In the 1950s, Bluebeard was the favourite tale of good little girls, one of whom is Catherine, who loves to frighten her older sister Marie-Anne by reading this fairy tale to her until she starts to cry. Catherine also puts herself in the fairy tale by becoming Princess Marie-Catherine, Bluebeard's last wife, the one who escapes the fate of all those he hanged before her because she is the virgin princess that the ogre cannot make up his mind to kill. This hesitation will doom him, and allow the virgin to get the head of the giant.
Week Commencing 27.08.10
| Picturehouse Exeter | 51 Bartholomew St West | Exeter EX4 3AJ | 01392 430909 | 27-31 August |
| Barn Cinema | The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall | Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL | 01803 847000 | 1-2 September |
Week Commencing Friday 3rd September
| Number8 Arts Centre | High Street | Pershore WR10 1BG | 01386 555 488 | 4th September |
Catherine Breillat (born in 1948) is a French filmmaker, screenwriter, and novelist. She started her career after studying acting, and wrote her first book, L'Homme facile (1965), at 17. She acted in Last Tango in Paris (1972) and wrote the screenplay for Maurice Pialat's movie Police (1985)
Since her first own film Une Vraie jeune fille (1976), which was released 23 years after its shooting, Breillat is known for films exploring issues of sexuality, gender conflict and sibling rivalry. She has been the subject of controversy for her explicit depictions of sexuality and violence, especially in Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004). Her films are shown worldwide and have earned her numerous awards.
Bluebeard, a reworking of Charles Perrault’s fable, is her latest film.
Catherine Breillat interviewed in Time Out
Catherine Breillat interviewed in The New York Times
Interview with Catherine Breillat in The Guardian
2009 BLUEBEARD (BARBE BLEUE)
2006 THE LAST MISTRESS (UNE VIEILLE MAÎTRESSE)
2003 ANATOMY OF HELL (ANATOMIE DE L’ENFER)
2002 SEX IS COMEDY
2001 BRIEF CROSSING (BRÈVE TRAVERSÉE)2000 FAT GIRL (À MA SOEUR!)
1999 ROMANCE (ROMANCE)
1996 PERFECT LOVE (PARFAIT AMOUR!)
1995 À PROPOS DE NICE, LA SUITE «Aux Niçois qui mal y pensent»
1991 DIRTY LIKE AN ANGEL (SALE COMME UN ANGE)
1987 VIRGIN (36 FILLETTE)
1979 NOCTURNAL UPROAR (TAPAGE NOCTURNE)
1975 A REAL YOUNG LADY (UNE VRAIE JEUNE FILLE)
DIRECTOR Catherine BREILLAT
SCREENPLAY Catherine BREILLAT (adapted from the story by Charles Perrault)
DIR. OF PHOTOGRAPHY Vilko FILAC
SOUND Yves OSMU
EDITING Pascale CHAVANCE
PRODUCTION DESIGN Oliver JAQUET
COSTUMES Rose-Marie MELKA
PRODUCERS Jean-François LEPETIT, Sylvette FRYDMAN
PRODUCTION Flach Film
Co production CB Films/Arte France
TECHNICAL DATA Digital / 1:1.85 / 80 min / Colour /Stereo
CAST
BARBE BLEU Dominique THOMAS
MARIE-CATHERINE Lola CRETON
ANNE Daphné BAÏWAR
CATHERINE Marilou LOPES-BENITES
MARIE-ANNE Lola GIOVANNETTI
MOTHER SUPERIOR Farida KHELFA
MOTHER Isabelle LAPOUGE
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★★★★
"Bluebeard breaks new Breillat ground..."Breillat has producd a witty, graceful and unusually tender reading of the story."
Sukhdev Sandhu, The Daily TelegraphFull review
★★★★
“Breillat has produced her funniest and most immediately pleasurable film to date”
“A series of gracefully shot and paced tableaux...refreshingly modern.”
David Jenkins, Time Out
“Breillat’s chamber-piece of oblique eroticism is beautifully designed and acted.”
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian
★★★★
“Adding comic relief as well as layers of complexity, Breillat coaxes hilariously, naturalistic performances.”
“Playful…loaded dialogue sets a tone as enigmatic as it is entertaining....
Complex, comic and discomforting...vintage Breillat.”
Sophie Ivan, Little White Lies
★★★★★
“An unabashedly sincere approach to Charles Perrault’s enduring fable. The film pulsates with danger and possibility.”
“It’s a children’s story with real bite...impressive”
Keith Uhlich, TIME OUT NEW YORK‘This quietly surreal Freudian fable is an elegant exercise of style with a sly humorous undertow.
Jonathan Romney, Screen International
‘Bluebeard delighted me. At a swift 80-something minutes, it's a brilliant feat of storytelling’
Sophie Mayer, Little White Lies
'...Catherine Breillat's low-budget fairy tale bears the unmistakable stamp of French cinema's leading provocatrice. ... Using a lively and much younger female cast than usual, Breillat offers a pointed commentary on girlhood, its dreams and rebellious impulses. Mounted with a stylised spareness recalling French mediaeval dramas by the likes of Jacques Rivette and Walerian Borowczyk, Bluebeard is a sly, somewhat Buñuelian essay that will appeal not just to Breillat devotees but also to lovers of the dark side of fairy tale – and, incidentally, to readers of Angela Carter, who made the Bluebeard story her own in the collection The Bloody Chamber.'
Jonathan Romney, London Film Festival
'... magical and eerily gorgeous... Sexual power relations are as key here as they were in Breillat's scandalous Romance and Anatomy of Hell but this time she prefers an implicit approach in which the lovely frail young bride played by Marilous Lopes-Benites seems in total command of her huge world-weary, wife-slaughtering husband and defiant of the fate of her predecessors. This small gem showed the continuing artistic dominance of classical pre-digital filmmakers'
Nick James, The Observer
Especially satisfying was Catherine Breillat's ‘Blue Beard’, which offers up a characteristically fresh and slyly subversive reading of Perrault’s fairy tale. The beauty-and-the-beast-style parable is played out with an impressive but never over-insistent attention to historical detail in terms of costume, customs, architecture and decor, and punctuated by a delightful commentary on its progress and meaning by two young sisters reading the book in the 1950s (the rather more bolshy and bloodthirsty one named, of course, Catherine). A funny, touching, wholly unsentimental study of feminine fear, courage and desire, it proves once and for all that Breillat’s brilliance has always lain not in her readiness to be graphically explicit (this film is never remotely controversial in that regard) but in her ideas.
Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Read an article on Catherine Breillat by Brian Price in Senses of Cinema
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