Scowlingly serious French film -- as the shot of carrion crows picking at the spilled entrails of a woodland creature soon makes plain. Or as the name of director André Téchiné had made plain beforehand. For all his soberness and somberness, Téchiné has put together an odd and colorful patchwork of material: life as a homeless scavenger in the countryside, life as a pampered male model in Paris (the same life in both cases: that of a Gallic Tony Perkins), life as a pair of platonic starving artists (a male homosexual actor and a female tango musician), a sojourn in Spain, a sojourn in the mental asylum, a sojourn in the justice system. Somehow nothing receives full measure. The abrupt, jumpy, elliptical storytelling method, with a clunky flashback plunked into the middle of the Spanish getaway, maintains a prickly seriousness throughout; but the experience is less than engaging, if also less than exasperating. Juliette Binoche, Alexis Loret, Mathieu Amalric, Carmen Maura. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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