Very professional, very proficient job by Laurent Cantet, director of Time Out , who here details the activities of lonely, middle-aged, largely American women (the vulnerable Karen Young and steely Charlotte Rampling, most prominently) at a Haitian resort in the Baby Doc era, enjoying the easy but not free companionship of ebony-skinned native boys (Ménothy Cesar, almost exclusively) and the camaraderie of their compatriots, although not always enjoying the competition therefrom. The film, meeting us at the airport and settling us into the resort, gets off to a smooth, seductive, enveloping start, like slipping into the shallow end of a heated pool, and it afterwards offers a good deal of dispassionate observation of languorous hedonism. The uncinematic artifice of confidential confessions to the camera (or in voice-over), by assorted members of the cast of characters, is more like having your head held underwater: "I moved my hand down his body. Such soft young skin," one guest reminisces. And then: "It was my first orgasm. I was forty-five." Why is she telling us this? Why need it be said? That the political backdrop stays forever in the shadows allows the movie to work very well, and not at all to work very hard, as a metaphor of American self-indulgence and ignorance vis-à-vis the Third World. It hardly raises a bead of sweat as a thriller or a bubble of suds as a soaper. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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