Anyone familiar with Catherine Breillat’s career to this point might have been momentarily confused upon hearing or reading about her latest film, a retelling of the classic gothic fairy tale “Bluebeard.” After all, she has made her name by creating provocative, visually challenging films that, by turns, both bluntly and obliquely address human sexuality, its meaning to the individual in a larger society, and thus its impact on interpersonal relationships, especially those in which power is to be gained, lost, and exerted. And so Bluebeard, set in Medieval Europe and featuring no nudity, no sex, and a minimum of dialogue, most of it prosaic, might seem slightly out of character. Slightly. And only until one recalls the plot of the tale and sees the many opportunities for Breillat to further her exploration: a powerful, feared, and solitary lord; a rumored string of young brides who’ve disappeared; a poor, beautiful young girl with an inclination to be opportunistic.
Briellat is faithful to the fairy tale itself, but she embellishes her film with a conceit, one that she claims is faithful to her own childhood. To frame the story, a pair of young girls, sisters named Catherine and Marie-Anne, make their way to an attic, where the younger, more brazen, and more mischievous Catherine finds a copy of the tale in an old book and then relates it to her doe-eyed, worrisome older sister, Anne. And Catherine clearly relishes the fear and anxiety that it causes on her older sister’s face. This is mirrored, as you might have guessed, by the relationship between the two poor sisters in the fairy tale, with the fearless Marie-Catherine (played by Lola Créton) immediately seizing on the opportunity to improve her station with Bluebeard (a perfectly stout and stoic Dominique Thomas) and the prudish Anne (Daphné Baiwir) unable to see beyond his appearance, or think of anything other than the rumors surrounding the preceding wives. The girls’ mother, in case you were wondering, is more concerned with mourning their father’s recent death and the girls’ nutritional well-being than she is with properly considering the prospect of her daughter marrying this beast of a man with a reputation for making young women simply disappear. She all but hands her to him on a platter, and I detected — in her demeanor during the “courtship” — a bit of bitter resignation that her daughter was more valuable and more powerful, all because of her youth, beauty, and the prized combination of the two known as innocence.
Once the quiet ceremony is done, Marie-Catherine moves into Bluebeard’s massive castle and has some ground rules laid out for her, chief among them being that she is forbidden to ever enter a particular room, though she is, of course, given a key to said room because she’ll be left alone while he travels and be the surrogate head of the household. Bluebeard tries to consummate the marriage, but he’s not forceful in any way never succeeds because Marie-Catherine outwits him by selecting a broom closet for her room, and he can’t squeeze his hulking frame through the doorway.
Some of the best visuals in the film are the scenes in which Marie-Catherine and Bluebeard dine together, seated next to each other on one side of a long table, facing the camera. Their spreads are truly extravagant, as befits a man of his status (and stature). They themselves, along with the room, are lavishly adorned in jewels, gold, and rich fabrics. And they eat in almost absolute silence, ripping into enormous slabs of meat with gluttonous relish — she because she’s barely eaten anything in recent years, and he simply because he can. The point here is power: he is wealthy and can afford such feasts, and she is a pretty young bride who finds herself in a position to demand such things from a powerful man. She views this as a victory — and she hasn’t even had to sleep with him!
The fairy tale, however, does not end on such a tenuous note. Eventually Marie-Catherine’s curiosity gets the best of her and she ventures into the forbidden room, only to be confronted by her worst fears. In true fairy tale fashion, Bluebeard arrives home from his journey early, learns about her disobedience, and is about to mete out punishment when a valiant savior arrives. The final shot in the castle — once again at the dinner table — is stunning in its composition, and the expression on Créton’s face belies her youth in ways that only Breillat could have coaxed from her. It would have been a wonderful closing shot … but there’s an odd final scene with the sisters in the attic, and at first blush it might seem like a moral of some kind, albeit a slippery one, that will leave viewers grasping for a cohesive point about desire and overestimating one’s abilities, but never settling on one. Which is exactly what Breillat wants.
