This drama (if that is the correct word) features Isabelle, a divorced artist in paris. She is now single, lives alone, and unable to decide if searching for the One is an urgent priority or a fatuity which is preventing her from enjoying life and experiencing pleasure. She has lovers and these liaisons are dangerous in that they don’t seem to provide the satisfaction they ought.
All the romance, the eroticism, the exquisite dissatisfaction of not knowing how or whether to be in love, is all dispersed into talking and debate and the intellectual interplay of ideas. Of course that may sound like an un-sexy ordeal and very French. And in blackest of black comic senses that is precisely what it is. The talk’s comic content is mostly without the easy laughs and obvious comic beats of, say, Woody Allen or Noah Baumbach. But there are big, genuine laughs here, too: chiefly when Isabelle explodes with rage at an artists’ rustic retreat when one of her contemporaries gives vent to an insufferable discourse on his relationship to the countryside. (Peter Bradshaw)