Bluebeard (2009)

directed by Catherine Breillat
France
80 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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This is one of those movies that earns five stars for not doing anything wrong. Each shot can be described as "painterly" and the tableaux of images it offers up, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, is rich in color and style. I knew that Catherine Breillat was a great director just from watching Fat Girl but now I think I should probably go deeper into her filmography.

This is an adaptation of the story of Bluebeard, a violent lord who murders all of his wives, and it's also a story in miniature of two little girls reading the tale between period-piece flashbacks of it happening. This adaptation of Bluebeard takes a considerably kinder stance on its titular character than the original, even though the sisters reading it seem to be more familiar with the tale in all of its violence as opposed to in the gentler version being shown onscreen. Bluebeard is depicted as a world-weary old man, a fatherly character to his much younger and consistently much physically smaller wives. He has a seemingly endless supply of kindness to give them- he tells the sister he ends up marrying that she can roam around the castle as much as she likes, he gives her her own small, secluded room when she requests it, though he would like to give her lavish riches and as much room in the castle as she wants, and overall he seems to just be thankful for her presence.

I think there are a lot of underlying statements about gender relations in this, and the fact that the unexpectedness of Bluebeard's kindness comes off as shocking may have been a statement itself: that we're at a point where it's surprising when a man isn't careless towards his wife or girlfriend. But it is inevitable that he does turn on her in the end, and the violence he exhibits when it comes time to do this isn't hateful, just... disappointed. It's almost like he's a symbol for how social conditioning allows any man to exert power over a woman just by default of his gender, even if he himself is a nice man and doesn't want any part of that. I think Bluebeard was a character who recognized that he had a great amount of status to uphold, not only as a lord but as a man.

The story of Bluebeard is not, however, entirely about Bluebeard, and it would be a big mistake to twist this review into something that only talks about him. In the story, the two sisters quite plainly do whatever they want, and this is shown and written in a way that's contrary to a lot of stories about "female empowerment" that put on airs; ones that pretend to be empowering and show girls that are advertised as having individualistic, forward-thinking mindsets, but in reality are shills for whatever beauty product is being peddled in that moment. The sisters in this film go out on their own, make their own choices, do whatever they want to do for them- up to and including marrying guys for their money, something often looked down upon as trashy. The Bluebeard story ends up having a semi-happy finish, but I don't know why I expected the rest of the movie to, considering Breillat.