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:

…Read more

• The Chinese censors have reportedly placed a media ban on actress Tang Wei, due to her sex scenes in Lust, Caution.  This means she can’t attend award show or appear on television, and the nation’s print media has been ordered to pull all feature stories about her.
• Anne Thompson eulogizes New Line, with help from John Waters, who recalls, “They were the first ones to mix art and exploitation, which is where I was coming from.”
• A Sopranos producer is writing a “NASCAR drama” for Gary Ross to direct at Universal. Ross seems particularly excited about depicting a sport that people actually care about: “I used blow-up dolls for crowd scenes in Seabiscuit, but that won’t be necessary in a sport where there are 150,000 fans in the stands every Sunday.”

• Oh, good: Indiana Jones and the Dorian Grey-ing of Harrison Ford Into Shia LaBouf will premiere at Cannes! Maybe. No one’s seen the thing yet, but according to Variety, “The cast, which includes Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett, have already been notified to pack their black-tie outfits for the French Riviera’s red carpet unspooling even though the fest has yet to confirm its official lineup.” Because celebrities pack suitcases 10 weeks in advance.
• Theatrical exhibition conference ShoWest will confer a special “Freedom of Expression Award” to Ang Lee and James Schamus, for releasing Lust, Caution with an NC-17 rating instead of cutting the film to get an R. National Theater Owners president John Fithian is inexplicably trying to push studios to revitalize the NC-17 market, even though even Lust, Caution made just under $5 million domestically, and in fact was a super-hit in China…where it was cut to appease the censors.
• Semi-Pro, which opens today, suddenly bears the dubious distinction of being the final release from New Line before the studio is subsumed into the clusterfuck that is Time Warner. It may not exactly send the studio out with a bang: although the comedy is said to be “tracking well among males under 25″ it’s nonetheless expected to “open well lower than Ferrell’s most recent films.”

The Golden Globes demonstrated their interest in contemporary World Cinema last year by nominating two Hollywood-produced films in the Best Foreign Language Film category, and ultimately handing the award to Clint Eastwood’s Japanese-language Letters From Iwo Jima. I was one of many who found this worrisome, but at the same time, it didn’t seem like it was totally out of left field. At least they didn’t give it to Apocalypto (nominated in the same category, thus unfortunately giving Mel Gibson a dose of “they only understand my work in Europe” cred).

At The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik says the Hollywood Foreign Press Association looks almost certain to repeat the pattern this year. Lust, Caution and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are just two of several films with Hollywood studio backing, directed by name-brand Indiewood auteurs, in a language other than English and incorporating a mix of foreign talent, that the Globes are expected to deem “too foreign” for their Best Picture category and just right for their Foriegn Language film category. This will, of course, have a ripple effect, pushing deserving non-Hollywood Foreign Language films out of consideration.

Ultimately, the problem stems from the fact that the HFPA’s field of vision is apparently so narrow that they don’t even think there is a problem. And they’re not the only ones.

…Read more

• With a total gross of $140,000, The Darjeeling Limited earned the highest per-screen average of the year this weekend, when it opened in two theaters on New York on Saturday after opening the New York Film Festival on Friday night. Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution opened almost as strong: the NC-17 rated, 158 minute film grossed almost $62,000 in its single New York engagement.
• Admittedly, there’s a lot riding on the success of Lions For Lambs (it’s the first production to be released by Tom Cruise’s revamped United Artists, and Cruise’s first starring role since the disappointing Mission Impossible 3), but is YouTube really the best place to sell an Oscar-bait drama about war and moral responsibility? Cruise and Co. think so: they’ve signed a deal with GooTube “in an effort to build buzz for the drama…to launch a competish for which individuals can produce a 90-second video discussing the social issue they’re most passionate about.”
• Amidst recent accusations that they’re just not very good at releasing films, First Look has announced two new acquisitions: Day Zero, a draft drama starring Elijah Wood which premiered at Tribeca earlier this year; and The Amateurs, a comedy about a crew of middle-aged suburbanites who hop into the world of DIY pornography.
• Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers took the top prize this weekend from Paul Auster’s jury at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

• Focus Features has accepted an NC-17 rating for Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, despite the fact that it will seriously hamper the film’s chances of reaching the audience it needs to gain critical mass come Oscar time. According to The Hollywood Reporter, although the film contains no full-frontal male nudity, “male-on-female oral sex, non-S&M restraints and several nontraditional sexual positions are depicted, conveying the aggression and emotional conflict between the main characters.”
• Unfortunately, it looks like DGA members won’t be able to enjoy any of that in the comfort of their own homes. First the Directors Guild of America said studios could send their members award season screeners; then they said they couldn’t; then they said they were planning to say they could, but now they’ve said that they can’t.
• With male and female audiences divided over the equally drecky-looking Scarlett Johansson vehicle The Nanny Diaries, and the Jet Li/Jason Statham fight pic War, Variety says SuperBad has a chance at pulling off another weekend at the top of the box office. In related news, Knocked Up is a huge hit in Australia and Russia.
• Anger Me, a documentary in which former child star/experimental filmmaker/Hollywood Babylon muckraker Kenneth Anger tells stories about his own life for two hours, earns the ultimate backhanded compliment from Variety: “Tech credits are adequate.”