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04/28/08
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The Last Mistress (2008)
76 %
Reviews Counted: 68 Fresh: 52 Rotten:16 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: 15
Runtime: 1 hr 54 mins
Theatrical Release: 11-04-2008
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
Top CriticClick to read the article
04/15/08
Top Critic
As the liaisons grow more dangerous, Breillat masterfully exposes seething undercurrents of jealousy and desire.
04/11/08
Top Critic
Like all Breillat's films it's obsessed with sex, power and gender, its protagonists reduced to tragedy as they desperately wield their weapons of seduction.
04/11/08
Top Critic
Visually, the film is an uninteresting as the similarly dour Don’t Touch the Axe, and now Breillat’s health is failing it may be time she hung-up her viewfinder.
04/11/08
Swiftly and deftly immersing us in the fashions – not just the clothes and decor, but also the changing sexual and social ethics – of the 1830s, Breillat’s meticulous, eloquent script and direction succeed in relating a consistently engrossing story.
04/11/08
Top Critic
even as this odd couple cuts its destructive path through the social order in a story that is essentially a tragedy, they come across as idealised revolutionaries rather than deluded victims of love.
04/09/08
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10/13/07
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09/08/07
Top Critic
Cool, carnal, and lethal, The Last Mistress is a period drama with a difference.
07/25/08
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
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
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
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
Related Forums
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
(2008 USA release)-Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS opens in NYC on June 27th!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
by: REEL_REVIEWER 7/3
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