Director/Screenplay – Catherine Breillat, Producers – Sylvette Frydman & Jean-Francois Lepetit, Photography – Vilko Filac, Production Design – Olivier Jacquet. Production Company – Flach Films/CB Films/Arte France.
Lola Creton (Marie-Catherine), Dominique Thomas (Bluebeard), Daphne Baiwir (Anne), Marilou Lopes-Benites (Catherine), Lola Giovanetti (Marie-Anne), Isabella LaPoge (The Mother), Farida Khelfa (Mother Superior)
Two young girls read the fairytale of Bluebeard to each other. In the story, sisters Marie-Catherine and Anne are sent home from convent school because their father has died leaving no money to pay for their education. Facing poverty, the eldest daughter Marie-Catherine decides to accept the offer of marriage from the wealthy Bluebeard, even though she is still in her teens and he has a reputation of being terrible to his wives. Soon after the ceremony, Marie-Catherine asserts herself in the household, insisting on having her own bedroom until she comes of age. Bluebeard proves attentive and loving. He then announces that he has to go away on long journeys and leaves her with the keys to his castle, telling her she has its freedom, all except for one room.
French director Catherine Breillat began directing in the 1970s and gained fame with her film Romance (1999), which attempted to address issues of female sexuality and was one of the first mainstream (non-pornographic) films to depict unsimulated sex scenes on the screen. Breillat’s controversial treatments of sexuality continued with films such as Fat Girl (2001), Sex is Comedy (2002), Anatomy of Hell (2003), The Last Mistress (2007) and Abuse of Weakness (2013). I have mixed feelings about Breillat’s work – while appreciating her desire to push the envelope with sexual material, her writing can often collapse into the tedious and pretentious philosophising that dominates much French cinema.
All of Catherine Breillat’s films deal with sexuality in one form or another with many of her characters being teenage girls starting to discover themselves. Here in Bluebeard and with the subsequent The Sleeping Beauty (2010), Breillat tamed down the more raw explorations of sexual matters in her earlier works and took on adaptations of Fairytales. Not that female sexuality is not an issue in either of these films, just that her characters remain clothed throughout. The period recreations all feel reasonable and authentic.
Lola Creton’s Marie-Catherine is another of Breillat’s heroines sitting on the cusp of womanhood and uncovering what that means – discovering the delights of being able to be clothed in a dress made for her. Breillat doesn’t even blink at the idea of the teenage Lola Creton marrying an older man – it is never said how old Marie-Catherine is, although lead actress Lola Creaton was only sixteen at the time.
What becomes rather amusing is when Breillat starts to invert the fairytale. As Bluebeard, Dominique Thomas is a bearish ogre of a man, burly, a face of long hair and a full beard (which is disappointingly only mildly tinted blue). However, rather than a threatening figure, the first images we see of him is of he riding back home to his domain with Lola Creton tenderly cradled in his arms in front of him on the saddle. Or of the two walking the beach where she seems dwarfed alongside him.
What is rather amusing is when Lola Creton moves into Bluebeard’s castle and starts to assert her own right – saying she could not possibly sleep with him “You must snore like an ogre,” and turning down his finery and moving into a tiny room to sleep on a chaise lounge – a room where he is not even tall enough to stoop to get in the doorway – where she announces that she intends to stay until she comes of age.
The ending follows the fairytale somewhat – we do get to venture inside Bluebeard’s locked room and see the corpses strung up, although Breillat does not spend too much time dwelling on the grisliness of it. Breillat also follows the original ending somewhat where Lola Creton’s cry out to Anne for help results in a group of musketeers (rather than the usual brothers) turning up out of nowhere and killing Bluebeard. The film ends with a long shot that goes on several minutes with Lola Creaton standing over Bluebeard’s severed head with a distant smile.
Bluebeard is a fairytale that comes from French writer Charles Perrault who also brought the world classic fairytales such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty, all of which were published together along with Bluebeard in the book Mother Goose Tales (1697). Other film versions have included a version from Georges Melies in 1901; Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard (1944) with John Carradine; and the big-budget Bluebeard (1972) starring Richard Burton, as well as several other foreign language versions.
Trailer here