Derrick Gibbons
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Curt
Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.
AnnieLola
Well, I've just started watching this and at the very least it seems like a good way to brush up on my French. Definitely worth a look-- though less than a half hour into it it some technical things struck me. For one thing, Fu'ad Ait Aattou-- he looks about 18! ...though I find that he was in fact pushing 27 when this was made. I just couldn't quite buy him as someone who'd been grown up enough to have had a mistress for ten years; he seems too much of a kid. And Roxane Mesquia, who plays the winsome young bride Hermangarde, doesn't look like a blonde; she looks like the bleached brunette she became for the role. Maybe it's just the color on my old TV... The lighting takes away from the period credibility, though this is a common enough feature of films set in what were dimly-lit times: rooms are brightly and evenly lit to accommodate the camera. The lighting and camera folks could take some pointers from the miniseries "Cranford", which stunningly evoked the look and feel of a shadowy 19th century candlelit indoor world. In "Mistress" the characters are shown in comfortably lit sets when it's supposedly dark out, and you find yourself wondering why they have candles burning when their light is plainly not needed and is in fact hardly visible.None of this, of course, addresses the quality of the film as a whole, and I'll resume commenting after having viewed the rest of it.
lustyvita
Its been awhile since I fell in love with a film, THE LAST MISTRESS reignited the flame. It is by far the best film yet of 2008. Few films can really develop the inexplicable magnetism of one person to another, the unbreakable bond that keeps them from drifting afar for too long. Its rare to experience, and difficult to understand. Somehow Breillat has brought to life a rich portrait of the love of a lifetime. Criticisms of pacing are way off, the performers are thinking, soaking in their melancholy and you track that sadness out of the theater in wet footprints. It was hard to leave the room when the credits were over, I wanted more of them, to believe in love no matter how much pain or consequence weathers its journey. Steadfast and true. One of the best female characters to date, and by far a groundbreaking performance from Argento! Rich, passionate, heartbreaking and Breillat's greatest success yet. This is film-making my friends! The younger ones may have trouble understanding or appreciating. For those of us still in love.
writers_reign
Up to now Catherine Breillat has been unashamedly up-front in a series of modern day medium-core pornographic movies. It seems a little late in the day to seek respectability by setting the graphic couplings in a period setting but that essentially is what she's done. For French film buffs it's a joy to see people like Yolande Moreau and Michael Lonsdale in anything and Ann Parillaud and Amira Casar are not exactly chopped liver if anybody asks you. Breillat protégé Roxanne Mesquida is also on hand to take care of most of the sexual content and it has to be said that Breillat has shot a seriously sumptuous movie. Whether it is, however, anything more than a chocolate-box with soft-core centres is moot.
movedout
An elderly couple (Yolande Moreau and Michael Lonsdale) commences the film amidst idle chatter and bloodied fowls, proudly earning their stripes as 19th century versions of Gladys and Abner Kravitz with the newly engaged libertine Ryno de Marigny's (Fu'ad Ait Aattou) torrid 10-year long amour with Italian-Spanish coquette Lady Vellini (Asia Argento) as their scandal du jour. The hot-blooded Vellini finds out soon enough that her overweening extra-pallid dandy is soon out to marry his way into higher circles through the fragile heart of virginal Hermangarde (Breillat devotee Roxane Mesquida) and through the sprightly imaginations of her household's feisty matriarch (Claude Sarraute). And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially when the woman in question is directed by agent provocateur Catherine Breillat, she of "Anatomy of Hell", "Romance X" and "Fat Girl" infamy. But here, Breillat tones down the transgressions of venereal shock for the (comparatively) sumptuous reservoirs of rapturous passion and fervent sexual anxieties – a refined take on the stock battle-of-the-sexes formula with art-house cinephiles' wet dream Argento as Breillat's latest codpiece in her intense dissection of Parisian high society's cannibalism and its mordant gender politics. Argento's Velli is no less than a force of nature as she ascends into a conduit for Breillat's declarations and shouts it from the rafters; her sexual aggressiveness play tricks on masculine insecurities and her vociferousness, an affront to feminine coyness. At the peak of her captivating sensuality and at the height of her enigmatic inscrutability, Argento's magnificence here is one of furious defiance.
