...but his sad sack adventures across Paris looking for a girl who's been missing for six months can be fairly engrossing at times. My favourite actors show up here: Aurore Clement and Niels Arestrup as Rachel's parents, Bruno Todeschini as a physiotherapist who knew her, Jeanne Balibar and Laurent Grevill as Maneri's ex wife and her new husband, Clovis Cornillac as the owner of the Apolus sex club (and what a fun place it looks too). Thierry Lhermitte will always be the Club Med host from Les Bronzes for me, but he does a pretty good job playing the run down private eye... that's a bad smoking habit he's got. Then there is the always-alluring Marion Cotillard, who needs to do very little to draw viewers into a scene. All in all, it's too long and has too many characters, but it's a lot of fun to watch.

A moody, sexy French detective story with more than a passing nod to the film noir tradition. We enter the strange murky world of private detective François Manéri as he tries to find out what happened to a missing girl. There's a lot to keep track of, and lots of false leads, but the overall achievement is in creating the story through the eyes of the main character, with all his flaws, than in a cut and paste murder mystery. I found the European very natural depiction of the skilled but all too human detective captivating, in stark contrast to the more formulaic characters of American detective stories.

I didn't expect such a level of directing ease in that movie after I had seen its cheesy trailer twice. The lines are also very sharp as is the story but...________Spoiler warninG________It's a real pleasure to follow the line of this investigation although it's all mixed with the private affairs of François Manéri. You get to seize how meaningless his life has become. He is never really at a loss as usual Noir heroes: the quest for a clue or for what his investigation is about dwells absurdly on all his life. As Clarisse tells him he seems to ask for answers he doesn't care about. That's the way things are going and even before you get to wonder where they go it's the end, brought here in a very low-key style. Like a long fade-out on François'head with just the truth here to deride him, to say how much he has been passing by important things without noticing any. Or rather things have just passed him by.Well, it's consistent for it's more about the main character than about the truth (the girl he is paid to look for) but it's not sufficient for the average guy in his seat. It's not punchy enough an ending, perhaps because Clarisse is not mysterious enough and when she just come to bring in the solution you need not to believe it, you need not to understand it, it's the end and so it is.Ok that is not the kind of artificial Machiavellian plan which we should be told only in the end if we have been good. I shouldn't complain. But it was not easy to end a movie about a character who's lost the idea of rhythm in his life (thus I mention here that the editing of the dialogue on his tape over his actual life is one of the major achievements). Something must happen in the end because we are to leave our seats and not just going on with François'dreadful life. It's a major flaw since Une affaire privée would have been great if only they had tried to pull it tight. Perhaps they wanted to avoid to have François see clearly by himself, perhaps they didn't want to eye up on Vertigo. Personally I would have tried to have him find something she leaves for him to know and he doesn't want to know and he is arrested and we see the policemen saying hello to the real Clarisse and her friend.Too bad but many good things to take away.

The atmosphere of the movie is amazing, the colors and the omnipresent music both stress the gloom and cynicism of the depicted world.Disillusionment, Lust, Strangeness, succesfully put together in an unusual private investigation.