Shrinking classes

I didn't like this film much. The set-up was fine but about halfway through my legs began to cramp slightly - or rather, I noticed that they had, a sure-fire sign that I'm bored. If you are a fan of Patrice Leconte's work - and he has made some decent films - I suggest you wait for the DVD rather than making this the centrepiece of a night out. And if you're on an early date, it's hardly likely to put either party in the mood to take things further, because the characters it depicts are about as lusty as a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Actually, a good deal less.

Sandrine Bonnaire plays Anna, a depressed and distracted woman who is visiting a psychiatrist (Dr Monnier, played by Michel Duchaussoy) for the first time. Apparently by mistake, she enters the adjacent office of William (Fabrice Luchini), a tax lawyer, and, without more ado, assuming he is the therapist, launches into a recitation of her problems. William is too uptight to stop her unburdening herself - and then she abruptly leaves.

When he tells his ex, Jeanne (Anne Brochet), what has transpired, they agree that he must fess up when Anna comes for her next appointment. But he doesn't and the bogus therapy continues.

The plot thickens just a little when William goes to seek the advice of Dr Monnier himself. Their exchange, in which the tax lawyer's need to receive intimate confidences is anatomised, provides the soul doctor with the best gag in the piece: "That'll be a 120..." he says drily, then waits three beats before pronouncing, "... euros." In fact, Duchaussoy is a welcoming sardonic presence in a film that takes the petting of moneyed neuroses all too seriously.

What could have been a watchable - but very slight - satire of the shrinking classes, complete with knowing little references to Woody Allen, turns, instead, into one of those leaden pieces of whimsy that French film directors seem to specialise in. Leconte has visited this territory before, most notably with The Hairdresser's Husband, wherein an obsessional charmer fetishises a coiffeuse.

The French and the English both share an overfondness for whimsy, but only the Gauls believe that there's anything whimsical about sexual dysfunction. For the charming Anna is in a classic Belle de Jour scenario: her crippled husband wants her to make love to strange men so he can regain his potency. William, in his conservative pinstripe suit, still tenanting the combined office and apartment where he was born, and where his father before him practised, naturally enough sees himself as a potential suitor.

However, as the "therapy" progresses, it becomes clear that while he has effected a proper transference so far as Anna is concerned - she sees him as lover, father, friend, ideal counsellor - he has failed to cope with his own counter-transference, and has fallen for his faux analysand. "Love," as Dr Monnier reminds him in true franco-whimsical style, "is an incurable malady."

LECONTE has waited 15 years to work again with Sandrine Bonnaire, who made a superbly twisted object of desire in his Monsieur Hire (1989). But, while the earlier film had the spare, smoothly oiled machine of a Georges Simenon plot to work with, this latest vehicle is a Traction Avant: it may look cool and dark, but its machinery is distinctly primitive.

Bonnaire conveys her move from oppressed and exploited wife in a prosaic fashion. With each session she looks younger and - gasp! - happier, while Fabrice Luchini's William has two basic expressions: bug-up-his-ass and two-bugs-uphisass. Far from believing that his still waters run deep, they seem merely stagnant. In what is essentially a two-hander you have to expect a little more combustion between the leads, but I never really bought the complicity between them to begin with, so the pay-off seemed preposterous.

Then there is the claustrophobia of the film, shot almost entirely in the tax lawyer's gloomy, mahogany rooms. There can be a virtue in almost static films, but a director has to work cinematically with such a conceit. Leconte doesn't, and when my legs began to ache I began to think, why doesn't he