Bluebeard - A Film by Catherine Breillat

Fairy Tale Movie Gets UK Premiere at the London Film Festival

Oct 19, 2009

Catherine Breillat's wonderful adaptation of Charles Perrault's fairy tale Bluebeard proved to be one of the highlights of the 2009 LFF.

Best known for directing emotionally frank and sexually explicit dramas like Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004), Catherine Breillat's latest film is a surprisingly subtle adaptation of a fairytale by Charles Perrault. Bluebeard is a playful reworking of Perrault's story which has much in common with Angela Carter's version of the tale in The Bloody Chamber, with the resourceful heroine proving more than a match for the wife-killing aristocrat.

Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) and her elder sister Anne (Daphne Baiwir) are sent home from there convent school after their father dies. Now impoverished, the only hope for the family is in one of the girls finding a husband. The notorious Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) is looking for a new wife and organises an event for interested potential brides to attend. Remarkably given his reputation as a murderer of women there is a reasonable turnout.

Bluebeard is charmed by the fearless Marie-Catherine who rather likes his blue beard and shows a disarming honesty towards him. They marry and Bluebeard tells his child bride that as long as she continues to be honest no harm will come to her. However Bluebeard has a golden key to a door with his dark secret hidden inside and he insists she must obey him and never open it.

Breillat frames the story with modern-day sequences in which a a young girl called Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) reads Perrault's story to her older sister Marie-Ann (Lola Giovanetti) delighting in scaring her. The 5-year old Lopes-Benites is astonishing, a little force of nature with a gift for comedy. There is plenty of humour in these sequences as the girls try to understand the troubling themes present in Perrault's story.

Catherine Breillat directs Bluebeard with a restraint that recalls Walerian Borowczyk's movie Blanche (1971). There are other fine versions of Perrault's stories, notably Neil Jordan and Angela Carter's dream-like take on Little Red Riding Hood, The Company of Wolves (1984), and Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin (1970). Both these films incorporate an element of fantasy Breillat largely avoids, preferring to keep things simple.

There is one exception. The discovery of what lies behind the door is made not by Marie-Catherine, but by little Catherine who imagines herself entering a stylised murder scene that is all the more unsettling for its lack of gore. Breillat explained afterwards in the Q&A session with Jonathon Romney how she did not want the corpses to appear to be rotting, but to stay the same as at the moment of death.

Bluebeard deserves a place alongside the films mentioned above by Borowczyk, Demy and Jordan as being amongst the best evocations of the fairy tale. It wittily manages to subvert and celebrate its source material at the same time. Interestingly Breillat stated her intention to stay within this world by directing 'Sleeping Beauty' next.

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