Female trouble

>> Asia Argento is boldly ferocious in Catherine Breillat’s period piece Une vieille maîtresse

by MALCOLM FRASIER

French director Catherine Breillat is known for her boundary-pushing content—well before 9 Songs and Shortbus, she depicted real sex in 1999’s Romance, then delved into inter-generational love in 2001’s Brief Crossing—as well as a certain cold, some might say misanthropic, view of humanity. These aren’t qualities we usually associate with a period piece, but in her latest, Une vieille maîtresse, she turns her unsentimental gaze to the bewigged aristocratic milieu of Paris in 1835.

Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) is a young ne’er-do-well about to marry the virtuous Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). Much to the scandal of high society, he’s still trying unsuccessfully to disengage himself from a 10-year affair with Vellini (Asia Argento). A few days before the wedding, Hermangarde’s grandmother (Claude Sarraute) sits the young man down and insists that he tell her the whole story, and as he does, the sordid affair unfolds before us.

Argento’s well-documented willingness to go to physical and emotional extremes makes her a perfect match for Breillat’s penchant for sadistically putting her heroines through the grinder. Whether she’s maniacally laughing, exploding with rage or tears, rolling her eyes back in sexual ecstasy, or calmly devastating a man with a poisonous look, Argento matches Christina Ricci’s performance in Black Snake Moan in sheer feral intensity. At one point, when Aattou is lying bleeding from a duel with her husband, she bursts into the room and sucks the blood from his wound to spite him—that kind of intense. Aattou can’t quite match her ferocity, but his performance, somehow combining cocksure arrogance and feminine sensitivity, is a good complement.

Lest I mislead you into confusing this with extreme cinema, let it be noted that the film is very slow-paced, deliberate and heavy with flowery, novelistic French dialogue. But while it’s typical of period pieces in its emphasis on transgressions against an earlier era’s moral codes, here the transgressions are depicted in much gorier detail. When Argento makes offhand outrageous statements like, “I hate everything feminine—except in young men, of course,” it seems designed to infuriate Breillat’s critics. But fans of both women will find much to enjoy here.

Une vieille maîtresse opens
this Friday, Aug. 10

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