This wretched killer is, after all, Sharon Stone. In stir she sits and stares, her old sexual insolence tamped into sadness and contempt. By the end she is practically Garbo in Camille, the doomed woman comforting the gentle, lesser man who loves her. Stone does a fine job without surrendering her star quality. She just can't save this schematic story.
Nobody has to perform that kind of career magic in French cinema.
The industry and its actresses occupy a middle-class middle ground where emotions are rarely italicized. If moviegoers are to be touched, they must do half the work, trolling for subtext, reading a heartbreak into a pensive glance. He needs an assistant, and when he meets Nelly, he realizes that he needs one last immersion in the idea of love. Nor does he make a grab for Nelly. But one night he watches her sleep, his hand gently gliding above her skin like a Hovercraft.