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30 mars 2010

In “Bluebeard,” a sly rethink of the freakily morbid fairy tale, the filmmaker Catherine Breillat makes the case that once-upon-a-time stories never end. Divided into two parallel narratives — one focuses on Bluebeard and his dangerously curious wife, while the other involves two little girls in the modern era revisiting the tale — the movie is at once direct, complex and peculiar.

“When I was growing up in the 1950s, it was a fairy tale that was specifically aimed at little girls,” said the French director Catherine Breillat, 61, whose film adaptation of the tale opened in New York on Friday. “I found it very strange that in the end it’s about teaching little girls to love a man who will kill them. Because that is the story that it tells.”

sychologically rich, unobtrusively minimalist, at once admirably straightforward and slyly comic, Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard is a lucid retelling and simultaneous explanation of Charles Perrault’s nastiest, most un-Disneyfiable nursery story.

With Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat—perhaps the most willful feminist provocatrice in cinema today—slyly subverts Charles Perrault’s gruesome fairy tale about a young bride married to an aristocrat who has murdered his previous wives.