Bluebeard

Breillat’s bloody chamber piece takes an outrageously deadpan approach to Charles Perrault’s grisly bedtime story about the aristocratic ogre who marries and murders a series of wives. Her Bluebeard is a middle-aged behemoth, easily four times the size of his child bride. The fairy tale is acted out in a 16th-century setting and explicated, often hilariously, by a contemporary pair of young sisters. The more sexually curious of the two is named Catherine, and the movie’s double ending, while not exactly Perrault, is pure Breillat. An idiosyncratic follow-up to her sensuously carnal, literary period piece The Last Mistress, Bluebeard is a perversely chaste and highly personal adaptation of Perrault’s classic fairy tale. An NYFF47 selection.