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It’s sexual transference time in Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie, as a gynecologist outflanks her philandering husband by secretly hiring a prostitute to seduce him. Nathalie (Emanuelle Béart) is the pouty proxy, and Fanny Ardant the wife, Catherine, whom Gerard Depardieu humiliates in the opening scene. Nathalie moves from a near-comical bourgeois-eye’s view of the red-velvet bordello where Nathalie undulates for a living, to Nathalie’s late-night-cable debriefings to Catherine, play-by-play reports about what body part went where and how. Fontaine never gets anywhere with the postfeminist voyeurism and class friction, partly because Ardant’s miles-away aloofness (and eerily mask-like face) is stifling. Béart, who once fumed she was “fed up being the incarnation of someone else’s fantasies,” needn’t worry: with her arresting feline face outlined in make-up and streaked with spidery hair, she resembles, in her first appearance, an anime character. Neither sexy nor smart enough to function without a pointless twist, Nathalie is just another, slightly more interesting French adultery lesson. Also noted: the death knell for post punk, in Catherine’s experimental risqué dalliance with a guy who seductively explains to her who Ian Curtis was.
Opens April 14 at Cinema Village
Opens April 14 at Cinema Village
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