Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Chad Shiira Asia Argento, as one would suspect, this being the latest film by Catherine Breillat, logs in a considerable amount of time unclothed in "Une viellie maitresse", although, to the disappointment of Breillat's fans who misread her work as porn, less graphically than past leading ladies, most notably, Caroline Ducey in 1999's "Romance", who performed unsimulated oral sex on Rocco Siffredi, four years before Chloe Sevigny, likewise, opened wide for Vincent Gallo, in "The Brown Bunny". Vellini's first encounter with Ryno de Marginy is tame, downright chaste(by Breillat's standards), as Argento, fully clothed, moans and grunts while Fu'ad Ait Aatou, fully clothed himself, expresses himself in a physical capacity. Breillat, never one to be conservative about representing female sexuality in her work, stages this first love scene like something out of a traditional period piece costumer. The context of this encounter between Vellini and Ryno de Marginy is the nobleman's impending marriage to Hermangarde(Roxanne Mesquida), "the jewel of French aristocracy". This mid-afternoon f*** is meant to be a parting gift to his mistress.The first nudity belongs to a little girl, the daughter that Vellini and her Frenchman reared in Algeria, who dies tragically from a scorpion's bite. Breillat, in her own words, told journalist Chris Wiegan, in his article "A Quick Chat with Catherine Breillat", that she takes "sexuality as a subject, not as an object." Prior to the Algerian tragedy, as part of an oral history that Ryno de Marginy recounts to Hermangarde's grandmother about his relationship with the mistress, he conjures up the day when La marquise de Flers(Claude Sarraute) told him that Vellini was "a woman, not an object". When the young girl is killed, she's being punished for being naked; not by Breillat, who's not a feminist in the traditional sense, but by the patriarchal church which equates nakedness with sin. The little girl has to die because the nude form is a temptation to man. Next to her funeral pyre, Argento is on top, straddling Aatou's body, her ample bosoms prominently displayed, unhindered by any scrap of clothing, as she tries to f*** the pain away. Since the woman is in anguish, mourning over a dead child, big breasts notwithstanding, the male gaze ignores the de-eroticizing circumstances, and finds pleasure in her pain. This is why Breillat's films aren't soft-core porn. Adult films don't have a self-reflexive component. Vellini has a right to grieve however she likes, it just so happens that sex helps, being buck-naked while she's having sex helps. Breillat sees her as a woman. The scene isn't about sexuality, it's about forgetting. When you lose somebody, you do whatever is possible to get out of your body. Vellini doesn't feel the penetration, she feels the loss of her child. But all the male viewer sees is a woman they'd like to have sex with; an object.During Ryno de Marigny's narrative in the grandmother's drawing room, the old woman changes from a seated position into a subtly provocative rearrangement of her body in which she's nearly falling out of her seat. She doesn't look particularly ladylike. Her laxness in the chair is the closest she'll get to sleeping with the young man. Very subtly, this woman of advanced age recalls the way Tori Amos seats herself in a sexual manner before the Bosendorfer piano. Ryno de Marginy not only seduced Hermangarde, but also this matured lady, who should have known better than to arrange a marriage between her granddaughter and a libertine.Wherever Ryno de Marginy goes, Vellini is sure to follow. She follows his man to the countryside, where the recently married couple decided to live, away from Paris, away from her. Their reunion takes place on top of a fort, in which Ryno de Marginy greets Vellini with a long phallic gun. The mistress grips the gun like she's pulling the male organ closer to her, transforming the penis as a weapon into the penis as a benign component of the male anatomy, since it's clear that Ryno de Marginy wants to shoot her with his very substance, not riddle her with bullets. "Une vieille maitresse" is a love story about a man's loyalty, not to his wife, but to his mistress. The filmmaker just goes about it in the most incendiary way possible.

