Pride Unprejudiced: The Last Mistress

Talking The Last Mistress
With Catherine Breillat

A sulfurous, sexual period piece, Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse) is, at first glance, both her most accessible and most carnal movie. An explicit, tempestuous variation on common costume drama, this adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel plays out as a luscious melodramatic essay. A 10-year obsession for Breillat is also an enveloping melodramatic essay on yearning. Unfolding during the reign of "citizen king" Louis Phillppe, the story details the marriage of aristocrat Ryno de Marigny (an angelic Fu-ad Aît Aattou) to Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida, from Fat Girl), a virginal young woman of the same class. Yet Ryno is still in thrall to his older lover of a decade, the flamenca La Vellini (Asia Argento). The temperature is substantially more humid than in Dangerous Liaisons. Argento's feral presence is a lively embodiment of one of Breillat's fixations: how women struggle against the place they are offered in society, as well as battle for the status they desire, with diversions into jealousy, lust, hate, passion. Her increasingly familiar force of perverse nature is well suited to Breillat's idées fixe about the weft and warpage of obsession, creating an atmosphere that despite the setting and the eye-filling plumage proceeds with contemporary force. The result is daring, delirious and ultimately affecting: the psychosexual battleground is eternal. People had sex then, and have sex now, and talk about it, dressed and dishabille.

"I enjoyed the dandyism, a last shout from the aristocracy," Breillat wrote in a director's note. "I am absolutely eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was more elegant and open-minded than the nineteenth, when the middle classes came into power, bringing narrow-mindedness and rigorously strict moral principles. The film contrasts these morals with the power of sentiments that transcend conventions. I also loved all these highly androgynous characters. Ryno is a terrible womanizer, a sort of Valmont, but he is also, like many dandies, deeply feminine. I've often dreamt about Michelangelo, about these men of dazzling beauty, a certain feminine beauty, yet without being effeminate.

"The story could only take place in an aristocratic environment," she continues in a Rohmeresque vein. "When struggling to survive, feeding a family and finding a room for shelter, there is no time for the leisure of romance. Not enough time to experience the pureness. Sentiment can only be expressed in a certain level of comfort where it is not tainted by the harsh realities of life. The way many great authors of that era expressed strong feeling in such idealistic settings has always fascinated me. Aristocracy simply lends itself to the refinery of sentiments."

My one notable prior brush with Breillat had been in the early part of the century during the Toronto International Film Festival in the lobby of the Park Hyatt, the festival headquarters. A colleague who'd interviewed her earlier in the day made a joke as she was breezing through and she took it as a serious query and before I knew it, I was sitting on the arm of an overstuffed chair listening as they parried densely about matters in a movie I hadn't seen yet. Of course, I had seen The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse) before the 59-year-old writer-director and I spoke on June 17.

Several years ago, while preparing The Last Mistress, her twelfth feature, Breillat, at 55, suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. She's doing well four years later, it would seem: on the day of our interview, she was switching appointments around before a flight to Brazil the next day after postponing a meeting with her producer about the movie she's making next with Naomi Campbell in order to do some more press. Over the phone from Paris (with a publicist's hand from New York and translator's assistance from Montreal), speaking to her from Chicago, her raspy voice balanced on an undercurrent of self-amused giggles.

RAY PRIDE: I'm interested in the way filmmakers use period pieces to reflect contemporary concerns. Modernity in drag, in short. When I hear that a European or Asian director I like is making a period piece, I hold my head in my hands. I'm saying, why aren't they showing me the modern world, their modern world? Open the window! But then there are films like The Last Mistress that feel as if from the present moment even with the trappings of costume drama.

CATHERINE BREILLAT: As you know, Shakespeare is modern, the classical dramas, and Racine and Corneille and all these antiques, they all deal with contemporary issues, they're all extremely contemporary. There's no such thing, really, as a costume drama, nothing is ever a costume drama. Or, rather, everythingis a costume drama. If we watch a film from the 1950s, we can have the feeling that in terms of emotions, at least, it's utterly contemporary. The sentiments are contemporary. There's no question. I've always tried to make films are timeless.

RP: The Coen brothers have set their movies always a bit in the past, five or seven years, a kind of "near-period piece" so that everything in the frame is intentional, with no way to simply point the camera down the street, so that "today" doesn't accidentally slip in.

CB: They're absolutely right. I agree with them completely. I've always said that things that are fashionable will go out of fashion quickly. And I deal with things that are timeless. Emotions, elements that date back to years ago, already have a classical character. Look at the example, the film noir American. In The Last Mistress, the characters' costumes are such were the sort you would have seen in the 1940s and 1950s, those dresses would not have been out of place in a detective film. But in terms of vamps, the model that inspired me most specifically was Marlene Dietrich.

RP: Who, of course, is an inauthentic figure who's utterly timeless. Completely constructed yet a figure outside of time.

