Directed by Claire Denis

Trouble every day is what Leo, a Parisian doctor, has got, with a wife he needs to keep locked and boarded up on the top floor like the first Mrs Rochester. Coré (Beatrice Dalle) has a rapacious appetite for sex, which is however just a preliminary to cannibalising the corpus delicti. At Cannes when the film was shown some walked out and some passed out. But congratulations to Durham Gala Cinema for showing a film which has been rarely seen in the UK outside festivals or the big cities.

Meanwhile Coré's old acquaintance from days in South America (where presumably they both were somehow infected with this strange affliction) and hence fellow sufferer, Shane (Vincent Gallo), has decided to bring his band-box-smart new wife June to honeymoon in Paris. Why? Is it to find Coré, a perverse aim surely for a honeymoon trip, or to track down Leo, presumably in order to find some cure for his condition before his desires get the better of him and he consummates his marriage with the inevitable result - a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘wedding breakfast'. Needless to say, it all ends badly.

While Dalle, with her sharp vulpine looks and sinuous body, is all sex and dangerous animal, Gallo, though looking like a delectable Sicilian bandit, gives an unconvincing and muted performance. His voice is either for some reason badly dubbed or very weak, and the scenes between him and Tricia Vessey as his naive wife, with her gloves and gamine hairdo, are flat and curiously, for no apparent reason, reminiscent of a mediocre 70s romantic comedy.

An odd film. Denis has a distinct talent for bringing flesh to the screen. Rarely has it looked more beautiful or real than here, dead or living, its warm contours laced with blood, mundanely detailed with pores and hair or romantically shadowed in soft light. Sex as the ultimate consumption? The insatiability of passion? A metaphor for AIDS? A Freudian portrayal of the inseparability of love and death? There's a suggestion of all these, as well as the horror and an occasional melancholy eeriness, but unfortunately the preposterousness of the plot won't go away, and it remains mostly a curiosity. Fortunately, Denis followed up this film in 2002 with Vendredi soir, where two strangers spend an intimate night together after they become trapped in traffic gridlock in Paris. There, sex is natural, unexceptional, not transgressive, life enhancing and without guilt. It's a small-scale unfussy film, and offers a kind of counterbalance to this grander and ultimately rather pretentious one.

Seen at Gala Cinema, Durham, 13 August 2007