Handsome but hard-going, Gabrielle is an intimate drama that keeps the audience at arm's length. Based on Joseph Conrad's short story The Return, it's a portrait of a marriage in meltdown set in pre-World War One Paris. Under direction from Patrice Chéreau (Intimacy) that's by turns stagey and splashy, co-leads Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory (The Page Turner) make a fierce commitment to the story's flailing relationship, but it's not enough to stop the film from going cold.

Written in 1897, Conrad's original yarn was told totally from the husband's perspective; here, as the title suggests, we see things just as much from the wife's side. But it's still tough to identify with the enigma that is Gabrielle (Huppert), who leaves a letter for Jean (Greggory) telling him she's run off with another man. However, just as the bombshell is sinking in, she comes back. Why? That's for the rest of this two-hander to thrash out, as the couple vent ten years of repressed emotion over the next three days and nights.

"FEELS LIKE A PARODY"

Can the battered union be patched up? Is there any love to salvage, or has it all been a sham from the start? You'll struggle to care. Much of the dialogue is so archly theatrical that it feels like a parody. Equally self-conscious are the random switches to black and white, not to mention the use of freeze frames, slow motion and giant inter-titles: pretentious little tics that serve not so much the story as the ever-widening distance between viewer and film.

In French with English subtitles.