Sindre Kaspersen French film critic, writer and director Pascal Bonitzer's third feature film which he also wrote the screenplay for, tells the story about journalist Bruno who is having doubts about his communists believes and who no longer knows if it is his wife or his young lover he really loves. After having received a call from his uncle who is fighting for re-election as the mayor of a small-town in Grenoble, Bruno decides to help him, but on his way he gets stuck in a dark forest. In search for someone that can help him, he encounters a secretive woman named Beatrice.This visually compelling and character-driven road-movie, a poignantly atmospheric mystery drama, which is an intriguingly written story about a middle-aged man's entwining love life, is strengthened by a fine music score and good acting performances, especially from Daniel Auteuil and Kristin Scott Thomas. Ludivine Sagnier and Emmanuelle Devos are also good in minor parts. A stylish, humorous and somewhat romantic neo-noir from Jacques Rivette's frequent collaborator, which was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2003.

Rooster-12 The obsession of 'signifie' and 'signifiant' is not enough to make a good film. Pascal Bonitzer should have remained in our memory as a brilliant film theorist back in the '60´s. It was not necessary to take the camera. The result is quite frustrating. It´s a pity for his excellent leading actors.

Fiona-39 This is, I think, meant to be a cold film - its summing up moment for me is when we have an extended close-up of Gaelle's ring on the ground in the snow, the white gradually darkening with the stain of Bruno's dark red blood. The camera simply watches the beauty of the movement, enjoys its aesthetic simplicity, and refuses to pan back to Bruno and let us witness his emotion and what is going on with him as he slowly bleeds. This is a deconstructed road movie; Bruno goes on a mission to deliver a message - a message whose sense we never learn, and whose effects ultimately seem irrelevant or minimal. Each trip in the car sees Bruno get involved with increasingly desperate sexual couplings, but there is no sense that these will progress anywhere. Indeed, it is noticeable that this film emphasises the way in which Bruno is in fact rejected at places that connote not travel as such, but the (unromanticised) stasis that travel also necessitates - in getting lost, at the airport, at the car park. Not so much on the road, then, as off the road - our lives here are not so much the American myth of untrammeled spaces, more full of constraint, difficulty and so on. The question repeated throughout the film in reference to Bruno's putative Communism, but what about the wall, becomes symbolic for me of the film's whole point. Neither sexual desire, nor 'love', nor ideology, can overcome the blocking 'wall', the stasis that haunts us. The cuts to Bruno's hand are perhaps the least disturbing thing in this beautiful, cold, bleak film.

ClaiClem The distribution was good, the subject could have been interessant and comic. whereas, he described the wandering of an old non credible communist looking for loving sensations. Instead of this, the atmosphere is nor lively nor heavy.