Catherine Breillat's characters wear their thoughts rather than their hearts on their sleeves, and as The Last Mistress reveals, their opinions about sex, love, and the world ring more naturally within a period setting. Which is not to say they're more interesting. The location is Paris and the year is 1835, when the bourgeois are so bored that they rant about such things as capriciousness and the pure sin of gluttony (the film begins with the horrific sight of Michael Lonsdale devouring a noticeably pink piece of chicken) in order to keep sane. Breillat is not the first artist to acknowledge how the idle blow off steam, but few have dared to admit that this time period, before the middle-class and their uptight morals took over, was a hotbed of unapologetic sexual expression.