Big screen classics

Bluebeard

+ intro by academic Dr Catherine Wheatley, King’s College London

Barbe bleue

Catherine Breillat’s imaginative and haunting take on the gory fairy tale.

France 2009
Dir Catherine Breillat
With Dominique Thomas, Lola Créton, Daphné Baiwir
80min
Digital
English subtitles
Certificate 15

Long fascinated by the power dynamics of erotic obsession, Breillat adapts Charles Perrault’s 17th-century fairy tale to witty, imaginative and haunting effect. Two sisters in the 1950s scare one another by reading the dark story; intercut with their teasing is the tale itself, in which a teenager readily marries the titular lord, even though he’s rumoured to have murdered his previous wives.