Bluebeard

I’m not entirely sure it’s a complete success, but my god is it an enchanting and mesmerizing journey through the sexual awakening of a young girl on the cusp of adulthood and a spin on fairy tales which remind us of their primordial power to shock, entice, awe and horrify us with equal measure. Catherine Breillat juxtaposes two different sets of sisters and Charles Perrault’s folktale as the framework to her version of Bluebeard.

And it seems no happy accident that the filmmaker behind a title like Fat Girl would take this fairy tale and spin it off into an exploration of female sexual fantasies. A young girl must wed, bed and tame a hulking and furry brute of a man? The essays practically write themselves for you. What pushes this young girl to agree to marry this animalistic man? Well, marriage or poverty is one example. Or deep-seated abandonment from her father is another. Or perhaps it’s the vow she had made earlier in the film to enact revenge upon the cruel Catholic nuns who kicked and her sister out of school by living in a castle and becoming a lady of wealth and power. There are many different symbols that can be read upon their union, and each of them has enough material in the film to make that reading seem fair and accurate.

This atmosphere is sustained through the castle’s set. This castle seems to be as much as symbolic psychosexual hothouse of repressed desires and violence as Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Corridors twist and turn, they lead to other corridors which finally lead to tiny bedrooms which allow for our young heroine to remain a chaste virgin and not make the transition into grown womanhood. There also seems to be a switch in power, a constant change between Bluebeard and his young wife being in charge of the other. At times she tames the beast through her virginal sweetness, and at others she demurs to his brute shows of force and aggression.

What kept me from completely enjoying the film was the cutting back to the other story. This one sees two very young sisters sneaking off to the attic to tell the story of Bluebeard and try to scare each other. This device isn’t entirely successful because these girls are VERY young. While the sisters in the main story are in their teens, so it makes sense for them to be confused and worried about darker material like “the blood” or consummating a marriage, these two are nowhere near adolescent age and couldn’t possibly have any knowledge or emotional grasp on these concepts. It doesn’t completely sink the film, but it does mar it. The shock ending is something I’m still not sure about. It’s certainly successful at hammering home the point that these tales were filled with violence and scary thematic material, but it might be too brutish an ending for a film that is mostly dream-like and hypnotic.