Tags: Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat, French, IFC Films

Catherine Breillat’s films bring with them an unshakeable sense of dread, a ticking timebomb sensation that erupts in quiet devastation—hold the wide-scale destruction. The French button-pusher, operating with over 30 years of filmmaking experience, seems to relish in punishing a viewer’s comfort level. The most scathing example is her 2001 shocker Fat Girl, a meditative study of an insecure teenager’s grappling with sensuality that takes a hard, visceral left-turn in its final section. Breillat’s latest picture, Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue), doesn’t hit with as strong a late-game blow as Fat Girl, but it certainly earns intelligent discussion once the credits roll. Breillat, who also wrote the script, turns her lifelong fascination with Charles Perrault’s same-named fairy tale into a nightmare fable remix. While not as universally known as other entries into the 17th century author’s oeuvre, including “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bluebeard” is coated in malice, much like the filmography of Ms. Breillat. 

Perrault’s cautionary tale of a disobedient spouse and her homicidal beau is inherently sinister; in Breillat’s control, Bluebeard gains layers of unique subtext. Patient audiences are given a chunky piece of allegorical storytelling to chew on, while give-me-the-goods types will either scoff or scratch bloody lines into their foreheads. And, really, what’s better than that?

Bluebeard interweaves two distinct plots, one a framing device about two young sisters reading Perrault’s 1697 folktale, the other a staging of the “Bluebeard” story itself. Of the two modern-day siblings enamored by the author’s classic work, red-haired Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), the boldest, fearlessly dictating Perrault’s world as her elder sis, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti), cowers. Imagine an adult reading Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” to a 9-year-old, but with the ages reversed. Marie-Anne’s understandable terror derives from the murderous base of “Bluebeard,” which tells of two teenaged sisters—Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) and Anne (Daphné Baïwir), notice the similarities in character names—forced to exit their religious school after their father dies. To provide her mother and Anne with financial stability, Marie-Catherine agrees to marry the aristocratic Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), a reclusive brute whose previous wives have all gone missing. What starts out as merely pedophiliac intrigue becomes a full-on horrorshow once Marie-Catherine discovers her a forbidden room in her hubby’s castle.

By Breillat’s standards, Bluebeard is rather toned down. Save for a curiously long shot of a beheaded chicken (a squirm-in-your-seat image if there ever was one), the film’s first two acts are almost child-friendly, albeit for kids mature beyond their years. Marie-Catherine is superficially, not physically, attracted to the ogre-ish Bluebeard, engulfed by his riches. Anne calls her out on this, at one point telling her sister, “You’d have to be poor to love him.” Breillat then punctuates the dishonesty of Marie-Catherine’s courtship by having coins pour upon her head during the wedding ceremony. The writer-director  vests heavy interest into the marriage’s impurity, shown point-blank in a scene where the young wife moves her bed into a crevice-like room, the entryway of which is too narrow for plump Bluebeard to penetrate. There’ll be no voluntary hanky-panky for Marie-Catherine, only the implied disgust of a large man attempting to seduce a helpless minor. In taking this subtle approach, Breillat both honors Perrault and goes against the perversely sexual nature of her own past works.

The film’s abrupt and grave conclusion, though, reminds one that you’re still completely in Breillat’s dark world. Narrative expectations are subverted in the narrator’s story; curiousity kills the unlikely cat. Breillat introduces the notion of collateral damage in regards to a child’s interest in the macabre, a clear parallel to the typically polarized feedback her brash films receive. As Marie-Catherine ignores Bluebeard’s orders and walks into his forbidden chamber, filled with hung female corpses and a dodgeball circle-sized blood stain, we instead see our pre-teen redhead of a narrator. It’s no surprise that Breillat has compared the character of Catherine to herself at a young age. To picture a young Breillat absorbing “Bluebeard” with wide-eyed focus, look no further than the character on screen. And to encapsulate the visceral reaction she loves conjuring from her audiences, watch older sister Anne’s last moments.

Bluebeard, which opened on March 26, is currently playing at the IFC Center in New York City.