ulien is a clockmaker with destructive impulses who decides to blackmail Madame X, a rich, attractive woman who traffics in stolen antiques. What he doesn’t know is that she has an even more dangerous secret that leads him to Marie, with whom he had fallen in love a year earlier.
Rivette, working from a story he developed with Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, ushers us slyly toward an ending that surprises and provokes, yet offers the possibility of love reborn.
– Kirk Honeycutt,
Hollywood Reporter,
5 Nov 2003
rotten:
Far from bad, but academic and -- for once with this director -- overlong.