bestial sex, when passion overrides courtly manners and good intentions get debased by lust.

Breillat has found a soulmate in the larger-than-life Asia Argento, who thrills as Vellini, the half-Spanish, foul-mouthed trollop of the Paris salon. She rips the screen apart with her passion and rage, making quick work of delicate Marigny (played by exquisite newcomer Fu’ad Ait Aattou, whose face is straight out of Caravaggio). Characteristically, Breillat creates a counterpoint to the heat between her actors with a cool, dispassionate camera, always a bit distant, observant and wary. The result is a magical journey that only an iconoclastic master like Breillat could deliver.

We also take a particular pride in this film as Argento and Breillat first met in Toronto at the Festival and discussed making the film here; its screening marks a kind of reunion and closes an artistically meaningful circle.
—Noah Cowan