Today from 18:00-21.00 hrs, the UvA Film Club will host their next screening in HVL/BuzzHouse’s Co-Working Space! This week's film is Bluebeard (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2009), with an introduction by Fatme Hawarin.

In her adaptation of the seventeenth-century French folktale Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat offers a tender twist on the monster inspired by knight Gilles de Rais –companion to Joan of Arc and infamous serial child murderer. As we listen to a young Catherine softly reading the tale to her older sister in a dust-lit attic, the film drifts into 1697, where the two girls, now incarnated as Marie-Catherine and Marie-Anne, mourn the recent death of their father. Left without dowries, they accept an invitation to a courtly dance hosted by Lord Bluebeard. Though divided by a disquieting disparity in years, Catherine and Bluebeard form an unexpectedly affectionate bond and soon marry. When the lord departs on distant business, he entrusts his young wife with a mysterious ring of keys to his vast fortress. Despite the sanguine prophecy quietly hanging over their union, the girl’s longing for her husband cannot but flourish in his absence. In magnificent Breillatian fashion, the film is both intellectually exacting and visually sumptuous in its restraint composition, framing Bluebeard less a monstrous villain than a vessel of female desire –too treacherous and radiant to be contained within societal mores of girlhood.