Movie review: 'The Last Mistress'

Asia Argento in "The Last Mistress" (Credit: IFC)

3 1/2 stars (out of four)

An unusually intimate costume drama, writer-director Catherine Breillat’s “The Last Mistress” has enough ornery sex in it to further its maker’s reputation for provocation. Yet it’s a different sort of venture for the maker of “Fat Girl” and “Anatomy of Hell.” Breillat claims her loose adaptation of the mid-19th Century novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, which recalls the emotional weather patterns—sexual humidity plus ironic chill—of de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” cost as much as her last 10 contemporary-set films put together.

But “The Last Mistress” relates to Breillat’s earlier works (the ones I’ve seen, at least) in its exploration of pure animal desire.

This is another way of saying “The Last Mistress” co-stars Asia Argento. The Italian native plays La Vellini, a Spanish-bred affront to all of Parisian polite society. The matador’s daughter and sloe-eyed courtesan has for 10 years been the mistress of Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou, whose lips Scarlett Johansson apparently borrows when she needs them). The caddish Ryno’s betrothal to the virginal aristocrat Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida) has changed everything, Ryno informs his intended’s grandmother. Much of the film is laid out in flashback, as Ryno chronicles his 10-year relationship with his mistress to the grandmother played, wonderfully, by Claude Sarraute.

On one level Vellini is an absurd caricature, a she-wolf who licks the blood off her lover’s chest after he fights a duel. But she holds the screen. She and her boyishly seductive lover can’t live with each other, or without. They are a classic sensual conundrum, and the way Breillat photographs the androgynous, slim-hipped Aattou and the avid-eyed Argento (no one’s idea of androgynous), the director’s playing with our perceptions of gender and power and desire. Argento seizes each scene with both hands, adding surprising layers of feeling as she goes. In some of her performances, be they in Italian or French or English, Argento—the daughter of horror director Dario Argento—can lose her way inside all that feral craziness. Here everything works.

The picture’s visual style is clean, exact and beautifully photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis. And with Michael Lonsdale adding exquisite touches of irony as the Vicomte de Prony, one of the Parisian men of influence, you are getting a lesson in how to capture the essence of a time and place without falling prey to “period film acting.”

mjphillips@tribune.com

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