David Romano

A dreary film. The consummate acting of Delphine Seyrig is the only thing that makes this film bearable. She makes even the most mundane tasks interesting but it's hard to sustain an interest in mundane tasks even when performed by a stylish and graceful woman. As she starts to crack up under the stress of her double life and the self-imposed narrow confines of that life, the viewer is also feeling the strain of her endlessly repeated motions.  Is this what I go to the movies for? I have enough of it at home, thanks. Actually, if you watch the film in 20 minute segments it can be refreshingly meditative. So little happens you actually can go into a state of relaxation before a state of impatience ensues. Everything is artificial in this film. The kitchen where most of the inaction takes place is not a real kitchen, the apartment is not a real apartment, the people are not real people and the life portrayed is not life at all but the artifice of a self-conscious auteur with little vision and little patience for humanity. How much can we learn from the lives of artificial people in an artificial world? The cold, stone and pavement of a colorless urban Brussels is the only contrast to the the tidy, almost sterile rooms of the apartment. Like many other films (think Barton Fink, American Beauty) this film is unable to resolve the dramatic tensions so the director resorts to a senseless murder to end the film. This failure of imagination, and the lack of a fully realized story (which is why so many good films come from literature) leaves the viewer none the wiser when the movie is over. Whatever sympathies and hopes you had for our heroine are dashed when she is revealed to be a psycho. And aside from her there is really nothing else going on.

Lame. Dated.