French actress Brigitte Roüan's second directing effort could conceivably be as provocative and controversial as advertised if you can convince yourself to stifle your yawn and rise to the bait: the amour fou of a married older woman for a footloose younger man. Roüan remains an energetic and expressive actress, and certainly it is good to see such a large and latitudinous role on screen for a certifiably mature woman, aging gracefully and attractively, and still looking quite like herself instead of like some creepy surgically sculpted replica of her earlier self. (We cannot expect such a sight from contemporary Hollywood.) But the situation, a "bold" and "daring" and -- yawn! dammit -- "defiant" reversal of the statistical norm, sacrifices maturity in other areas in favor of tit-for-tat, turnabout-is-fair-play fantasy: the lover must not merely be younger, but be a bushy-haired swarthy Euro stud out of a Vanity Fair cologne ad; his friend, a blocked novelist, would never have been able to give birth to his creation without the older woman's mothering and midwifery; her actual children, two docile teenage boys, are low-maintenance adornments; and her cuckolded husband, once he figures out what's going on, never confronts, never complains. (In a parallel story, he hires on as the defense attorney for an elderly woman who has let out a lifetime of bottled-up passion by sticking a carving fork into her husband's throat.) It's a lot to swallow all at once. And in a nice irony, the movie only begins to feel truly alive, truly awake, after the heroine's emotional collapse at the end of the affair -- at the end, in other words, of the fantasy -- when Roüan attempts to set a new screen record for depth of submersion into the slough of despair. Standard household measuring implements will be useless. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.