Wow! Such a good movie.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

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.

Catherine Breillat's latest film showed up on IFC in theaters and I figured I'd try it since I saw a couple of good but not great reviews.Set in 1835 the plot has a young man, who has been having a long term affair with an older woman, having his life and wedding plans upset by his mistress who just won't get over him. Whats worse is he can't get over her and thanks to two gossips (who take a holier than thou road, while privately taking great glee in destroying lives) everyone is talking about it.More accessible Breillet film was for me nothing special. The problem for me was that once you realized that neither of the lovers was going to give up the affair there really was nowhere to go. Basically you have two people who love and hate each other and really can't leave the other even though its the only sensible thing to do. Realistic to be certain but the film kind of has no where to go and by the end of its running time your ready to move on to something else.Sixish out of ten.

Une vieille maîtresse (2007), adapted and directed by Catherine Breillat, was shown in the U.S. with the title, "The Last Mistress." This is a period film, set in early 19th-century France.The basic plot is a love triangle--Fu'ad Ait Aattou plays the young aristocrat, Ryno de Marigny, who wants to marry the virtuous young woman, Hermangarde, played by the elegant Roxane Mesquida. Asia Argento plays Vellini, a highly sophisticated courtesan, with whom de Marigny has been having an affair for ten years.The film is filled with beautiful women and lots of sex, but not much else. de Marigny doesn't seem all that desirable or interesting to me, and I didn't buy the plot line that Vellini simply couldn't let him out of her life. It's not that prostitutes can't fall in love, but it struck me as unlikely that this prostitute would fall in love--and stay in love--with this client.We are supposed to understand that sexual values and attitudes are shifting at this time, and women are becoming liberated from the assumption that they can only be desired, but can't have desires themselves. Maybe so, but I think that justification was tacked on to a film whose raison d'etre is the display of lovely female bodies.This movie was shown at the excellent Rochester High Falls International Film Festival. Most of the action takes place in drawing rooms and bedrooms, so the film will work well on DVD.

An elderly couple (Yolande Moreau and Michael Lonsdale) commences the film amidst idle chatter and bloodied fowls, proudly earning their stripes as 19th century versions of Gladys and Abner Kravitz with the newly engaged libertine Ryno de Marigny's (Fu'ad Ait Aattou) torrid 10-year long amour with Italian-Spanish coquette Lady Vellini (Asia Argento) as their scandal du jour. The hot-blooded Vellini finds out soon enough that her overweening extra-pallid dandy is soon out to marry his way into higher circles through the fragile heart of virginal Hermangarde (Breillat devotee Roxane Mesquida) and through the sprightly imaginations of her household's feisty matriarch (Claude Sarraute). And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially when the woman in question is directed by agent provocateur Catherine Breillat, she of "Anatomy of Hell", "Romance X" and "Fat Girl" infamy. But here, Breillat tones down the transgressions of venereal shock for the (comparatively) sumptuous reservoirs of rapturous passion and fervent sexual anxieties – a refined take on the stock battle-of-the-sexes formula with art-house cinephiles' wet dream Argento as Breillat's latest codpiece in her intense dissection of Parisian high society's cannibalism and its mordant gender politics. Argento's Velli is no less than a force of nature as she ascends into a conduit for Breillat's declarations and shouts it from the rafters; her sexual aggressiveness play tricks on masculine insecurities and her vociferousness, an affront to feminine coyness. At the peak of her captivating sensuality and at the height of her enigmatic inscrutability, Argento's magnificence here is one of furious defiance.