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I can think of no better poster child for celibacy than Parisian “provocateur” Catherine Breillat, the director of such erotic misfires as Fat Girl, Romance, and more recently, The Last Mistress, which stars another over-hyped “hottie” Asia Argento. Exiting the theater after a Breillat flick, I never want to have sex again. Ostensibly concerned with digging deep into the beating heart of female sexuality, Breillat creates characters that are writhing bundles of drama and pain, anger and confusion. There is no laughter, never any levity nor celebrations of desire at all – just academic intellectualization in lieu of visceral heat, cardboard cutout chemistry between actors, dire emotional consequences hidden in every fuck. The Breillat canon would make for a wonderful addition to those abstinence-only programs George W. loves so much.

Take for example this Breillat quote from the press notes for The Last Mistress (which the director adapted from the Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly19th-century novel): “But romance is dark, which was another reason for wanting to make this film; for the romanticism, the burning passion, the terrible suffering, but without perverting the sentiments. The heart of the story portrays an ideal that topples into disaster as soon as it is reached.” Sexy, huh?

It’s in this inevitable disaster that Asia Argento, chewing up scenery like the ice cream cone she furiously devours from her horse-drawn carriage, plays Vellini, a costumed Moorish version of the Ally Sheedy character in The Breakfast Club. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find needy, mentally deranged people the least bit sexy. I can say with utmost certainty that if I was shot in a duel like Vellini’s lover Ryno was, and my lover thrust the surgeon out of the way in order to drink the blood from my wound, it would not turn me on in the least. (But then I also don’t find pout-lipped, A&F model types like lead actor Fu-ad Aît Aattou sexy either – so maybe it *is* just me.)

For even in the most candied costume dramas there has to be some emotional truth. It’s not that I can’t relate to the trials and tribulations of love. Like Vellini I’ve been a long-term mistress, romantically involved to the point of “terrible suffering,” experienced that unbearable pain that Anais Nin likens to walking over hot coals; she wondered if this were possible without getting burned. I also know that we’re all hedonists at heart – not unrepentant masochists like Breillat’s characters would have us believe – wouldn’t go through the torture, the living hell of love, if it weren’t for the overwhelming growth, the endorphin high of desire. The worst times with someone you deeply love are better than the best times with someone you are merely fond of.

But you wouldn’t know this from any Breillat film. Which is why I’m using The Last Mistress to inaugurate my own Breillat Awards – given to the top five un-sexy, sexy indie flicks. Consider The Last Mistress the grand prize winner; here are four runners-up, in no particular order:

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In her two films at the 2007 New York Film Festival, Asia Argento plays two sexual outlaws, two centuries apart. In Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, she’s a kept woman who can’t keep away from her now-married former lover; in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, she’s a stripper and a whore. In Ferrara’s film, she cavorts with a wild dog on stage, for cash; in Breillat’s, Argento is the wild dog, in spite of her money and title, and she clutches the head of a tiger while in the throes of orgasm as if to prove it. In both films, Argento is tough and toxic; her body is on display constantly and yet there’s a never a sense that she’s in anything less than total control. In both films, Argento is at once ultra-feminine and masculine, sexy and “scary”, in a way that maybe hasn’t been seen on screen to this extent since the height of Marlene Dietrich.

In fact, The Last Mistress feels very much like a Dietrich film, with various themes and plot threads borrowed from The Blue Angel and Morocco. Breillat’s method of directing actors is also not totally dissimilar to that of the director who made Dietrich’s Hollywood career, Josef Von Sternberg, in that both tend to privlege physical choeography over the development of a character’s inner life. But saying that Argento plays the Dietrich role in Go Go Tales is essentially like imagining the gorilla suit number from Blonde Venus digitally inserted into the middle of 42nd Street. Ferrara’s made an almost happy-go-lucky glorification of sleaze, with Argento as its dark heart.

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