Catherine Breillat, director of the assorted sexual provocations of Fat Girl, Romance, and Anatomy of Hell, is a name likely to strike terror in the hearts of filmgoers far more than that of George Romero, say, or Dario Argento. But where the 19th-century setting and idiomatic Romanticism of her previous film, The Last Mistress, imposed some restraint, some decorum, the fairy-tale genre and Renaissance trappings of this one impose additionally some actual chasteness, some starch. True, the physical and generational disparity between the delicate child bride and the mountainous serial wife-killer (a disappointing Bluebeard, more of a realistic Graybeard) injects a strong dose of unsavoriness, and the forbidden chamber is a gruesome sight, albeit no match for the shivering chicken with its head cut off. (Oh, those French!) Yet the general effect is of something exsanguinated, embalmed, stuffed. Shot in a plain, austere, matter-of-fact style, the film amounts almost to a documentary on the artifacts of olden days: clothes, kitchen implements, furniture, with a splendid harpsichord as centerpiece. And the difficulty of stretching out to feature-length a faithful adaptation of a three-page opus by Charles Perrault manifests itself in nonstop dragginess. One device to aid in the stretching is a framing story in which an autobiographical “Catherine” tortures her older sister with a re-reading of the dreadful tale, but even though we can sense what Breillat is getting at, we do not remotely experience the danger of fiction. The only terror apt to be inspired in this instance is the terror of tedium. Dominique Thomas, Lola Creton, Daphné Baiwir. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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