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.