The Cinematheque

“Psychologically rich, unobtrusively minimalist, at once admirably straightforward and slyly comic.”

J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Catherine Breillat closed out the aughts with a pair of fairytale adaptations. Bluebeard, her faithfully pitch-black take on the perverse Charles Perrault folktale, arrived first (The Sleeping Beauty followed) and cast a haunting spell with its formal austerity and savage lessons on innocence lost. The film, for the most part, treads close to its source: Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), a lord of great wealth whose many wives have suspiciously vanished, entrusts his newest bride Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton, in her first major role) with the keys to his palace. She may enter any room save one, a taboo too seductive for her not to transgress. Breillat cleverly frames this Eden parable as a storybook read aloud by two child sisters, the youngest blanching at its horrors. Eschewing scenes of sex but not the significance of it—Marie-Catherine’s guarded virginity is a crucial invention—Bluebeard is among the unruly director’s most lucid and accessible achievements.

In French with English subtitles

“Breillat has produced her funniest and most immediately pleasurable film to date … Her droll critique of the scourge of patriarchy is refreshingly modern.”

David Jenkins, Time Out