Une vieille maîtresse (The Last Mistress), Catharine Breillat, 2007

Breillat's film, following in relatively close succession from Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterly and Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, confirms a recent and quite specific trend in French cinema towards lavish period epics of forbidden love. Much as with those films, Breillat creates a patient work that allows for her characters' indiscretions (notably punctated by the director's trademark carnality) to unspool in an artfully and fully rendered world.