BREILLAT’S VIRGIN TERRITORY

Today I was talking to my friend Hannah McGill, creative director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, about what she was looking forward to seeing at Cannes Film Festival, which starts on Wednesday. One of the films she mentioned was Catherine Breillat‘s Une Vieille Maitresse (which roughly translates as An Old Mistress). I had registered the fact that Breillat had a new movie at the festival, but not that it was a lavish period costume drama. And when I saw that Twitch had put up a link to the film’s trailer, I became even more intrigued.

The plot of Une Vieille Maitresse centers on a handsome young aristocrat Ryno De Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) who shuns his longtime lover, courtesan Vellini (Asia Argento), when he gets engaged to Hermangarde (Breillat’s current muse, Roxanne Mesquida), a marquis’ daughter.

It’s virgin territory for Breillat, who has never before made a historical film and for the most part has stuck to the intense, overtly sexual explorations of her own very modern feminist ideas. It will interesting to see how Cannes audiences respond to Breillat’s unique interpretation of costume drama, particularly given what happened to Sofia Coppola‘s infamous Marie Antoinette – another revisionist take on French history starring Asia Argento as a prostitute – at last year’s festival. (To put the record straight on Marie Antoinette, another friend who was at the film’s Cannes press screening informed me that the predominant reaction to the film was actually extremely positive, and that only a very small number of people booed.)

Although I have often struggled to relate to her worldview, I find Breillat fascinating as a filmmaker, and think her last two films, the self-reflecting Sex is Comedy (riffing on Truffaut‘s Day for Night) and highly-charged two-hander Anatomy of Hell, have been her most accomplished yet. Given how intimidating and self-assured her films are, I was pleasantly surprised to find her sweet and almost maternal when I interviewed her a few years ago. However it’s unlikely that side of her personality will ever come through in her films. And probably a good thing too.