Fairy-Tale Endings : Death by Husband

Paris

THERE once lived a hideously blue-bearded man who slit the throats of his half-dozen wives, stashing their corpses in the basement of his castle one by one. So goes the legendary folk tale “Bluebeard” (“La Barbe Bleue”), published by Charles Perrault in 1697 to become an enduring European bedtime story.

“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.”

In this Prince Charming-free cautionary tale, marriage is not a happy end but a point of departure. As the story goes, Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), a man with a reputation for misplacing his many wives, entrusts his newest bride (Lola Créton) with a key to a forbidden door and then leaves on a business trip. During his absence curiosity inevitably gets the best of her, and when she unlocks the door, she discovers a macabre collection of her husband’s ex-wives. The key, tainted with mysteriously fresh blood, betrays her disobedience, and Bluebeard condemns her to join his other spouses. But this time the new wife buys a bit of time by requesting a last prayer and is saved by a pair of sword-wielding men.

There are dozens of versions of the Bluebeard tale, including “Fitcher’s Bird” as told by the Brothers Grimm. Perrault’s “Bluebeard” was influenced partly by the real-life story of Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century pedophile and child murderer, and the word bluebeard is now shorthand for “serial killer.”

The character’s shadowy presence has long haunted works of art, music and literature the world over. He makes an appearance in Stephen King’s novel “The Shining”; Kurt Vonnegut used the story as a partial premise for his “Bluebeard,” a best-selling 1987 novel; Humbert Humbert compares himself to the character in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” The specter of Bluebeard has also inspired operas by Bela Bartok and Jacques Offenbach and turns up in an untitled 1917 sonnet from the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Yet Bluebeard doesn’t have the name recognition of a Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood in the United States, and its dark subject matter makes it an unlikely candidate for the Disney treatment that could catapult it into the mainstream anytime soon.

Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor and the author of “Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives” (Princeton University Press), said that teaching fairy tales to her students and researching the book convinced her that the tale of Bluebeard had fallen into a “cultural black hole”; she encountered few Americans who were able to recite the details of the story, despite its cultural resonance.

“I’m always astonished at how few people know this story,” she said in a phone interview, “especially considering how many films and other works it has inspired.” Ms. Tatar noted that Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” owe something of their plots to the spirit of “Bluebeard.” And she devotes a section of her book to a raft of films made in the 1940s, including George Cukor’s “Gaslight” (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946) and Fritz Lang’s “Secret Beyond the Door …” (1948), that do not overtly reference the tale but nevertheless turn on a wife’s fear of her largely unknown husband and his possible desire for her throat. More recently, Jane Campion featured a Bluebeard pantomime in her 1993 film “The Piano.”

Ms. Breillat’s film moves between a re-enactment of the centuries-old fairy tale and the 1950s, when a girl reads Perrault’s tale aloud to her older sister, as Ms. Breillat did in her youth.

Known as the writer-director of cerebral, sexually explicit films like “Romance” (1999), “Fat Girl” (2001) and “Anatomy of Hell” (2004), Ms. Breillat insisted that nudity and sex have no place in her favorite childhood fairy tale. In her film the only glimpse of flesh involves Bluebeard’s corpulent torso. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t see sex as one of the story’s primary themes.

Perrault’s tale ends with a tacked-on moral about the fleeting pleasures and damning consequences of a woman’s curiosity, but Ms. Breillat favors a Freudian interpretation: the bloody key as a symbolic nod to the loss of the heroine’s virginity.

“That key imposes a certain destiny,” Ms. Breillat said in her home on a cobblestone street in the 20th Arrondissement, sipping tea in her kitchen. “He is obliged to kill her, but he can’t.”

Ms. Breillat takes pains to humanize Bluebeard and to show what she believes is real love between him and his young wife; her Bluebeard, for example, treats his virginal 14-year-old bride with paternal affection, allowing her to sleep alone in the one room in the castle whose threshold is literally too narrow for his girth. With his feminizing corpulence he is more gentle giant than monster.

“My Bluebeard is very touching,” she said. “He’s like a father to her. But fathers can be very cruel to their daughters. I think fundamentally ‘Bluebeard’ is a metaphor about the tender and cruel relationship between men and women.”

Terrifying stories like “Bluebeard” can function as a sort of exorcism for our fears, Ms. Breillat said, allowing us the luxury of frightening ourselves in the safety of our imaginations to emerge better able cope with the real horrors of living.

“The difference is that children are fascinated by fear because they are invincible,” she said. “They know it won’t happen to them. As adults we project ourselves onto those corpses in the basement.”

In 2004, two weeks before she was originally scheduled to start shooting “Bluebeard,” Ms. Breillat had a cerebral hemorrhage that paralyzed her left side. Once she had taught herself to speak and walk again, she said, she could not yet face tackling her favorite fairy tale and instead made “The Last Mistress,” a costume drama based on an 1865 novel by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly.

“I was afraid to do ‘Bluebeard,’ ” she said, “because it is such a fundamentally black story. In all the other fairy tales the ogre is an ogre; he’s a monster. ‘Bluebeard’ is so very dark because in the end the ogre isn’t an ogre. He’s a man.”

Kristin Hohenadel

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/movies/28bluebeard.html?ref=movies