SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Jackson Booth-Millard I only found this French film because it was featured in the book of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I recognised the leading actor starring, so I was hoping the critics giving good reviews was right. Basically middle-class Parisian housewife Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) is married to possessive husband André (Guy Marchand), but she is bored of her lifestyle and longs for something else. Then she meets charming street thug Loulou (Gérard Depardieu), he has no job and resorts to robbery to survive, but he provides Nelly some excitement, and she leaves her husband to have a passionate affair with him. For a while it just seems like a casual fling, Nelly is fulfilling lust and Loulou is getting sex and living off her money, but in the mind-set of a middle-class bourgeois, André is doing whatever he can to win back and convince her to return. But then things get complicated when Nelly finds out that she is pregnant with Loulou's child, but he says he will support her, whether he can change his ways and provide for her is a big question. Also starring Humbert Balsan as Michel, Bernard Tronczyk as Rémy, Christian Boucher as Pierrot, Frédérique Cerbonnet as Dominique, Jacqueline Dufranne as Mémère, Willy Safar as Jean-Louis and Agnès Rosier as Cathy. Huppert gives a good performance as the bored housewife who leaves her husband out of boredom and gives in to unadulterated lust, Depardieu is interesting as the unemployed layabout who is charming and likable, together they are an odd couple, but great to watch, there isn't much of story to talk about, it is more a look at social and sexual interaction in contemporary France, with some good backdrops, it is a watchable drama. Gerard Depardieu was number 90 on The 100 Greatest Movie Stars. Very good!

Michael Neumann Bored, restless housewife Isabelle Huppert leaves her brutish husband for an overage juvenile delinquent, played by Gerard Depardieu in one of the roles that made him an unlikely international sex symbol. The film is an uninhibited look at the seamier side of romantic Paris, but may be altogether too dark for its own good, and not only in terms of lighting: the script itself is often unforgivably vague. A talented cast gives the largely improvised non-story an almost documentary feel, but with no sympathetic characters (and with a distracting lack of motivation) the film rambles on interminably in no particular direction. In the end it amounts to little more than just another exercise in urban spiritual malaise, complete with stock footage of the cuckold husband blowing a lonely late-night saxophone in his empty apartment, with the TV flickering silently in the background. Not even the most opaque European art-house mood piece can support that kind of cliché.

writers_reign I used to think that Isabelle Huppert became interested in sleaze in the late 90s, around the time she made School Of Flesh but now I see that as far back as 1980 she was inserting a toe into murky waters. Watching this film you get the impression that Pialet has seen Tennesee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and focused on Stanley Kowalski and Stella DuBois at the expense of Blanche and decided to speculate on how Stella, a genteel daughter of a plantation owner, hooked up with Stanley, a Polish lorry driver who has been walking erect only since Tuesday. So, presumably using this speculation as a starting point Pialet takes up his scissors and a piece of thin cardboard and fashions Nelly (Huppert) an educated, middle class bored woman and allows her path to cross that of LouLou (Gerard Depardieu) a guy about one and a half steps up from an ape, lately out of the slammer whose only interests in life are sex and violence. The result is predictable; the moth is attracted to the flame. And that's it. No fresh insights into the Human Condition; no polemics, no point of view, just a trawl through a garbage can for its own sake. As ever Huppert and Depardieu are excellent as is Guy Marchand, whom Huppert leaves for Depardieu but sometimes excellence is not enough.

P. J. Kerrigan Given the exhaustive and thoughtful review by the previous poster, I won't be redundant. This movie contains one of the best lines I've ever heard: As Nelly rides away with LouLou on his motorcycle, Andre poutfully spouts (rough english) "But you can't discuss books with him!"; Nelly replies "I don't discuss books, I read them!".Priceless.