Too glossy to be true

I've liked much of director Claude Miller's past work, especially Garde a Vue (1981), a tense New Year's Eve interrogation of a respected citizen on a rape charge, and La Classe de Neige (1998), an alarming revelation of child abuse on a school trip.

But I could not get to grips with Betty Fisher, a Franco-Canadian co-production. It is too glossy, badly cast and lacks plausibility in every twist of its convoluted plot. It's based on Tree of Hands by that over-rated writer Ruth Rendell. (Chabrol knew what he was doing in skimming the potboiler fat off her Judgment in Stone, filmed as La Cèrèmonie.)

Betty Fisher (Sandrine Kiberlain, a freckled, angular Isabelle Huppert), a best-selling French novelist, loses her four-year-old son in an accident. Her unstable mother (Nicole Garcia), who abused Betty as a child, tries to make good the loss by abducting the infant son of Carole, an unmarried workingclass mother (Mathilde Seiger). Carole is a bar girl in a downtown bistro. She cohabits with Franáois (Luck Mervil), but is lusted after by Milo the barman and propositioned by Alex (Edouard Baer), a dealer in forged passports. Alex is a gigolo, kept by a rich widow who tires of him and goes off on holiday.

Left improbably in possession of the luxurious home, Alex flogs it, fully furnished, for cash to a Russian mafioso and his slinky wife. Betty's estranged husband Edouard meanwhile turns up to apply emotional blackmail.

Got all that? I don't believe any of it. Half these people would never cross into each other's arrondissement. If they did, some of them would be clapped in handcuffs at once. I don't believe any woman would leave her low-life lover, especially one as criminally ratty looking as Alex, in possession of her home and contents while she swans around Marrakesh, or wherever. In any case, the whole house-sale sub-plot is a distraction.

In short, the thing is a mishmash of women's problems: maternal domination, parental love, marital distress, emotional jealousy ... Not even the plot's fancy sub-divisions into each character's "story" diverted my disbelief.

It is also too good-looking. I suspect any highly charged drama whose women always appear to be just back from the hairdresser's or a shopping trip. The best I can say is, it has nice touches, especially the arriviste Russian's wife dripping in neck-to-toe blue fox-fur and giving her new home the once-over with the snooty comment, "Terylene is a little bland for a bedroom." The voice of Moscow fashion.

Betty Fisher And Other Stories
Cert: cert15