Although it's ostensibly a period piece, filled with sumptuous costumes and all the other trappings of early 19th-century Parisian aristocracy, Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress is as aggressively modern as any of the director's films. The source here is Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 157-year old novel Une Vieille Maitresse, but Breillat chews it up and spits it out with the taboo-breaking relish she's brought to contemporary exercises (exorcisms, some would say) like Fat Girl and Anatomy of Hell.
Female desire is still very much this button-pushing filmmaker's ground zero, and when the men and women of The Last Mistress discuss romance, they might as well be speaking about combat, a series of feints and counter-feints that sometimes gets referred to as "strategy." As in all of Breillat's films, The Last Mistress plays sex as comedy, as horror show and power struggle, and though the film is set in 1835, the venom in its dangerous liaisons is as timeless as it is unsettling. Once again, Breillat's characters seem to take almost as much delight in inflicting pain on each other as they do in the mutual exchange of pleasure — maybe more.
Breillat's co-conspirator here is the equally provocative Asia Argento, who stars as the titular "courtesan on the wane." A woman of such powerful and unpredictable appetites that the movie makes her seem like some big, bad force of nature, Argento's Vellini is both vulgar and noble, an elemental sustainer and destroyer of men. Vellini's volatile, 10-year relationship with the philandering Ryno de Marigny (Fu-ad Ait Aattou) has ended as the film opens, although he stops by for one final, earth-shaking shag before sauntering across town to explain himself to the wealthy grand-mère of his beautiful new fiancée.
The bulk of The Last Mistress is given over to Marigny's memories of his obsessive, abusive, perverse and wildly romantic affair with Vellini, a tale lapped up by the old lady, lubricated by good port. "We were each other's victims," he confides of a relationship begun in insults and sealed in a duel in which Vellini is apparently so taken by Marigny's willingness to die that she rushes into his room to lap at the blood seeping from his wounded chest. It's a quintessential Breillat moment, but there's more blood where that came from.
In many ways, this is Argento's show. She revels in all the smoldering, screaming and eye-rolling, at one point memorably straddling her naked lover while her toddler's corpse burns in the background. With symmetrical twin curls arranged over her forehead like a pair of dangling breasts, buttocks or balls (you choose), Argento's "goddess of capriciousness" is dangerous even when inert. And while Breillat lays it all out in surprisingly straightforward fashion, the movie's defiantly lurid sensibility is just in time for summer, an elegantly appointed Marie Antoinette lost in its own 9 1/2 Weeks.
Breillat isn't the only auteur trying something different this summer. It may sound like a bad joke, but David Gordon Green, one of the most uniquely understated voices of independent cinema (George Washington, All the Real Girls) has teamed up with Judd Apatow, a producer whose hit comedies rely on vomit and feces in much the same way that Jerry Bruckheimer depends upon explosions. Green's The Pineapple Express also employs the Superbad writing team of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (who also stars), and the result is a comedy/action flick about a couple of potheads on the run from ruthless but inept killers.
You might be tempted to wonder where Green went wrong, but a more instructive question, as it happens, is where Pineapple Express went right. Green's move to the mainstream turns out to be a weirdly competent one, with the indie auteur and his gifted, longtime director of photography Tim Orr casting aside all artistic pretensions and embracing a blandly self-effacing style that Andy Warhol might have blessed. The rigorously populist, no-frills approach puts the movie's nuts and bolts front and center, from James Franco's fabulous turn as Rogen's mush-brained pal (hands-down the best comic performance by an overly serious method actor since Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) to the material itself. And although the numerous trailers and YouTube spots have given away many of the movie's best bits, there's still some funny, albeit predictably crude, stuff here.
The gleefully potty-mouthed humor mostly revolves around typical Apatow fixations: errant bodily fluids, genitalia jokes, faces shoved into boxes of cat turds and, most of all, rampant, unapologetic drug intake. The movie's basic premise is that everything is funnier when you're high or when you're watching someone who's high. What Pineapple Express essentially does is filter the conventions of buddy movies and action flicks through a stoner sensibility — so while its slo-mo shoot-outs and chases aren't all that far removed from Bruckheimer, it's doubtful Jerry would have broken up an explosive grand finale by having one of his characters scream, "Prepare to suck the cock of karma!"
The story arc of Pineapple Express isn't ultimately all that different from the movies it's supposedly spoofing — Rogen and Franco eventually realize their flaws, at least momentarily, and then hit bottom before emerging victorious — but the unflagging energy of the movie's one-damn-thing-after-another scenario is pure Apatow, screwball comedy for a toilet-humor era.
Green simply becomes a tabula rasa and gives himself over to chaos every bit as pure as the poetry of his prior films, until one particularly frenzied sequence culminates with Rogen's character asking, "Was that too much?"
Well, sure it is, but that's exactly the point.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2008.