Asia Argento, as one would suspect, this being the latest film by Catherine Breillat, logs in a considerable amount of time unclothed in "Une viellie maitresse", although, to the disappointment of Breillat's fans who misread her work as porn, less graphically than past leading ladies, most notably, Caroline Ducey in 1999's "Romance", who performed unsimulated oral sex on Rocco Siffredi, four years before Chloe Sevigny, likewise, opened wide for Vincent Gallo, in "The Brown Bunny". Vellini's first encounter with Ryno de Marginy is tame, downright chaste(by Breillat's standards), as Argento, fully clothed, moans and grunts while Fu'ad Ait Aatou, fully clothed himself, expresses himself in a physical capacity. Breillat, never one to be conservative about representing female sexuality in her work, stages this first love scene like something out of a traditional period piece costumer. The context of this encounter between Vellini and Ryno de Marginy is the nobleman's impending marriage to Hermangarde(Roxanne Mesquida), "the jewel of French aristocracy". This mid-afternoon f*** is meant to be a parting gift to his mistress.
The first nudity belongs to a little girl, the daughter that Vellini and her Frenchman reared in Algeria, who dies tragically from a scorpion's bite. Breillat, in her own words, told journalist Chris Wiegan, in his article "A Quick Chat with Catherine Breillat", that she takes "sexuality as a subject, not as an object." Prior to the Algerian tragedy, as part of an oral history that Ryno de Marginy recounts to Hermangarde's grandmother about his relationship with the mistress, he conjures up the day when La marquise de Flers(Claude Sarraute) told him that Vellini was "a woman, not an object". When the young girl is killed, she's being punished for being naked; not by Breillat, who's not a feminist in the traditional sense, but by the patriarchal church which equates nakedness with sin. The little girl has to die because the nude form is a temptation to man. Next to her funeral pyre, Argento is on top, straddling Aatou's body, her ample bosoms prominently displayed, unhindered by any scrap of clothing, as she tries to f*** the pain away. Since the woman is in anguish, mourning over a dead child, big breasts notwithstanding, the male gaze ignores the de-eroticizing circumstances, and finds pleasure in her pain. This is why Breillat's films aren't soft-core porn. Adult films don't have a self-reflexive component. Vellini has a right to grieve however she likes, it just so happens that sex helps, being buck-naked while she's having sex helps. Breillat sees her as a woman. The scene isn't about sexuality, it's about forgetting. When you lose somebody, you do whatever is possible to get out of your body. Vellini doesn't feel the penetration, she feels the loss of her child. But all the male viewer sees is a woman they'd like to have sex with; an object.
During Ryno de Marigny's narrative in the grandmother's drawing room, the old woman changes from a seated position into a subtly provocative rearrangement of her body in which she's nearly falling out of her seat. She doesn't look particularly ladylike. Her laxness in the chair is the closest she'll get to sleeping with the young man. Very subtly, this woman of advanced age recalls the way Tori Amos seats herself in a sexual manner before the Bosendorfer piano. Ryno de Marginy not only seduced Hermangarde, but also this matured lady, who should have known better than to arrange a marriage between her granddaughter and a libertine.
Wherever Ryno de Marginy goes, Vellini is sure to follow. She follows his man to the countryside, where the recently married couple decided to live, away from Paris, away from her. Their reunion takes place on top of a fort, in which Ryno de Marginy greets Vellini with a long phallic gun. The mistress grips the gun like she's pulling the male organ closer to her, transforming the penis as a weapon into the penis as a benign component of the male anatomy, since it's clear that Ryno de Marginy wants to shoot her with his very substance, not riddle her with bullets.
"Une vieille maitresse" is a love story about a man's loyalty, not to his wife, but to his mistress. The filmmaker just goes about it in the most incendiary way possible.
