TIFF '11: The sound of silence

Islands, Stefano Chiantini’s third feature, stars Asia Argento as Martina, a woman living on a small, ruggedly beautiful Italian island, a woman so traumatized by loss that she’s resolved to stop speaking and devote herself to caring for bees and an old priest who’s suffered a stroke. Martina is most often clad in baggy pants and boots, a shapeless old ski jacket, and a plaid shirt. Quite a different ensemble than the foxy little dress and six-inch black heels Argento wore to the premiere screening of Islands at the Toronto International Film Festival last night. Islands tracks the convergence of Martina, the priest, and an undocumented foreign labourer who winds up getting stranded on the island and helping take care of the old man, as well as fend off the old man’s sister, who seems fiercely protective of his welfare mainly so she and her husband can get in on the inheritance. Anyway, the three central characters form an archipelago of sorts, and of course Martina and the foreigner, each damaged in their way, gradually move toward romance while facing nominal resistance. Islands has some captivating images of stark landscape and stark interiors, but the illegal immigrant angle is basically incidental and the love story exceedingly familiar. In all seriousness, you almost have to admire how utterly lacking in subtext this film is (especially considering the central character is mute): the sister’s husband actually comes out and states their ulterior motive; Martina fondles photos of some child clearly absent and achingly missed; Martina pulls her nightshirt tight to her breasts before bed, the foreigner having re-awakened her sexual longings; the foreigner sucks honey from Martina’s fingers; and, big-big-big foreshadowing with this one, the foreigner echoes that bit in L’atalante about dunking your head in water to see the ones you love (might Martina have lost someone to the sea?). Yes, Islands is a triumph of exacting story editing. Anyway, it was a perfectly tasteful way to pass a couple of hours on a Wednesday night at TIFF, the point by which everyone is totally fucking exhausted. During the Q&A after the screening someone asked Argento about playing a mute (“It was a relief. Most of the time you have to learn all that dreadful dialogue. It’s so long.”) and about why Martina doesn’t speak. “I tend to remember the great silences in my life,” she replied. “I find that silence is very sexy.” As people shuffled out of the theatre I tried going up to Argento and not saying a single word. Didn’t seem to work.

Sanguine properties: The Last Mistress

It says a lot about the almost singular subversion of The Last Mistress, not to mention the progress of Catherine Breillat as a filmmaker honing very particular themes, that for no less than half of the movie’s duration, we have the young, delicately handsome Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) divulging the breadth of his impressive sexual biography to the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute), an elderly woman and protective grandmother of Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida), the virginal and rather unhappy looking young beauty who’s to be Ryno’s bride. Alternating between Ryno’s measured recount and flashbacks to his tempestuous ten-year affair with La Vellini (Asia Argento), a sort of verbal seduction unfolds in precisely the context that would seem to forbid it most. But the Marquise assures us that she is still a woman of the 18th century, which is to say, a woman of the Age of Reason, now biding the end of her life in the Age of Romance. She’s worldly, and she’s game. She listens exquisitely. The year is 1835, the city Paris.

This also says something about how much the movies can still learn from the novel. Based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly’s 1851 novel Une vieille maîtresse, or The Old Mistress—the English-language title being a dopey compromise that deletes the dreaded term “old” from the promotional materials—Breillat’s eleventh and by far most expensive and glamorous feature possesses an unusual, bisecting structural elegance that compliments the intricacy of its narrative, one rife with erotic struggle, surrender and self-realization. It begins with Ryno entering Vellini’s boudoir for one last premarital fuck, which of course will not be the last by far. As we’re ushered back into the development of their affair, we see how deeply it’s rooted in the ecstasy of antagonism, with Ryno only winning the venomous Vellini’s affections after he’s been shot by her elderly husband in a duel. Once the bullet is extracted from his chest, Vellini rushes to his weakened figure to suckle the fresh blood. She feeds upon Ryno, as he, in his way, will upon her in turn. Her erupted lust is, you know, kinda repulsive. And totally hot.

The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish matador and an Italian princess, la Vellini is a social outlaw, undeterred by the local consensus that a 36-year-old, ostensibly homely woman leading a life of sexual abandon is deeply unseemly. As mapped out by Breillat and Argento, arguably the two most notorious bad girls of contemporary European cinema, Vellini’s trajectory is marked by aggression and orgasms—and, let me tell you, Argento makes the movie orgasm into some sort of new art form here. Vellini, with her defiant, devastatingly hard stares—the way she licks an ice cream cone makes the promise of fellatio at once enticing and scary—is the devouring one and thus, in a sense, the masculine half of the pairing, while Ryno, with his full lips and pale features, pursues more gently, playing the feminine. The overturning of traditional gender roles is itself a part of what makes their collision dynamic, and, as the Romantics would have it, destined for misadventure and courting peril.

Breillat’s shrewdest tactic comes in her balancing of formalities with recklessness, containment with the carnal. The production design is immaculate and softly hued, the costumes artful but largely understated, with the few flourishes counting for a lot in terms of character, and the camerawork, courtesy of Giorgios Arvanitis, who also photographed Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and her masterful Fat Girl, is painterly—the painter, mind you, would have to be Goya—and presentational, with speakers frequently gazing squarely toward us as though posing for a portrait—which, of course, they are. The brazen qualities, the rawness of the movie, is kept largely within the confines of the narrative itself, while the directorial style is largely clean and only coolly confrontational. It’s a marriage made in the heaven preserved for shameless provocateurs, some sublimely seedy place where Breillat and Argento can recline with their feet on the table, while the rest of us watch, in shock, here and there, but in this case, more often in awe. The Last Mistress is pretty delicious.