CB: Utterly modern! You're absolutely right about Marlene Dietrich being completely timeless. Here I was making a film in flamenco fashion inspired by a Spanish woman, and to me the most beautiful Spanish woman you'll ever see on screen is Marlene Dietrich in the Devil is a Woman. There she is, a platinum blonde German, and she's just fantastic. But it just goes to show that fantasy remains fantasy, that a phantasm is powerful, and in the film, she is a projection of your fantasy. [Breillat giggles.] It's very funny [très drôle] that when I prepared the credits for my film, I copied first of all the credits to The Devil Is A Woman and then Asia Argento's agent saw them and said, no, her name isn't big enough, everything should be in capitals. And I told her agent, "What! She thinks she's greater than Marlene Dietrich?"

RP: C'est drôle. That makes me think of an image that I like very much, you have a shot-countershot of a smoke ring being blown and then you see the Ooooo rising and encircling, capturing the man's face.

CB: That's a shot I like as well. There's an element of luck involved because there's no way to control the smoke to frame the face exactly as you want, as you've planned, but I created a very ironic shot. I was lucky my actor was very gifted at making smoke rings and he made several and then we got the one that was just perfect according to plans.

RP: A truly Sternbergian image.

CB: [Breillat giggles] Yes, I love the films that Sternberg shot with Dietrich. The Scarlet Empress, that refers most to that. I always told Asia that she was the Scarlet Diva and I was the Scarlet Empress! And for that reason she couldn't resist me.

RP: How did you start working with your usual cinematographer, Yorgos Arvanitis? Compositions in films he's signed are usually acute, but he follows a particular style with you, masterful with interiors and confined spaces, yet by contrast he works fluently in landscapes and swooping, craning shots for Theo Angelopoulos.

CB: What you say of Arvanitis is very much true. But everyone who works with me differently than they work with others. I'm not going to say I'm despotic on set, but I would say people enter a state of hypnosis. I possess them as a director. I possess them body and soul in such a way that they apply their talents, they devote their talents for the good of the film. I'm an artisan, I observe everything on the film, setting the framing, citing the set design, choosing the actors, of course, and the costumes as well. Often, very often, in fact, I'd say always, my first step in taking possession of a project, in entering into a project, is by buying the settings, the costumes, the jewelry that you see in this film, for example. In the same way, I appropriate the actors. In fact, the actors aren't actors. They haven't been actors before my films. It's I who make them into actors. I see myself like a painter, who mixes, who crushes their own paints, rather than buying paints that are already in a tube. To me a professional actor is a tube that's already been used. Arvanitis - [Breillat giggles] - in a way Yorgos Arvanitis is my paintbrush and the canvas is my film. In fact, in French, there is another word for film, you can call a film a "canvas."

RP: You've usurped my question about whether there are styles of painting or analogies with painting that apply to your work.

CB: In the film as far as painterly examples go, the one I had was Georges de la Tour. In choosing Yorgos as my DP, I wanted to unbalance him, put him in an area of difficultly, as he's well known for his exteriors and here I was making him work in interiors the whole time. That was my obstinate choice. I think you have to do that all the time, to put people ill at ease, which is to force them to do the impossible, which is always far more interesting that what they are used to doing normally.

RP: I'm looking at a small reproduction hanging above my desk right now one of de la Tour's candle paintings, candles reflected in a mirror. I can understand that choice.

CB: [Breillat laughs] Yes, yes.

RP: Of Ryno, his lover says that if he were emperor, he'd do everything possible to make himself unpopular. I think you empathize with that specific line and specific sentiment. Is that part of what enabled you to keep the project clear in mind for so long with the multitude of distractions?

CB: Exactement! You're absolutely right to point out that sentence spoken of Ryno. He says that he will pride himself on being unpopular, that's really how I am seen in France, that's my position within France. That is perhaps why I chose "Une vieille maîtresse" [to adapt], I see myself as Ryno. And that's also why in casting the part I chose a man who was so handsome, so charismatic, and so obviously could have stemmed from the Italian Renaissance. He looks like he was painted by Holbein. I love the character of being proud and being defiant and it's exactly how I am seen. It's something I work at, it's a reputation I work at, a reality, but it's something that's even unconscious on my part. It seems to be my fate. [laughs] When I was making this film, people would ask me, Catherine, you always make films with very low budgets, now you have twice the budget that you had, what are you going to do with it? And I said, I'm going to make a film that's twice as good as what other people would do! [giggles] I'm extremely arrogant! On-set, I invited journalists from Liberation [the left Paris daily] when I was preparing to shoot. At that point when I was shooting, I'd already suffered my stroke and I was half-paralyzed. Of the idea of going to Cannes, the journalist asked, how are you going to manage? And I responded that half of me is still better than everyone else in France! It really angered people and provoked a lot of hostility because people didn't realize that it was meant ironically, but it was also a provocation.

July 16, 2008