BlissAndConversation.com

REVIEWING YOUR LIFE ON STAGE AND SCREEN

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.

       The reasons why La Vellini (Asia Argento) will be the last irreplaceable mistress of young libertine Ryno (Fu-ad Aattou) are abundantly and lushly repeated in the erotic scenes dear to the heart of French director Catherine Breillat.

          Although debt and destitution compel him to marry a beautiful heiress Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), not even his honeymoon, not even the isolated chateau in Brittany where the couple lives, can separate him from his mistress of the last decade.  That’s because they are erotic equals, aggressively obsessed with passion.  How can you leave a woman who provokes you into a duel with her old aristocratic husband and then licks the blood from the near-fatal wound he inflicts?
          La Vellini is the daughter of an imperious Italian princess and a fiery Spanish matador.  When she meets Ryno, they recognize each other immediately on some sub-conscious sensual plane and she takes him as surely as if it were her birthright.

          “Mine by the right of the White Election!  Mine by the royal seal!”  That’s not La Vellini, or Catherine Breillat, it’s Emily Dickinson whose passion may have been only in her dreams but who emotionally evoked it for all of us.

          Based on an 1851 novel by Jules-Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly, this film is very French.  The lovers’ passions have, as apostrophes, superb performances by Michael Lonsdale and Yolande Moreau as elderly society gossips and Claude Sarraute as Hermangarde’s aristocratic grandmother, who coaxes Ryno into telling her all about his affair with La Vellini.  The intelligence, intuitive understanding and mordant delight with which Sarraute drinks in this night-long confession take it out of the realm of gossip and the purely physical to demonstrate the almost metaphysical nature of intense sensuality. 

          Neither religion nor death can separate the lovers and by the film’s end, we understand wearily why their intense sexual compatibility is irresistible.