The Last Mistress (2008)

"The Last Mistress" marks the monumental pairing of cinema's premiere provocateur, director Catherine Breillat ("Romance," "Fat Girl") with the most fearless and explosive actor of our generation, Asia Argento ("Marie Antionette," "Boarding Gate"). A penniless rogue, Ryno de Marigny (newcomer Fu-ad Aît Aattou), shocks 19th century France with his engagement to the virginal gem of the aristocracy, Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida of "Fat Girl"). As lurid speculations of Ryno's ten year affair with the carnal Vellini...

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Movie Review

Review by Robert Bell (B)

Staying true to her singular feminist roots and psychosexual explorations of the inherent imbalances between men and women, but stepping away from prosthetic penises, fun with menstrual blood and brutal parallels of symbolic emotional rape, Catherine Breillat has assembled her most accessible art house film to date.  It's a slightly perverse, subtext-laden and stuffy Masterpiece theatre style entry with soft-core porn lighting and surprisingly glib insights on female sexuality in relation to religious constructs of male supremacy.  Breillat's feat here is mainly that of transferring Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's invariably male-centric novel of the same name and spicing it up with some sly feminist critique. 

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