#Hermangarde

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

You would give away your granddaughter, the flower of the French aristocracy, to a libertine?

[bebemoon]

roxane mesquida as hermangarde in ‘une vieille maîtresse’ (2oo7), dir. catherine breillat .

[filmstruck]

Doomed Love: THE LAST MISTRESS (’07) by R. Emmet Sweeney

THE LAST MISTRESS (’07) marked a dividing line in Catherine Breillat’s career. It was the first film she directed after suffering a stroke in 2004 that left her partially paralyzed (dramatized in her film ABUSE OF WEAKNESS [’13]). This costume drama about l’amour fou was also her first period piece and book adaptation (Une vieille maîtresse [1851], by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly), necessitating a larger budget than her previous works. What is fascinating is how she bends the source material, and the genre, towards her concerns – the notion of sex as power - mainly through the casting of Asia Argento as the title mistress who bewitches a debauched young aristocrat. Argento’s knifing, exhaustingly physical performance astonishes the characters around her, a modern aggressive girl in a passive pre-modern world.

The world as depicted in the novel described the twilight of the aristocrats, the last self-obsessed gasp of the moneyed elite. All of that accumulated tradition and ritual lies within La Marquise de Flers (a sardonic Claude Sarraute), the grandmother to Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), who will be marrying Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Aït Aattou), an infamous cad who used to bed wives for sport, and who had been engaged in a ten-year relationship with Vellini (Asia Argento), the Spanish wife of an aging Englishman. Vellini publically abandoned her marriage for Marigny, causing a wave of scandal.

But Hermangarde, played with angelic naiveté by Mesquida (FAT GIRL [’01], SEX IS COMEDY [’02]) has fallen deeply in love with Marigny. Which is understandable, because Aattou has a preposterous beauty of his own, with his bee stung lips and high cheekbones, Breillat compared him to Alain Delon. Breillat told Fernando Croce of Slant Magazine how he was cast:

I saw him at a sidewalk café, and I pointed him out to my assistant director. “There’s Ryno de Marigny! He’s mine!” For this part I needed a young Alain Delon, the Delon of Visconti’s The Leopard. There are no such leading men in France nowadays, so I had to reconstruct one. We’ve no matinee idols in French cinema today, only Gérard Depardieu and the Depardieu wannabes. Ugly leading men—that’s the French taste, I suppose. Just as I was about to send my assistant director after Fu’ad, he came over, asked if I was the director of Romance, and gave me his phone number, all of this with extraordinary elegance. Just what the character called for.

The Marquise asks Marigny to tell her the story of his life, specifically his affair with Vellini, in detail. She is both trying to vouch for his character and to vicariously enjoy his passions through his story. Claude Sarraute plays the Marquise with sly restraint, teasing out her reactions slowly, as she seems to be savoring every word of Marigny’s tale.

And the tale is of their sado-masochistic love affair, sealed with a bullet in a duel, when Vellini’s husband buries a shot into Marigny’s shoulder. This after endless attempts by Marigny to woo this woman who so intrigued him, who didn’t fall for any of his romantic tricks, or seem to have any concern for propriety. When they first talk at dinner, it ends with her smashing a glass in Marigny hand, slashing open her hand. Their bond is repeatedly cemented by blood. After the duel, when Marigny is on the operating table, she kneels over him and licks his wound, in a voracious bit of eroticism. They want to possess each other fully, and they consume each other for a decade.

They conceive and lose a child together, and that loss changes the valence of their all-consuming passion. It turns from light to dark, their lust no longer a fuel but a drain, hollowing them out. So, they agree to part amicably, and remain friends. But Hermangarde is embarrassed and self-conscious about sex, loving Marigny like one loves a sculpture. It is only a matter of time before Vellini returns – and she does with gusto, smoking cigars, wearing a patchwork gown that makes her look like a Roma wanderer. Her whole wardrobe marks her as an outsider from the beginning, from her entrance wearing a mantilla, with two hairs curled down her forehead so it looks like a heart (or an ass, depending on your perspective). She also wears a modern-looking ball gown, as well as a dress modeled after the figure in Goya’s The Clothed Maja (ca. 1815). She is a shapeshifter, and perhaps it would be more accurate to say she is not modern, but out-of-time, an enchanted figure.

Her sex scenes with Marigny are carnal and matter-of-fact, no swelling music or ogling close-ups, just two beautiful people absorbed, and absorbing, the other’s body. They are frankly erotic sex scenes, made so, according to Breillat, by how much the actors disliked each other: “they hated each other. [Laughs] I was relieved: I realized both of them belonged to me, because they did not belong to each other. We took it from there. As a general rule, I hate when my actors like each other.” Breillat, as shown in her comedy of directing a sex scene, SEX IS COMEDY, is a master manipulator, creating conflict and tension until getting exactly the right pitch of intensity she is looking for.

Those sex scenes also underline the yawning gap between their status in the bedroom and that outside of it. Inside, Vellini is in control, dictating the pace and direction of their lovemaking – while outside, she is considered a fallen woman, an outcast. Whereas Marigny, equally adulterous, is lining up a lucrative wife, and during the wedding ceremony, the priest quotes from Corinthians: “Man did not come from Woman, but woman from man. Man was not created for woman, but woman for man.” Marriage, by that metric, is indentured servitude, and what Vellini is looking for is something freer, the satiating of lust for the man she desires, taking each other whole, body and blood.

Breillat had difficulty finding anyone to insure her on the project, due to her stroke. The only way they would sign off is if she would name a director to finish the project in case she was physically incapable of it. Breillat told Croce that, “The only person I could ever consider for that was Claire Denis. I knew that if she shot the film, I could use her images after I had recovered. Her way of working is also very physical, even if her work is rawer, while mine tends to be about enchantment. Both of us are after human truths and mysteries.”

[thefilmstage]

In the Bible, Paul the apostle wrote in the first letter to the church at Corinth these words: “Man did not come from Woman, but woman from man. Man was not created for woman, but woman for man,” which is repeated in the wedding ceremony between Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) and Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida). These words cast a shadow — not only for Vellini (Asia Argento), the lover who has been cast aside, but for women everywhere in Christian nations. If one rebels, one fails god, but man can do as he pleases, for he is God. This breeds a generation of witches. If Man is God and Women refuses to acquiesce to Man then she is the Devil. Vellini, having been scorned by Marigny, becomes what is foreshadowed earlier by her crimson evening gowns, black veils, and propensity for blowing cigar smoke from her cherry lips. Vellini follows her heart and her carnal instincts to the seaside cliffs of Marigny’s elegant honeymoon where she finds a happily married man. Vellini is turned into a villain simply by the circumstances of her soul; and with Catherine Breillat‘s pointed lens on gendered conversation, she addresses the prickly differences between the perceptions of the sexual man and woman in 19th Century France.

Our retrospective on the best films of 2007 continues with The Last Mistress.