The Last Mistress

One newspaper ad for Catherine Breillat’s latest project, The Last Mistress, prominently excerpts Roger Ebert’s review: “A passionate and explicit film about sexual obsession!” As a matter of fact, the film seems neither especially explicit—at least by Breillat’s standards, whose Romance (1999), e.g., features actual on-screen sex—nor terribly passionate; rather, it has a static and almost claustrophobically flattened feel to it. (The “sexual obsession” part, however, rings true.)

The film is based on a 19th-century novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly and tells of a young “libertine” in 1830s Paris, Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou), whose plans to marry an innocent aristocratic girl are sabotaged by his ongoing association with an old mistress, La Vellini (Asia Argento)—a rather vulgar courtesan, and Spanish to boot. In an account of his troubling circumstances told in confidence to his fiancée’s sympathetic grandmother, Ryno explains that he has been cohabiting with Vellini for ten years in a tumultuous on-again off-again fashion. The backstory reveals that the attraction was initially entirely one-sided, with Ryno engaging in relentless pursuit of the object of his desire undeterred by her mockery, complete lack of encouragement, and even her then-husband’s attempt to kill him in a duel… He is near-fatally wounded in the skirmish, and this is what finally triggers Vellini’s realization (or rather, admission) that she too is consumed by passion, and can no longer live without him. A blissful period ensues after the couple elopes to Northern Africa, far away from Western civilization—and ends abruptly with the unexpected death of their love child. Vellini’s sexual neediness in the wake of this incident is what first begins to repel Ryno; henceforth the romantic relationship takes a turn for the worse, while the carnal one persists with a vengeance, right up until the present day, with little chance that a small matter like Ryno’s marriage to another woman will quash it.

The sex scenes—all between the two main characters—contain nudity, but no glimpses of genitalia; the sex itself is simulated. Much of the movie resembles a series of stagy, talky tableaux (perhaps as befits the source material), and so too the sex scenes; these tend to consist of oddly motionless intercourse in convoluted positions and, reminiscent of de Sade, occasionally feature lengthy conversations concerning sexual politics.

All this makes a real-life chicken-killing scene toward the end of the first act (presented via a medium-long shot rather than in close-up, though still rather jarring) stand out all the more. This scene takes place after the protagonist/narrator has been wounded in the aforementioned duel; he drinks the freshly slaughtered chicken’s blood, presumably to restore his vitality. As a transitional moment, in addition to coinciding with the turning of tides in the relationship between Ryno and Vellini, the killing in a way ushers in an atmosphere of unpleasantness more characteristic of Breillat’s previous work—see Romance, Fat Girl (2001)—after a relatively civil and even light-hearted opening (though it is immediately preceded by a blood-licking scene in which Vellini laps at Ryno’s open wounds in an effort to kill him via infection, quite unpleasant in its own right).

But why does this particular incident take place “for real” as opposed to being staged? The insertion of this bit of documentary death footage^[1] does provide a moment of instant, visceral drama—underscored by the method of killing, which entails the chicken’s neck being stabbed repeatedly with a knife as the bird emits prolonged croaking sounds of distress—and yet it’s not exactly used for shock value in the traditional sense. Maybe real death is a substitute for real sex here: because of its immediate physiological urgency, the slaughter may elicit in viewers the misperception that sexual activity elsewhere in the film is characterized by the same kind of raw authenticity... A curious arrangement; more typical is the exact opposite scenario: unsimulated sex used to lend authenticity to staged scenes of death and violence. (Linda Williams refers to this phenomenon as a type of “genre confusion,” which has led to violent narrative films that also contain overt sexual activity being described as far more brutal than the on-screen action bears out.^[2] One example of this is Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes’s Baise-Moi [2000], another harsh French film about female sexuality.) Perhaps with The Last Mistress, even a brief moment of bona-fide bloodletting has led some viewers to mistakenly believe they are seeing a work rife with explicit sexual imagery.

We might therefore say the film is at once a case of the most conventional use of unsimulated animal killing on screen (i.e., creates instant drama, mirrors/foreshadows human character’s fate, etc.) and rather unusual in its real violence—fake sex reversal.

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1. See Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions On Death, Representation, and Documentary,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Fall 1984, for further discussion, as referenced here.
   
2. Linda Williams, “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography,” Representations 27 (Summer 1989), p. 42.