Critics reviews

What is fascinating is how she bends the source material, and the genre, towards her concerns – the notion of sex as power - mainly through the casting of Asia Argento as the title mistress who bewitches a debauched young aristocrat. Argento’s knifing, exhaustingly physical performance astonishes the characters around her, a modern aggressive girl in a passive pre-modern world.

Asia Argento, for her credit, plays this role with dominance and a hedonism that verges on the feral. The way she tilts her head or moves her wide shoulders to steer physical conversation through body language conveys power over the rather delicate performance of her lover and contemporary, Fu’ad Aït Aattou.

The Last Mistress is able to use the source material to not just evoke the late Romantic milieu of Laclos, but also to create a meta-fictional frame to explore generational warfare, domesticity versus sexual freedom, gender relations and historical recreation at large.

The Last Mistress" is so different from French filmmaker Catherine Breillat's previous films that it almost doesn't feel like a Breillat picture until after you've finished watching it. Only then do the movie's sensual details reorganize themselves and intensify, emerging from memory like the high points of an erotic dream.

Given their reputations as feminist provocateurs, the coming together of Breillat and Argento seems natural, even inevitable, and The Last Mistress gets a charge from their feisty, uncompromising spirit.

The painful close-up of a doctor extracting the bullet from his chest is pure Breillat; the scene in which Vellini bursts into the sickroom to suck his wound is pure Argento.

Catherine Breillat’s latest is as philosophically rigorous and psychologically revealing as anything she’s made.