With The Last Mistress, always-controversial French director Catherine Breillat has hearkened back to the golden age of her country's aristocratic era. With the period setting, the deliberate pacing and the trappings of a time often thought of as fodder for Oscar-bating movies about doomed love, one might just suspect the director of Romance, Fat Girl and Anatomy of Hell of going soft. But then you spot Asia Argento in the credits, and remember that this is a woman who wrote her first major novel at the age of 17 only to have it rejected by the French classification system on the grounds that the material was unsuitable for readers under the age of 18, and you realize you've got nothing to worry about. Although she's just passed her 60th birthday and suffered a major stroke that kept her out of action for several months, the woman who says that "Censors are a kind of mafia" isn't going soft for anyone.
In a brief but volatile interview with Slant magazine's Fernando Croce, Breillat talks about The Last Mistress and how it made her somewhat lament the death of aristocracy ("The aristocrats, especially in the Laclos works, display massive panache in their affairs: if they ruined themselves, they would do it with flair";' her attempts to find the perfect leading man in France ("There are no such leading me in France nowadays, so I had to reconstruct one. We've no matinee idols in French cinema today, only Gerard Depardieu and the Depardieu wannabes. Ugly leading men -- that's the French taste, I suppose."), and what it's like working with Ms. Argento ("Imagine you're a potter, but instead of working with clay, you're modeling lava"). You'll also learn who her handpicked replacement would have been to finish the movie had her stroke proved fatal.
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