Argento is a feral beauty who devours everything in her path, and a perfect actress for Breillat. But the director seems hemmed in by the period finery, and the movie is a self-conscious yawn.
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09/05/08
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The Last Mistress (2008)
77 %
Reviews Counted: 77 Fresh: 59 Rotten:18 Average Rating: 6.7/10
Consensus:
More complicated than your average bodice ripper, Catherine Breillat's Last Mistress features beautiful costumes, wrought romances, and a feral performance from Argento.
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hr 54 mins
Theatrical Release: Jun 27, 2008 Limited
Box Office: $621,567
Synopsis: Controversial director Catherine Breillat (ROMANCE, FAT GIRL) delivers her most ambitious film yet with THE LAST MISTRESS. Adapted from the novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, the film is set in 19th-century France, when the world was a seemingly much more innocent place. Underneath the... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Asia Argento, Fu'ad Ait Aattou, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute, Yolande Moreau
Reviews
Argento, the daughter of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, has become a force to be reckoned with on the international film scene over the past couple of years.
08/29/08
Screenwriter/director Catherine Breillat's take on the tale has a definite feminist slant to it, which may explain why the male characters come off so badly. And unfortunately, sometimes that makes it dull.
08/29/08
Oh god, have I ever seen a more tedious 'erotic' movie than this one?
08/28/08
There’s plenty of skin and acrobatic positioning in Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, but the ferocious passions they signify are far more interesting.
08/22/08
What makes the movie ineluctably compelling is Argento's fire in the title role.
08/15/08
A dispassionate autopsy of a passionate triangle, brilliantly devised if not always perfectly executed.
08/10/08
It's characteristic of the virtues and limitations of French sexual provocateur Catherine Breillat...that they usually derive from the same source--the fearless determination to skirt the borders of camp.
08/01/08
Top Critic
Cool, carnal, and lethal, The Last Mistress is a period drama with a difference.
07/25/08
Top Critic
There's a brittle pomp and circumstance to The Last Mistress, which suddenly turns into a sensual witch's dance, once star Asia Argento is let loose about a third of the way into the film.
07/25/08
Top Critic
Despite an austere budget and some minor anachronisms, The Last Mistress proves that Breillat has found something in the luscious language of the 19th century that makes sense to us today.
07/25/08
Top Critic Top Critic
The cynicism and fire of the film all emerges from the heat of Asia Argento. In giving a truly fearless performance as the title character, she uses her body and audacity to tweak the upper-class society that can't take their eyes off her.
07/21/08
Asia Argento, as Vellini, is a firebrand, a woman who is attractive even in non-seductive moments when she is angry or downcast or 'off-stage.'
07/21/08
Top Critic
Aattou plays his role with the supreme self-confidence of a man in control, his deep blue eyes radiating calm, but Argento seems to know better. She is a wild, physical force, a primal fury who could only be resisted if she were to allow it.
07/18/08
[Breillat's] latest and possibly most entertaining exercise in erotica.
07/18/08
The Last Mistress is grindingly predictable, its view of sex as hand-to-hand combat (the lovers here assault each other like Sumo wrestlers) is often unintentionally funny and the casting is all wrong.
07/18/08
[Breillat] is inviting us to really look at sex as it occurs in life, and to engage with it mentally, as a driving mystery of human existence.
07/18/08
Top Critic
The sex, like almost everything else in The Last Mistress, is mechanical.
07/18/08
Top CriticRelated Forums
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/10
Review: Fiery, sexual performance by Asia Argento in 'The Last Mistress'
by: lovelacy 7/21
by: lovelacy 7/21
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