Catherine (Fanny Ardant) suspects her husband Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) is cheating on her. She meets call girl Marlène (Emmanuelle Béart) and hires her to seduce Bernard. She renames her Nathalie and gives her insights into him. Nathalie comes back regularly to give reports on details of their sexual encounters.The twist is telegraphed a mile away. When it's revealed, it is without tension or drama. I would rather the movie be straight forward and show the truth right from the start. It could have gone into much deeper waters. The sexual connections with its accompanying tension have the more interesting possibilities. This is torture waiting the movie to do the 'reveal'.

I must confess that I will watch anything with Emmanuelle Beart in it. Her first role of note was in Manon of the Spring as a shepherdess. A great movie featuring the young and beautiful Beart bathing nude at a spring. Here she is Nathalie, a prostitute hired by a woman to pose as a college student and seduce her philandering husband. The wife, Catherine(Fanny Ardent) hears a phone message from a girl sounding a bit to friendly to her man, Bernard(Gerard Depardieu). She pays Nathalie for the hook up and then meets with her after each encounter and has her describe in graphic detail, what Bernard did. Catherine is a cold woman who seems to get off in a voyeuristic way while listening to the sexual play by play of Nathalie and her soul mate. It is all very strange but Depardieu and Beart make it worthwhile as an interesting curiosity.

A film about two women, or rather the two hemispheres of a woman, made by a woman.I find nothing to like in most French films. The burst of reflexivity in the 60s where film critics became the most important filmmakers has had a negative effect today. Virtually nothing can be made and pretend to be real unless it is deeply internal. This drives most stories to farce or worse: romantic tripe.Catherine Breillat breaks out of this by using cinematic sex to punch through the internal/external skin by cinematic means. But sex — even her extreme versions — are pretty boring unless connected to emotions we know. Here is a French filmmaker in Anne Fontaine that gets it right, even though she is saddled with the French vocabulary. She even uses mainstream French actors.The film is rather simple. We are presented with two sides of being a woman with a man. One is the domestic hearth, the mother and constant. The other is the sexual partner, the life. The major challenge in being a partner (so this film has it) is to balance these because they cannot be merged. It is a matter of integrating selves while maintaining both.They try to seduce each other. They each find that their inner dream is to be the other, and many problems come from the fact that they are not and cannot be. They lie while supporting and comforting each other. Even after watching the "making of" featurette, I cannot know whether the actresses involved in making this were quite attuned to what it is. I am supposing not, because their performances aptly seem like performances. The sexy one literally plays a sex actress.There is much too much space taken up early in the film establishing the narrative. I believe this filmmaker could have does as well with less, because all the tropes used are from French films we know. But the ending is worth it, the faces. It is all about the faces here, and we need the hour and a half of learning those faces to know what their expressions mean at the end. It is not a happy ending, though it uses a film standard for one.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

It was the premise of this "dirty" little story that caught my eye: a wife engages a prostitute to rekindle the sexual desires of her unfaithful husband. For herself. Yes: the wife (Fanny Ardant) actually employees the prostitute (Emmanuelle Beart) to give the husband (Gerard Depardieu) a really good time, all the while without him realizing that his wife is paying for it. Her hope is that, once his sexual frustrations are worked out, he'll stop his philandering and return to her loving arms...Want to bet on her chances?An odd story, to say the least, so I just had to watch it. Then I found out it turned into something else: a real love story. Or, perhaps -- what we all think passes for love, in marriage? Hence, slowly and inexorably, the protagonists strip away the rites of married life, exposing the hypocrisy, innuendo, and outright lies that force people to continue in a sterile relationship.Very French, very bawdy – in a wordy sense – and very introspective: Lots of long searching looks, sparse dialog, mood swings, tawdry night clubs, and conversations (when they occur) about the finer details of having sex.Depardieu provides an excellent image of a man at a loss – at work and in his marriage, and he's not at all sure why; Ardant (an actress I'd not seen much of until this outing) underplays the aggrieved wife with what appears to be a stoic calm but which is actually calculated indifference; and the very luminous Beart is perfect as the avaricious pro ready to make a few too many francs at the expense of the wife's dignity. I hadn't seen Beart in a movie since Manon des Sources (1986), in her role as the vengeful daughter of Jean de Florette; she ages well, no question...As I implied above, however, all is not what it seems to be, especially when it comes to relationships. There is an exquisite twist (a careful viewer will spot the clues that point directly to the twist) to the story that forces the wife to face the reality of her marriage and thus make a choice. And the viewer is left with two questions: was it all worth the expense? And, did she make the right choice?If you like these French actors, and French movies in general, I thoroughly recommend this one. Not for kiddies or even teenagers, though.