Film Festival 09 - Bluebeard
Bluebeard
Barbe bleu, France 2009, 80m
Director: Catherine Breillat
Festivals: Berlin, San Francisco 2009
France's masterful Catherine Breillat (An Old Mistress, Anatomy of
Hell) returns with this playful rumination on the allure of Charles
Perrault's 17th-century fairytale about a gloomy nobleman with a
penchant for murdering his disobedient wives. "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& but in
her ideas." - Geoff Andrew, Time Out
In French with English subtitles
