Rien sur Robert

Despite the cast, which perhaps suggests a cross between Rohmer and Buñuel, this bizarre farce is rather more like a misbegotten Gallic intellectual rehash of After Hours. Luchini is a neurotic writer, forever at war with tetchy lover Kimberlain, his family and his own paranoia about another acclaimed young author. The latter turns up for dinner on the wrong night at his former professor's place, with disastrous consequences. At first it looks like being an odd but engaging comedy of embarrassment, but as Luchini gets involved with weird waif fatale Cervi, and the sexual intrigues thicken, it becomes increasingly turgid, precious and even, for all its posturing, moralistic.