Old Mistress, An

Synopsis: In early 19th century Paris, 30-year-old aristocratic libertine, Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Aït Aattou) is about to marry the beautiful Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). The marriage is frowned upon by Parisian society and before marrying her, Ryno tells her grandmother, the Marquise de Flers (played by French entertainment journalist, Claude Sarraute) of his ten year relationship with La Vellini (Asia Argento).

This adaptation of an 18th century novel Une vieille maîtresse by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly is a direly plodding affair. Breillat, a director much-vaunted in art cinema circles for her provocative statements about female sexual identity in contemporary Western patriarchy (the title of her previous film, Anatomie De L'Enfer, 2003, makes no bones about her position on this) flounders hopelessly with a period setting. Certainly one can hire the right costumiers and production designers and look at any number of films that have also been set in the same period but all that guarantees is that one will get a film that looks like any other of its type. And that is what An Old Mistress feels like. The over-furnished interiors, the nights at the opera, the society dowagers dealing the fate of their charges, the duel at dawn and so on are all so tiresomely familiar that Breillat could have saved a good portion of her budget by simply writing the scene descriptions on a blackboard, Dogme-style, and let our imagination do the rest.

If provocation is generally Breillat's strong suit here it fails her badly. Asia Argento, daughter of Italian giallo director, Dario Argento, has the hard features of the cheap beauty she is supposed to be (apparently in the novel she is described as ugly). If this was a film set in a modern-day working class district of Paris she'd be perfect (not a little because of her boob job and the tattoo on her sacrum) but in this setting, in which fine appearances and elegant graces are supposedly paramount, she is an incongruously literal embodiment of the moral state she is intended to represent (Argento presumably got the role because of her performance as the vulgar courtesan, Madame Du Barry, in Sofia Coppola's comparably mis-judged frock-fest, Marie Antoinette, 2006). Breillat-regular, Roxane Mesquida, takes up her position at the opposite end of this simple moral scale decked out in virginal white although dramatically she is called upon to do little other than be winsome and pallid. But more importantly, in Argento's performance, the psycho-sexual allure which her screen lover, Ryno, apparently finds so irresistible and which ultimately transcends her physical charms, is in no way apparent (compare her in this department to Glenn Close and her command over John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons, 1988).

As Ryno, model-turned-actor, Fu'ad Aït Aattou is one helluva pretty boy with lips that would please fans of Angelina Jolie, but neither as a 20 year old fop nor as a 30 year old man of the world is he particularly effective, falling somewhere in between and relying on his physical charms instead of personality to portray his character. Whilst it would be hard for any actor, let alone a novice, to pull off such a critical age difference, the main failing of this film lies in Breillat's hackneyed mise-en-scène and laboured script which lumbers the actors with dialogue that might have read well on a printed page but robs the performances of immediacy. It is easy to imagine both actors could have done a lot better if less constrained but then with this film there's so much one needs to imagine being different in order to like it.

 

 

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