Audience Member
Bluebeard is a terrible movie. It was suppost to be a drama and a thriller. As a thriller, it was adequate, but compared to other thrillers, it doesn't hold up. As a drama, it failed. You're supposed to care about the main character, but she is so lifeless. She can't cry, she has a terrible singing voice, and I didn't feel she would be different if she was a corpse. The first half of the movie started telling the story before the girl reading the story read the story. And speaking of that girl, the movie keeps cutting to real life for no reason but to get a laugh, and it wasn't funny most of the time, and in the end,they just kill off her sister for no reason. Anyway the rest of the cast wasn't great either. It was obvious when they tried to legthen the movie, the costumes sometimes didn't look from the time period and the dance had fingerguns. Now, it was disturbing seeing Bluebeard with a 13 year old girl as his wife, and his beard wasn't blue! Lastly, there was one scene that was weird. When the room was opened, the main character was switched with the girl reading the story. It made me go, "Oh, that girl said that horror made her laugh." But it was pointless swapping the leads. There were more scenes that were weird, but i'd suggest that you watch the movie. It's like, The Room. It's so bad that you have to watch it. i'd give it 5/10 stars because of ironic enjoyment.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/03/23
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Before Disney made them sugary sweet, fairy tales were dark & violent stories meant to punish female curiosity. The film uses the story of 'Bluebeard' to give us an effective feminist critique of patriarchy & how we teach women to love the men who do them the most harm
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/23/23
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Audience Member
An interesting take on Perreault's fairy tale that asks more questions than it answers. A surprisingly sympathetic Bluebeard, a twisting exploration of female sexuality and a rather odd and slightly disturbing sub plot involving two little girls reading Bluebeard make for a very interesting and very French film that deserves several watches.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/08/23
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Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard) (Catherine Breillat, 2009)
I have an odd relationship with the works of Catherine Breillat. I know many, many people who revere her films as masterpieces of transgressive cinema; I know an equal number, give or take a few, who find them loathsome, exploitative crap masquerading as art cinema. I can see both sides of the argument, but I have yet to be able to figure out which side of it I'm on. There just isn't anything about Breillat's work that excites me one way or the other; I seem to have this same problem with Gaspar Noe. While Bluebeard-of the Breillat works I have seen to date, by far the most accessible to a general audience-did not break through that barrier, it's come the closest.
If you know your fairy tales, you know the story here. Unspeakably wealthy chap Bluebeard (22 Bullets' Dominique Thomas) goes looking for a wife and stumbles upon beautiful, innocent Marie-Catherine (Goodbye First Love's Lola Créton). The two have a whirlwind romance, get married, and then Bluebeard has to go away on business. He gives Marie-Catherine the run of the castle, with one exception-there's one door she can't open. But, of course, he gives her the key anyway. (Chastity belt analogy, anyone?) Will she be able to resist temptation to look behind that door and see what secrets Bluebeard has hidden away?
Breillat, of course, gives us more than that. Bluebeard and Marie-Catherine do not live in a vacuum; while Marie-Catherine's fortunes have risen mightily in the world, she makes the effort to keep ties to her family, especially her sister (Monsieur Batgnole's Daphné Baiwir), and Breillat sets a framing device in place regarding a pair of contemporary sisters (Marilou Lopes-Benites in her first screen role and Lady Blood's Lola Giovannetti), one of whom is reading the story to the other. Which sounds like a horrid piece of artifice, and if you've seen more than one Breillat film you know that's a possibility-but it works here better than it does in something like Fat Girl. (I want to compare it, oddly, to Svankmajer, but I didn't make enough notes to draw that comparison convincingly, so I'll just leave that out there.)
Never encountered Breillat before? Encountered her and were unimpressed? Give Barbe Bleue a try; it may just change your mind. *** 1/2
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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Audience Member
Being a fan of dark fairytales, I thought this was really good.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/19/23
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Audience Member
[Spoiler alert] Two stories are mixed here. In the 20th century, two little girls read the fairy tale of Bluebeard by Perrault. The oldest girl gets scared more and more by the story and has an accident. In the 17th century, we see two girls being dismissed from a private convent because their father has died, leaving only debts. On their journey home, they pass the castle of Bluebeard. The coachman warns the girls: all the women Bluebeard married have disappeared. While it seems like the older redheaded sister Anne would be the next bride, Bluebeard falls for the younger sister Marie-Catherine, who is still a child. Bluebeard knows of the reputation he has as a monster and calls himself an ogre. After the couple gets married, Catherine decides to sleep in a very small room: the entrance is so small that Bluebeard can't even get in. Even though it looks like they turn into a normal couple, one day Catherine opens the forbidden chamber and finds the corpses of the other women. As Bluebeard returns and sees the blood on the key, he tries to murder his bride, but he gets beheaded by two musketeers right on time. In the last scene we see the head of Bluebeard on a plate, while Catherine strokes his hair.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/15/23
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