Love and Honor & The Last Mistress

There are foreign films and then there are foreign films. Talky adult movies that require attention and concentration. That's fine with me, after seeing movies like Step Brothers and Tropic Thunder a movie lover craves true sophistication.
Love and Honor stands the samurai genre on its head. Yes there's a fight but only after an hour-and-a-half of heavy drama. Set in a timeless past (the Edo period although it's hard to determine the exact century) our hero is a low level samurai whose main job requires tasting his lord's food. When he's poisoned he nearly dies, only to discover he's going blind. A popular samurai series told the adventures of a blind swordsman, but this isn't that tale. In fact director Yoji Yamada concentrates on how a samurai lives and the minutia of details that define marriage and relations.
Now blind, our hero discovers his wife gave herself sexually in order to guarantee her husband's pension. After much discussion he challenges the guilty lord to a duel of sorts. You wouldn't be off the mark calling this a thinking person's martial arts film. Slow and methodical, yet as soothing as a summer rain this film completes Yamada's samurai trilogy.
On a different plane but still a spiritual cousin is The Last Mistress from French helmer Catherine Breillat. If you're familiar with Breillat's contemporary films you know that passion and feminist ideals weigh heavily. Unlike Romance or Fat Girl, Breillat's previous films to be released domestically, the drama in Last Mistress, while engaging, hardly shocks.
The story follows an upper class stud who marries for money yet keeps a mistress on the side. But things are much more complicated than that. Ryno de Marigny once took a bullet for the lady Vellini and she's totally devoted, as a lover, and as a friend. Though up until that moment she hated his guts.
Everyone seems to go along with the convention of adultery, and this includes de Marigny's bride. The joy in The Last Mistress comes from the serious treatment of the subject in a formal and austere manner. The entire movie seems to have two musical passages and only one is indigenous. In The Last Mistress Breillat has advanced her game; she still explores the dark side of human relations but we are removed from too much empathy for the characters.