A Business Affair

Carole Bouquet is a floor-walking model and would-be writer caught between two contrasting but equally self-absorbed men in this well-written romantic comedy with a gently feminist undertow. While nursing her novelist husband through a chronic bout of writer's block, she is seduced by the brash charm of her publisher. Sold short by both men, Bouquet eventually opts for a literary identity of her own. Greatly helped by Pryce's atypically unsympathetic performance and Walken's easy charm, writer William Stadiem and director Brandstrom cut to the intellectual root, if not the emotional heart, of this ill-fated triangle of ambition and desire. Ultimately, perhaps, slightly too modest to attract the thoughtful art-house audience it's aimed at.