La Vellini: she smokes cigarettes like a man. If you get shot in the chest during a duel in the early morning, she'll come to your sick bed and suck the blood from the open wound. Played with abandon by Italian actress and film maker Asia Argento, La Vellini is a woman of great passion. She wears fantastic, colorful gowns, a signature dangling earring, and sometimes her hair is pulled back tight and sometimes it's worn down, the long, loose ringlets emphasizing the wildness of her character.
La Vellini is, of course, the title character of Catherine Breillat's eighteenth century costume drama The Last Mistress. She will cause the ruin of Ryno De Marigny (the appealing Fu'ad Ait Attou in his first role), a dashing playboy who wants to discard the old and start with the new: the lovely, wealthy young Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). Ryno's problem, however, is that he can't seem to shake that old mistress. Despite all good intentions, he finds himself, again and again, returning to La Vellini and engaging in strident and artfully posed conjugal acts. Happiness is not to be his.
Asia Argento and Fu'ad Ait Attou in "The Last Mistress"
Breillat, however, steps out of genre convention with the sex scenes -- for there are far too many ludicrous, overwrought sex scenes. Poor Asia Argento is asked to ride her lover hard, her breasts bouncing, on the desert sands of Morocco, while her illegitimate daughter burns on a funeral pyre. The pathos does not ring true; The Last Mistress is nothing but pure, laughable melodrama.
