OPENS JULY 16, CERT 15, 100 MINS

Break it down and it’s almost a parody of French cinema, complete with stylish icons doing their thing. Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu are a bourgeois married couple; he’s philandering. As a form of revenge, she hires a “bar hostess/erotic dancer”, played by Emanuelle Beart, to seduce him then tell her the details. There’s much analysis of relationships, plenty of fatalistic intellectualising about sex, and enough of Beart’s beauty to placate the male gaze but steer shy of exploitation.

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Yet for all the potential cliches, it works. Possibly because writer/director Anne Fontaine (Comment J’Ai Tu