Catherine Breillat subverts a classic Charles Perrault fairytale. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM. (contains spoilers)

CATHERINE BREILLAT is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest directors, and unfortunately a director whose reputation is more renowned for her unflinching images than the provocative ideas which accompany them. Half the audience walked out of the tampon scene in Anatomy of Hell a few film festivals ago, and most of that group wouldn’t have considered why they considered it disgusting in the first place. After all, it’s just blood isn’t it? Bluebeard (La Barbe Bleue) is another piece of brilliance, as she takes an oft-filmed Charles Perrault fairytale and adds her own vision on the proceedings. Her underrated visual sense is as gorgeous as ever; her thematic concepts as challenging as ever.

The Perrault fairytale has been on celluloid since 1901 since early silent pioneer George Méliès made it into a short. The classic tale of female curiosity involves the barbarous Bluebeard who murders his wives and hangs them in a particular room in his castle. He marries a young girl, and entrusts his key to the room to her when he goes away. Breillat recasts the story by subverting it as a romance. Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) is much more dominant in the relationship, and emotionally controls the much more physically imposing Bluebeard. Their relationship is chaste, non-violent (until the obvious end), and actually loving, despite the expectations that he’d be this giant ogre (which he also is). The film actually leaves you for a while believing in their romance.

Breillat ends the film by suppressing the fact that the men ‘have to’ come and save Marie-Catherine. Instead, it’s all left visually to Marie-Catherine, who is cast in an icon painting with Bluebeard’s head. The film intentionally skips over the patriarchal climax. She, despite her youthful face and tiny frame, is the source of power in the film, right from the film’s opening when she swears that she wants to kill the Mother Superior of a convent where the girls were studying. We identify with her, not with any sort of male power – whereas the original fairy tale is much more ambivalent.

However, the original story is only part of the film. The film is narrated by two young sisters in the 1950s. They update the fairytale’s fantastical depictions of curiosity, conflict, cruelty and sisterly love into the everyday. Their love is less confrontational than A Ma Soeur! but it’s nonetheless dark (despite the charming interaction). In fact, the abrupt ending results from a sister’s avowed refusal to be curious, her attempt to hide from the cruelties of Bluebeard. Unlike the fairytale, where Marie-Catherine is portrayed as a fool for looking into the room, the film shows the exploration as some sort of necessary confrontation of evil.

Breillat’s career-wide fascination with the body, and de-contextualising it from its typical ideologically loaded representation is present in this film, despite this film’s non-engagement with sex. A simple shot, like Marie-Catherine’s hand being engulfed by Bluebeard’s, or Bluebeard’s vulnerable naked torso when he takes off his night-shirt after being rebuffed on his wedding night, shows how Breillat confounds common assumptions of romance, the body, and sex, by simply confronting the body performing ‘everyday tasks’. Pure evil is somewhat sieved off by Breillat’s approach of refusing to moralise when it comes to female relationships and desires. This is despite the fact that we know that Bluebeard is pure evil. The visuals are reminiscent somewhat of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and Breillat’s exquisite control of light and image are as evident here as they have been in films like Anatomy of Hell and Romance. Bluebeard is yet another excellent Breillat film, and fully justifies its inclusion in the Masters section of this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival.