On the surface, French provocateur Catherine Breillat’s latest film is nothing like the nine before it. Her first attempt at adapting material not her own is also a period piece, heavy with intricate costumes and poetic dialogue. Yet its spirit is unmistakably modern, and centers on the same amour fou or mad love that all of her films have dealt with in one way or another. Asia Argento plays Vellini, a Spanish woman of questionable nobility, who has stolen the heart of a young Parisian playboy and held it captive for some ten years. The story begins and ends in the present tense but breaks in the middle as the young man reveals the secrets of Vellini’s hold on him to the grandmother of his future bride.
Asia Argento is not necessarily beautiful by Hollywood standards, but she has an undeniable presence on screen, and she inhabits this character with an abandon that is completely believable. Breillat’s confidence as a director translates beautifully. With the help of the rich source material, she's made her most fulfilling film yet.
During the post-film Q&A Breillat said that she identified heavily with the male novelist on whose book the film is based, as he was heavily censored and she has always felt herself pushed to tell stories in their most raw form. She revealed that in order to achieve this raw feeling, everything in the film was kept real from jewelry to costumes to locations (no easy feat). When asked about the heavy role sex plays in her films she commented that she once observed, looking on the face of an actress, "something ecstatic and sacred at the same time when a woman is at the extremes of passion." She went on to talk about seeing this same effect in certain classic paintings, and used that idea as way to tell a timeless story of romantic consumption in the film’s nineteenth-century setting. — Bryan Whitefield