The movie is at its best when it just captures the feverish substance of her passion, which it does vividly and candidly with a striking lack of self-consciousness on Rouan's part. But in its specifics, particularly in how it sets up the various male reactions to her behavior, the movie often seems somewhat schematic and labored, if not tedious. Her husband is defending a woman who stabbed her husband in the neck because of his affair - as he practices and prepares for her defence he copes with his growing knowledge of Rouan's adultery, and in that process can't help but argue in mitigation of his own wife; the mechanism seems clunky, if only because high-profile murders are such overly familiar, convenient thematic vessels for one thing or the other. The inspiration she provides to her main writer (who names his book after her description of a man's sweat) is too easy an external validation rather than a riding of the waves she creates for herself. The scenes of her trashed state are too much decrepit chic. Not that the overall trajectory doesn't more or less work, but the film constantly seems to be battling its own limitations, the restrictions it places on its central turbulence. The ending certainly seemed to me a very melodramatic signaling of redemption.
