APRES L'AMOUR (Directed by Diane Kurys. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Bernard Giraudeau, Hippolyte Girardot)

Not so much a ménage à trois as a free for all, Après L'Amour demonstrates that even free love has to be paid for in the end. Diane Kurys, who at her best makes gently bittersweet evocations of something approaching real life, has turned her lens on middle-aged affairs of the heart, with the emphasis on affairs over heart.

Although her central character, 30-year-old novelist Lola (Isabelle Huppert, an actress who has been playing thirty-somethings for over a decade) vacillates between two men, David and Tom (Giraudeau and Girardot), she is not the only one with an indecisive love life. Each of the men drift between Lola and clingy, dependent wives, while David's manipulative secretary has plans of her own for both him and his brother.

This is no bedroom farce however, the French being far too sophisticated to bother with the bedroom (the first dangerous liaison takes place between Lola and Tom in a car parked outside the flat she shares with David).

Après L'Amour talks about sex without getting too carried away with the act. It looks through a cold eye at the self-serving nature of relationships that have lost the central hold of monogamy. While the characters are seen through the cool, slightly imperious gaze of Lola, who manipulates their lives in her fiction, the film watches her with equal detachment. Lola sees herself as a strong, independent woman, yet she fails to get what she wants, losing her men to their apparently weaker other halves.

Après L'Amour is classically French, if not quite a classic. The characters are convincingly complex and don't work for audience sympathy, but it is hard to fall madly in love with a love story this heartless.