Adaptation of a mid-19th-century novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the bellwethers in the corruption of the Romantic Movement: the depletion of the heroic individualist and the ascendance of the femme fatale, the man-eater, the succubus, the vampire. The titular mistress, a native of Spain, land of Carmen (her literary contemporary), will be seen literally licking the blood from a bullet hole in the hero’s chest. This is a juicy role, perhaps the juiciest to date, for the snaggle-toothed, baggy-eyed, crow-voiced Asia Argento, the role of a woman whose charms are not outwardly obvious. She not only fits that criterion (charms, yes; obvious, not so much), she fits additionally the classic pattern of the dark temptress set in opposition to the blondness and blandness of the paragon of virtue, her lover’s fiancée. If Argento’s evident breast implants and glimpsed tailbone tattoo argue against her usefulness in a period piece, she nonetheless brings to the role what it wants most, a threat of danger. The cigarillo, the spit curl, the gypsy garb can do only so much on their own; the actress convincingly ties them together into a pathology. Of course the director, Catherine Breillat, brings a threat of danger herself. But even as the de rigueur sex scenes are moderately explicit, they’re a marked retreat from the envelope-pushing extremes of her Romance, The Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell, and they’re in short supply. Breillat, a bit bogged down in talky exposition as well as in a disproportionate and ill-placed flashback, is plainly in no hurry to assault any barriers or to generate facile sensation. She demonstrates herself to be completely committed to the period, the costumes, the settings, the sentiments, in short the total sense of reality, recorded in crystalline photography and unadorned with meddlesome background music. Her societal portrait, filtered through the sensibility of a capital-R Romantic, has almost a documentary instructiveness. Fu’ad Aït Aattou, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute, Michael Lonsdale. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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