The Last Mistress/Une vieille maîtresse was delayed by “foremost provocatrice” Catherine Breillat’s stroke, yet shot in eight months, “pretty quick for a film of this scale.” Though self-censored for publication, the long Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly book balances, more than the film, the freedom of a revolutionary France against the straitness of an 1830s bourgeois society under its “citizen king.”

Walking carefully with a cane at her New York Film Festival press conference, the voluble director/writer spoke of her painterly use of color, of long “timeless” literary dialogue “not to be recited but expressed like thought [to] recognize ourselves,” and of the film’s accessibility to the general public.

Accessible it is, relying on the familiar literary engine of the pull of the sensual, taboo, exotically “other” woman against respectability in the approved virginal blonde men marry: Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales, or Scott’s Rebecca and Rowena, here uncorseted.

Introduced, and filled in now and again, by mischievous gossipy elders who from years and gout can only vocalize desire, countesses and viscounts (Yolande Moreau, Michael Lonsdale), the tale is for a good part of its length fleshed in narrated flashback. Old herself, soon to die but more liberal, the Marchioness de Flers (journalist and authoress Claude Sarraute) has handpicked a husband for wealthy, adored golden-haired granddaughter Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). Her circle is delighted to point out that, though of good connections, thirty-year-old Ryno de Marigny (“new born oxygen,” in his first film, Fu’ad Aït Aattou), has run through every last sou of his own, is a notorious (or envied) roué with the ladies, and remains entangled with a scandalous if desired courtesan.

Paleness framed in black, a boy’s face as beardless as his betrotheds’, stiletto-tailored in the style that would later rage Yellow Book London aesthetes, Ryno is summoned from his mistress’ arms to kneel at the wrinkled grandmother’s feet. Dismissing curious, still-innocent Hernangarde, she plays co-conspiratorial woman of the world in plumbing the depths of the dissolute but candid mate she has already publicly announced. This elicited confession of past sins is supposedly to test his worthiness, but audience titters greeted her languid pose and voyeur’s smirk during the insisted-on nightlong recounting of amours.

So to the flashback, starting with Ryno’s broke return from wenches and Baden gaming tables, his bumping into friend Cerisy (Jean-Claude Binoche) and, through him, meeting the “bit Moorish” illegitimate daughter of a matador and an Italian countess. Licking an ice though later favoring fat cigars, this gypsy-ish La Vellini (Asia Argento, daughter of Dario) takes a dislike to the insulting yet intrigued Ryno, but beneath their sharp exchanges at that evening’s costume party, lurks the obvious spark.

The New York Times’s “skinny vamp ripened into a terrific actress,” Argento overacts her vulgarity way beyond the rôle’s homage-inspiration in ‘Fifties screen femmes fatales and, especially, in Dietrich’s 1935 Concha Perez -- “the most beautiful Spanish woman in a film is German and blonde” -- and the masochism underlying emotion, pain and tension in Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman. The Italian’s obscure object of desire is hackneyed, from the hair-flower and voluminous red skirts to later harem pants and jackets, through her capitulation in greedily licking up Ryno’s heart’s blood -- Shaw and Munch both pictured the female as vampire -- after a Bois de Boulogne duel with her drunk, sexually useless husband, Sir Reginald (Nicholas Hawtrey).

SPOILER ALERT

The lovers flee to the primitive life in Algeria, but their daughter’s death there signals a change, as they separate but obsessively draw back together over a decade. His marriage and the pregnancy of his wife cannot keep them apart, for she follows the newlyweds to their damp Channel island retreat. Frail but game and jealous, Hermangarde rides out to find the two, but what she will encounter is the “worst . . . silence of [his] terrible fate.” This talky, heavy melodrama is pretty to look at, but behind it there is nothing of substance. 

(Released by First Take Films; not rated by MPAA.)