ANNE FONTAINE’S Nathalie is crammed with the kind of characters who could exist only in French cinema. Catherine (Fanny Ardant) is a gynaecologist who suspects that her husband Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) has been playing away from home. In fact, she has some fairly unambiguous evidence — a telephone message that says something along the lines of, “So long and thanks for all the sex.”

Bernard’s response is a Gallic shrug and the admission that, yes, it has happened occasionally but it was invariably “too banal to talk about”.

Instead of scissoring holes in the crotches of all his favourite suits like a normal person, Catherine enters the realm of French cinematic fantasy. She engages the services of a pouty prostitute, Nathalie, played by Emmanuelle Béart, and instructs her to seduce her errant husband and then report back with all the sordid details.

This immediately jeopardises the credibility of the whole film: can we honestly believe that any wife, even an urbane, sexually sophisticated one like Catherine, would decide that the best way to tackle her husband’s infidelity would be to hire him a hooker? Nathalie herself is another uniquely cinematic creation. She’s a prostitute with none of the nasty, off-putting occupational hazards — no crack addiction, no disease, no poverty. In fact Nathalie makes a reasonable living from her other career as a beautician and hairdresser, which would seem to suggest that she moonlights as a hooker for kicks. Right.

Béart looks like some kind of over-ripe fruit, spilling out of cantilevered corsets and draped over red velvet banquettes in the Parisian bordello where she works. She certainly has the physical presence for the role but doesn’t seem to be able to shed much light on this mysterious woman or her motivations. It’s left to Ardant to do most of the running in the acting department, and while she is a charismatic and complex performer, she does rely rather too heavily on the fluttery-fingers-to-the-throat school of sexual arousal.

Depardieu, meanwhile, is relegated to the background for most of the film, but he serves to illustrate yet another cinematic fantasy — the unprepossessing toad of a man who proves irresistible to a string of gorgeous women.

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