Seamus2829 For years,I pretty much avoided the "face of new Euro porn" films of French director Catherine Breillart (infamous for 'Romance',or 'Romance X',as it was known in Europe). When I heard she had taken on a film adaptation of the 19th century erotic masterpiece, 'The Last Mistress', I though to myself "grand...more boring Euro porn" (I walked out on 'Romance X' out of sheer boredom,and not of shock). Well, I was pleasantly surprised by 'Mistress'. Mind you, Breillart still has some growing up as a writer/director to do (there are things that transpire that are never explained),and her characters are still for the most part, unlikable. Apart from that, she has made some improvements. The cast includes Asia Argento,who doesn't seem to have any issues with tossing off her duds and parading around nude in any film she appears in,as well as several others,including veteran British actor Michael Lonsdale. The plot concerns a penniless,good for nothing young lad who is engaged to be married to a French woman of wealth & name, but has been an off again,on again lover of a half Spanish/half French woman of no certain valor. All I could think at times was 'Dangerous Liasions' meets 'Fatal Attraction',filtered thru a European perspective. This film obviously will not be everybody's cup of tea,but is still worth a look. No rating here,but probably only pull down a hard "R",due to nudity & some fairly restrained sexuality.

richard-1787 I saw this movie this afternoon, and though at the end my watch assured me that it was less than 2 hours long, I had the impression I had sat through a verbatim reading of the entire 459 page novel. Endless dialogues in very literary French with the characters sitting down, filmed by a director who has no idea how to film dialogue, especially literary dialogue. The costumes were nice and so were the sets, but it reminded me of a very bad Masterpiece Theater episode.And it's a shame, because there was the makings here for a good movie (with another director). Most of the actors and actresses looked their parts, with the annoying exception of the male lead, who looked convincing at 20 but way too boyish - or girlish - for 30. The novel is interesting. (Though the premise is obvious and doesn't sustain almost 500 pages. The novel would be better known if it were a lot shorter.) A much better script could have been the basis for a good movie. (The script was evidently by the director.) And then there were the annoying small mistakes. Why, in the middle of a movie that sticks close to its historical period, c. 1835, do the characters do a rendition of a German popular song from the 1920s that sounds very 1920s? Why, at the opening of the movie, is the date 1835 given with the tag "the period of Choderlos de Laclos"? Laclos died in 1805 and his one remembered work, Les Liaisons dangereuses, dates from 1782. This story so very clearly dates from the Restoration and right after it, the period Balzac, Barbey's real contemporary, described so well in Eugénie Grandet, with its aristocracy moving ever further to a moral and sexual right wing - as we see in poor Ermangarde, who is afraid to enjoy sex.As I said, the acting here was fine, the sets and costumes ditto. But the dialogue was leaden as was the direction, and I found the male lead annoying.A major disappointment.

madupont If anyone knows where it is to be found, please post information.I have an even worse question. I carefully went back for an encore after having a very good impression of this film, that lessens but, Argento is a strong performer; I never found Anne Parillaud. I looked carefully, and I still do not see her! Someone give me a hint?I did recognize the name Sarraute, immediately, but then put it out of my mind. It is amazing however, if it is true that she is not a professional actor because she was the most fully developed character and does as well as Catharine DeNeuve in,Time Regained(different era;same concerns). I caught that remark about the Laclos and the differentiation of time; and yet, when I described a hair-style to someone, it hit me that for all their concern to be fashionable, the French retained a hairstyle for some 54 years(as seen at the banquet table that evening of the "costume-disguise" party).Also, at another venue, a remark was made that Sarraute's line,as La Marquise de Flers, was "I am absolutely true to the 18th.century values" --which led me to consider by this morning, after finding it other described as "I am marvelously true to the 18th.century values", how in the world did she survive what was a class and political Revolution? She was at her prime, thus it is ironic but it explains in one line from whence the values she mentions casually in response to Marigny's story. Or, as my mother said (whose grandparents were of this return to the Bourbon Rule), "Women have the power. It is women who run things."I have yet to find a "professional reviewer" who adequately explores the ramifications of this film accurately. I have to hand it to Breillat,for her attention to "detail, detail, detail".In no way do I find fault with her Algerian segment; it's a well known psychology, to mask grief and depression with "flamboyant" sexuality.I loved the particulars of Hermangarde's wedding as choreographed by her grandmother, which reveals better than anything that remark of my mother who had an uncle who was a Roman Catholic priest. (although in some ways it is nearly as good as another film-maker's,Dutch, "deathbed symbolics"in, Antonia's Line,by Marleen Gorris). Did anyone else notice that Roxane Mesquida resembles a very young Sharon Stone? Her glare is phenomenal.Fu'ad Ait Aattou has a future revealed in the close-up delivery of his lines, and he carries himself well, he is not discomforted by the clothing of that period which he wears to advantage; but, he needs some work on those biceps. He apparently has a very deep rib-cage at the sacrifice of any shoulder or bicep development.