Asia Argento, as one would suspect, this being the latest film by Catherine Breillat, logs in a considerable amount of time unclothed in "Une viellie maitresse", although, to the disappointment of Breillat's fans who misread her work as porn, less graphically than past leading ladies, most notably, Caroline Ducey in 1999's "Romance", who performed unsimulated oral sex on Rocco Siffredi, four years before Chloe Sevigny, likewise, opened wide for Vincent Gallo, in "The Brown Bunny". Vellini's first encounter with Ryno de Marginy is tame, downright chaste(by Breillat's standards), as Argento, fully clothed, moans and grunts while Fu'ad Ait Aatou, fully clothed himself, expresses himself in a physical capacity. Breillat, never one to be conservative about representing female sexuality in her work, stages this first love scene like something out of a traditional period piece costumer. The context of this encounter between Vellini and Ryno de Marginy is the nobleman's impending marriage to Hermangarde(Roxanne Mesquida), "the jewel of French aristocracy". This mid-afternoon f*** is meant to be a parting gift to his mistress.

The first nudity belongs to a little girl, the daughter that Vellini and her Frenchman reared in Algeria, who dies tragically from a scorpion's bite. Breillat, in her own words, told journalist Chris Wiegan, in his article "A Quick Chat with Catherine Breillat", that she takes "sexuality as a subject, not as an object." Prior to the Algerian tragedy, as part of an oral history that Ryno de Marginy recounts to Hermangarde's grandmother about his relationship with the mistress, he conjures up the day when La marquise de Flers(Claude Sarraute) told him that Vellini was "a woman, not an object". When the young girl is killed, she's being punished for being naked; not by Breillat, who's not a feminist in the traditional sense, but by the patriarchal church which equates nakedness with sin. The little girl has to die because the nude form is a temptation to man. Next to her funeral pyre, Argento is on top, straddling Aatou's body, her ample bosoms prominently displayed, unhindered by any scrap of clothing, as she tries to f*** the pain away. Since the woman is in anguish, mourning over a dead child, big breasts notwithstanding, the male gaze ignores the de-eroticizing circumstances, and finds pleasure in her pain. This is why Breillat's films aren't soft-core porn. Adult films don't have a self-reflexive component. Vellini has a right to grieve however she likes, it just so happens that sex helps, being buck-naked while she's having sex helps. Breillat sees her as a woman. The scene isn't about sexuality, it's about forgetting. When you lose somebody, you do whatever is possible to get out of your body. Vellini doesn't feel the penetration, she feels the loss of her child. But all the male viewer sees is a woman they'd like to have sex with; an object.

During Ryno de Marigny's narrative in the grandmother's drawing room, the old woman changes from a seated position into a subtly provocative rearrangement of her body in which she's nearly falling out of her seat. She doesn't look particularly ladylike. Her laxness in the chair is the closest she'll get to sleeping with the young man. Very subtly, this woman of advanced age recalls the way Tori Amos seats herself in a sexual manner before the Bosendorfer piano. Ryno de Marginy not only seduced Hermangarde, but also this matured lady, who should have known better than to arrange a marriage between her granddaughter and a libertine.

Wherever Ryno de Marginy goes, Vellini is sure to follow. She follows his man to the countryside, where the recently married couple decided to live, away from Paris, away from her. Their reunion takes place on top of a fort, in which Ryno de Marginy greets Vellini with a long phallic gun. The mistress grips the gun like she's pulling the male organ closer to her, transforming the penis as a weapon into the penis as a benign component of the male anatomy, since it's clear that Ryno de Marginy wants to shoot her with his very substance, not riddle her with bullets.

"Une vieille maitresse" is a love story about a man's loyalty, not to his wife, but to his mistress. The filmmaker just goes about it in the most incendiary way possible.

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.

Milan Kundera writes: "Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition." Case in point, Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou), an impoverished but elegantly handsome young man who is trapped between the aristocratic world to which he aspires, and an obsessive bond with a defiantly independent mistress, the boldly seductive Vellini (Asia Argento), an older but dazzling Spanish woman said to be born of an Italian noblewoman and a bullfighter. Adapted from a 19th-century novel Une vieille maîtresse by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, Catherine Breillat's beautiful and elegant The Last Mistress, challenges the patriarchal assumptions of the age by depicting a 36-year old woman's right to fully express her sexual desires even if it is means flaunting society's conventions and Christian misogynist teachings.

Set in Paris in 1835, complete with elaborate period costumes and sumptuously decorated drawing rooms, the film opens with the gossip between two aging aristocrats, the Vicomte de Prony (Michael Lonsdale) and his wife, the Countess d'Artelles (Yolande Moreau about the ten-year affair between de Marigny and Vellini and the young man's impending marriage to the wealthy Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). Hermangarde's grandmother La marquise de Flers, excellently played by the 80-year-old French writer Claude Sarrate, is an open-minded and rational individual who claims to be a woman of the 18th century. Worried that Ryno will not be able to get over his passion for his fiery Spanish mistress, de Flers listens attentively as Ryno relates to her the details of his long relationship, an affair that he says has now come to an end, telling her that "You don't betray a new love with an old mistress".

In flashback, Ryno relates how he was overcome by Vellini's wild beauty after they were introduced at a party ten years before. Vellini, then married to a wealthy but dull Englishman, reacts negatively, however, when she overhears Ryno call her an ugly mutt and the young man is forced to vigorously pursue her despite her strong objections, forcing her to kiss him while the two are out riding. Her horrified husband witnesses the act and challenges Ryno to a duel the next morning. After deliberately missing his first shot, Ryno is shot in the chest, a wound from which he will take months to recover. The incident, however, triggers Vellini's awareness of her love for Ryno, exotically announced by her sucking the blood from the gaping hole in his chest.

De Flers presses Ryno for the details of their life together during the past ten years but the dramatic story is better left for the viewer to discover. When the film returns to present time, de Marigny and Hermangarde are married and ostensibly in love, yet he struggles to keep his word to her grandmother by moving away from the temptations of Paris to a remote seacoast. The cigar-smoking temptress, however, also loves the fresh sea air and the stage is set for the film's final act. The Last Mistress is an outstanding work of art that is strengthened immeasurably by striking performances by Asia Argento and first-time actor Fu'ad Ait Aattou. Argento fully captures Vellini's sexual assertiveness but tempers her incendiary disposition with naturalism and a tenderness that makes us care about her fate.

Aattou, discovered by Breillat in a crowded café, is almost feminine in appearance with overly thick lips and sensitive eyes, yet he brings a masculine determination to the role that makes him completely convincing. Like the recent film by Jacques Rivette, The Duchess of Langeais, in The Last Mistress love becomes a contest of wills, a power struggle between two people whose relationship consists of a tug of war not only between domination and submission but between 18th and 19th century social codes. That Breillat makes the ride so entrancing is a tribute to her enormous talent.