Video & On Demand - Bluebeard DVD & Download

Bluebeard DVD & Download

Out now

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.

The DVD also includes an exclusive filmed interview with Catherine Breillat.

★★★★

"Bluebeard breaks new Breillat ground..."Breillat has producd a witty, graceful and unusually tender reading of the story."

Sukhdev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph

Full review

★★★★

“Breillat has produced her funniest and most immediately pleasurable film to date”

“A series of gracefully shot and paced tableaux...refreshingly modern.”

David Jenkins, Time Out

“Breillat’s chamber-piece of oblique eroticism is beautifully designed and acted.”

Peter Bradshaw The Guardian

★★★★

“Adding comic relief as well as layers of complexity, Breillat coaxes hilariously, naturalistic performances.”

“Playful…loaded dialogue sets a tone as enigmatic as it is entertaining....

Complex, comic and discomforting...vintage Breillat.”

Sophie Ivan, Little White Lies

★★★★★

“An unabashedly sincere approach to Charles Perrault’s enduring fable. The film pulsates with danger and possibility.”

“It’s a children’s story with real bite...impressive”

Keith Uhlich, TIME OUT NEW YORK

‘This quietly surreal Freudian fable is an elegant exercise of style with a sly humorous undertow.

Jonathan Romney, Screen International

‘Bluebeard delighted me. At a swift 80-something minutes, it's a brilliant feat of storytelling’

Sophie Mayer, Little White Lies

'...Catherine Breillat's low-budget fairy tale bears the unmistakable stamp of French cinema's leading provocatrice. ... Using a lively and much younger female cast than usual, Breillat offers a pointed commentary on girlhood, its dreams and rebellious impulses. Mounted with a stylised spareness recalling French mediaeval dramas by the likes of Jacques Rivette and Walerian Borowczyk, Bluebeard is a sly, somewhat Buñuelian essay that will appeal not just to Breillat devotees but also to lovers of the dark side of fairy tale – and, incidentally, to readers of Angela Carter, who made the Bluebeard story her own in the collection The Bloody Chamber.'

Jonathan Romney, London Film Festival

'... magical and eerily gorgeous... Sexual power relations are as key here as they were in Breillat's scandalous Romance and Anatomy of Hell but this time she prefers an implicit approach in which the lovely frail young bride played by Marilous Lopes-Benites seems in total command of her huge world-weary, wife-slaughtering husband and defiant of the fate of her predecessors. This small gem showed the continuing artistic dominance of classical pre-digital filmmakers'

Nick James, The Observer

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 attention to historical detail in terms of costume, customs, architecture and decor, and punctuated by a delightful commentary on its progress and meaning by two young sisters reading the book in the 1950s (the rather more bolshy and bloodthirsty one named, of course, Catherine). A funny, touching, wholly unsentimental study of feminine fear, courage and desire, it proves once and for all that Breillat’s brilliance has always lain not in her readiness to be graphically explicit (this film is never remotely controversial in that regard) but in her ideas.

Geoff Andrew, Time Out

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