"The Last Mistress": Newcomer's looks are the star of erotic period piece

Can a female director make her leading man look prettier than a male filmmaker would? If her name is Catherine Breillat, and her star is handsome newcomer Fu'ad Ait Aattou, the answer is apparently yes.

Aattou's face — those bee-stung lips, those creamy cheeks, that perfect hair, those penetrating eyes — becomes the landscape of "The Last Mistress," her latest and possibly most entertaining exercise in erotica. For Breillat, casting this inexperienced discovery was something like love at first sight.

"For the first time, I had found that beauty, feminine without being effeminate, that I'd always hoped to find," she said in an interview. Now, "if he could act."

She need not have worried. Aattou carries the film with his intense, multilayered performance as Ryno de Marigny, a roguish, nearly broke 19th-century Frenchman who is torn between two lovers. It's a little like watching the young Montgomery Clift stealing his debut film from a cast of veterans.

Breillat, best-known for modern and experimental explorations of sexuality ("Romance," "Sex Is Comedy"), seems completely comfortable with adapting this more traditional period piece. Reminiscent of "Dangerous Liaisons," it's based on "Une vieille maîtresse," Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1851 book about beautiful people trapped by fatal attractions and the mores of their time.

Aattou smoothly captures the contradictions in Ryno, the central character, who is about to marry the aristocratic, virtuous Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida) but can't deny an emotional connection to his ex-lover, the Spanish courtesan Vellini (Asia Argento). And the latter hangs on to him as if nothing else could matter.

Told largely in flashback from Ryno's point of view, the story is less about love than it is about manipulation and the perils of obsession. Veteran character actor Michael Lonsdale, playing a mischievous gossip who opens and closes the film, delivers an especially cynical sting to his last scene. He's in his element, but Mesquida, alas, is not. She can seem out of her depth playing a character whose appeal, other than wealth and social stature, is never quite defined. Maybe that's Breillat's point? If so, it doesn't make for much of a contest.

The real heat is generated by Argento and Aattou. As long as they're demonstrating the extremes of their love-hate relationship — at one point she fetchingly declares, "I'd have enjoyed seeing you killed today" — the sparks definitely fly.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com