The Last Mistress (2007)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Excellent but underrated film

As Good As It Gets

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

What you open to can be bigger and more fulfilling if you are careful to make those things few. Some films you can let permeate your soul, and others you must keep at a distance. Part of the experience of film, unavoidably, is how to handle celebrity. Sorting out who is easy; keeping a reign on how is harder, especially (for me) where women are concerned. I allow Asia into my field of vision, together with a few similar excessive female lives. The simple narrative is merely that they live their lives deeply, with some dangerous mix of abandon and control. Our vision only sees the cinematic skin of their lives in sex and relationships, but we infer the internal passion and focus.Breillat makes powerful films, formed as skits about damaging sex and recoil. The balance is a bit unfair because these things are easy to communicate but hard to convey in a manner that you can use in building a self. But she is honest and we see her. She apparently had some severe medical event and this is her first film after recovery. She merely adapts a book, a story about a man reluctantly captured by a woman. That woman is played by Asia, presumably using much of herself or what she uses in acting herself.Narratively, the thing is well structured. We have an outer wrapping: a couple telling each other the 'scandalous' story we are about to see. Then we have the story of the romance, and an inner story where the man tells the story. These three versions do not coincide, but the tension among the versions is not mined as we would hope.The society dunces have the romance as simply sexual gluttony, too marvelous to abandon. The story told by the man is one of reluctant obsession, a curse that is inescapable and that only incidentally involves the escape of sex. What we see is sparse, allowing us to struggle with our own voyeuristic issues: do we allow ourselves to be captured by the nudity and sex we see, or do we allow the narrative to have its own passion without feeding it ours?This is where the attraction of celebrity engagement confuses because Asia exists outside the movie. We see the familiar tattoos. We see the commitments, still rare among actresses. We see the risk. It works, I think, but only by accident and it may not for you if you have not followed her life from that of the tortured film child.The sexual roles, incidentally, are reversed. The guy is passive, possibly a victim and softly feminine. He lies like a stereotypical woman. The mistress is bold, open, fearless, aggressive. She is possibly the predator, fate be denied.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

In 19th century Paris, a man about to marry recounts his life with a mistress. This is a good-looking costume drama, a lavish production. Unfortunately, it is a boring blab fest. While it's a love story between a man and woman, there is some gender bending going on here. With her hard, angular face, Agento looks like a man in drag, although there is ample evidence that she's 100% woman when undressed. With his soft, feminine face, Ait Aattou looks like a woman cross-dressed as a man. Both leads turn in inept performances. There is a scene involving their love child that is supposed to be tragic, but is laughably lame. Breillat has made some bad but provocative films. This one is simply bad.

Greetings again from the darkness. I always get a kick out of the French cinematic view of love. Of course, there is always some single person we are meant for ... though endless lovers are expected. Somehow there is a soul mate and we always find that person not matter the pain caused to ourself or others.Director Catherine Breillat uses the transition of France from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth as the setting for this tale of "love" among the French upper crust. A cheap plot device - the ultimate detailed confession - provides the full guts of the story, both background and foreshadow.What made the film inaccessible for me were both lead actors, especially Asia Argento as Vellini (the last mistress). I just didn't find these people likable, whether together or apart. On the other hand, I did enjoy Michael Lonsdale as de Prony, and his wonderful dialogue and delivery.Mostly an uneventful couple of hours with no surprise ending at all.

If anyone knows where it is to be found, please post information.I have an even worse question. I carefully went back for an encore after having a very good impression of this film, that lessens but, Argento is a strong performer; I never found Anne Parillaud. I looked carefully, and I still do not see her! Someone give me a hint?I did recognize the name Sarraute, immediately, but then put it out of my mind. It is amazing however, if it is true that she is not a professional actor because she was the most fully developed character and does as well as Catharine DeNeuve in,Time Regained(different era;same concerns). I caught that remark about the Laclos and the differentiation of time; and yet, when I described a hair-style to someone, it hit me that for all their concern to be fashionable, the French retained a hairstyle for some 54 years(as seen at the banquet table that evening of the "costume-disguise" party).Also, at another venue, a remark was made that Sarraute's line,as La Marquise de Flers, was "I am absolutely true to the 18th.century values" --which led me to consider by this morning, after finding it other described as "I am marvelously true to the 18th.century values", how in the world did she survive what was a class and political Revolution? She was at her prime, thus it is ironic but it explains in one line from whence the values she mentions casually in response to Marigny's story. Or, as my mother said (whose grandparents were of this return to the Bourbon Rule), "Women have the power. It is women who run things."I have yet to find a "professional reviewer" who adequately explores the ramifications of this film accurately. I have to hand it to Breillat,for her attention to "detail, detail, detail".In no way do I find fault with her Algerian segment; it's a well known psychology, to mask grief and depression with "flamboyant" sexuality.I loved the particulars of Hermangarde's wedding as choreographed by her grandmother, which reveals better than anything that remark of my mother who had an uncle who was a Roman Catholic priest. (although in some ways it is nearly as good as another film-maker's,Dutch, "deathbed symbolics"in, Antonia's Line,by Marleen Gorris). Did anyone else notice that Roxane Mesquida resembles a very young Sharon Stone? Her glare is phenomenal.Fu'ad Ait Aattou has a future revealed in the close-up delivery of his lines, and he carries himself well, he is not discomforted by the clothing of that period which he wears to advantage; but, he needs some work on those biceps. He apparently has a very deep rib-cage at the sacrifice of any shoulder or bicep development.