Martin, age 20, runs away from his rural French home under mysterious circumstances and ends up at his half-brother's flat in Paris, where he meets and falls in love with the half-brother's female roommate Alice, age somewhat older. When Alice informs him, halfway through the film, that she is pregnant, he has a flashback (which we don't see for a while yet) of what happened to make him flee his father's house, and for the rest of the film, while Martin languishes in a psychiatric facility, Alice must resolve the situation Martin created, a labor of love she doesn't hesitate to perform even though it involves the sacrifice of her own happiness.

The bad news: This is a long, slow movie, and the characters are not really as well-defined as they perhaps could have been, especially given the film's character-centered plot. The good news: It's really beautiful to watch, and when the end of the movie sneaks up on you, and you've given what you've seen a little while to sink in, it's so brilliantly sad that you just want to fly to Paris and find Alice and hug her or take her to dinner or something. Not a good choice for a first-date movie--rent the video and have a close friend over for wine and cheese.

A weirdly inconsistent film, mixing hamfisted direction with an occasional obsessive attention to telling detail, seemingly shallow interactions with deeper thoughts, and Juliette Binoche's acting with Alexis Loret's acting. Loret can't act at all, even though he is pretty. This is not a great French film, but there's a lot to like about it nonetheless. Juliette Binoche is in fact that pretty, and she can act too. It has some (but not all) of the unforced naturalness that distinguishes French cinema. And it does not look upon its audience as a bunch of slack-jawed troglodytes, always a plus. Seven of ten, not the thing to convince someone to enjoy French cinema but pleasurable nonetheless.

It's considered bad form in certain circles to criticize Andre Techine but what the hey, I say it's spinach and the hell with it. This is uneven at best and boasts one of the clumsiest flashbacks on celluloid. Alexis Loret as Martin is clearly paying homage - as Jilly Adair would say - to Dorothy Parker running as he does the gamut from A to B and it's left to Juliette Binoche as Alice to carry both him and the film as best she can which might have been easier had she had a half decent script to work with. Those Ivory Towers in Academia will be swaying in ecstasy at this one as ordinary cinema-goers note the lack of apparel on Techine. One to avoid.