After bombarbing us with his music video special effects - hand-held and subjective camera, blackouts, voice-memories, home-movies, out of focus, fake rear-projection, and voice-overs, director Olivier Dahan has the sense in his climax to simply concentrate on the face of his leading lady, giving her no dialogue.
As Sylvie, a Nice street prostitute, Isabelle Huppert wears blonde dyed hair, blue fingernails, white eye make-up, pink lipstick, totters on high heels and pops pills. The blondeness matches Huppert's freckles, and her tartiness suggests a Euro Marilyn Monroe, with a dirty mouth. Sylvie gets laughs from the inappropriateness of her being the mother of 14 year old Laurence (Maud Forget), who suddenly appears to her mother and is involved in a death that recalls Cheryl Crane's killing of Johnny Stompanato. Together Sylvie and Laurence flee in search of Sylvie's husband Piotr (Andre Marcon) who lives in Viale.
The screenplay by Agnes Fustier-Dahan has some amusing touches, when Sylvie and Laurence are separated (though Laurence leaves Sylvie perhaps too often) and both of them get car rides from a car thief, Joshua (Pascal Greggory) at different times. Joshua and Laurence just miss spotting Sylvie, and Sylvie gets a lift from another car whose driver turns out to be a cop. Joshua is eventually used to give their triangle a conventional ending, which though could have been worse. However Laurence's bleeding seizures are never explained, other than being the result of having a prostitute for a mother. Sylvie is said to have a memory problem, and though we are never told why exactly she abandoned Piotr and their son, Yannis, her visit to a psychiatric institute suggests she went nuts and her prostitution is the best she can handle now, and of course, also her punishment. (The beating that Sylvie gets that brings about the killing from which they have to flee is evidence that her life is no Pretty Woman). Although the screenplay's use of the metaphor of a home that has burned down is clear, the ghost river that sits beside Piotr's house and the use of flowers remain somewhat obtuse.
Before the climax, Huppert has a few good moments. A look of irony when told the car driver is a cop, her reaction to meeting a nurse at the psychiatric institute who asks her about Yannis, and her heartbreaking tears when faced with the child who does not remember her.
