Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue)
Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat (Director and Screenwriter)
France / 2010 / 80 mins / French with English subtitles
Opening Weekend Date: 16 July 2010
Cinemas screening the film: Curzon Soho, Ritzy, Cameo, Tyneside, Pictureville Bradford, Lighthouse
Check out our exclusive interview with Director and Screenwriter Catherine Breillat, on the Birds Eye View Blog.
In the 1950s, Bluebeard was the favourite tale of good little girls, one of whom is Catherine, who loves to frighten her older sister Marie‐Anne by reading this fairy tale to her until she starts to cry.
Catherine also puts herself in the fairy tale by becoming Princess Marie‐Catherine, Bluebeard's last wife, the one who escapes the fate of all those he hanged before her because she is the virgin princess that the ogre cannot make up his mind to kill. This hesitation will doom him, and allow the virgin to get the head of the giant.
Catherine Breillat - Director and Screenwriter
Catherine Breillat started her career after studying acting at in Paris, prior to being in Last Tango in Paris. Beside her filmmaking, she is a bestselling writer. She has recently completed shooting a film based on Sleeping Beauty.
"Bluebeard delighted me. At a swift 80-something minutes, it's a brilliant feat of storytelling’"
Sophie Mayer, Little White Lies
"This quietly surreal Freudian fable is an elegant exercise of style with a sly humorous undertow"
Jonathan Romney, Screen International
"Especially satisfying was Catherine Breillat's Blue Beard, which offers up a characteristically fresh and slyly subversive reading of Perrault’s fairy tale. The beauty-and-the-beast-style parable is played out with an impressive but never over-insistent"
Geoff Andrew, Time Out
