Catherine Breillat’s fondness for female sexuality-themed
provocations makes her Bluebeard an
ideal marriage of creator and content, allowing the French director – working
in the more placid, refined mode of 2007’s superb The Last Mistress – another opportunity to plumb sex-violence-domination
dynamics. Breillat’s film is in fact two separate stories, the first concerning
the destitute Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) and her marriage to the hulking,
wealthy lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), and the second a pseudo-framing
narrative in which a young girl (Marilou Lopes-Benites) reads the tale of
Bluebeard to her frightened older sister (Lola Giovannetti) in a musty attic. In
the former, Breillat follows her source material’s basic template but tweaks it
in not-inconsiderable ways, turning Marie-Catherine into an active, fearless
participant in her betrothal and coloring her journey from penniless single
girl to independent bride with shades of ingrained sexist violence (“There are
many invasions,” she muses tellingly early on to her sis). Throughout, the
patient rhythms and uneasy silence of Breillat’s direction casts a hypnotic
spell, turning the ostensibly refined proceedings – in which Bluebeard is less
a monster than a pitiful lonely man troubled by his actions – into a moody
fantasia of barely repressed compulsions and desire, as epitomized by matching
shots of caressing hands hovering over hands. And in a stunning finale, one
that finds images of death both fossilized in a loving tableau and materializing
out of nowhere, Breillat captures the potent, potentially lethal power of fairy
tales.
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