Nathalie

It’s so unfair. While the rest of Europe’s female populace struggle with saddlebags and moisturising creams and torturous gym equipment once they hit thirty, French birds get to age like bottles of Chateau Lafite. Just check out Nathalie to witness 37-year-old Emmanuelle Beart cavorting magnificently in a black suspender belt, or Fanny Ardant slinking it up in a manner no woman in her sixth decade ought to be able to carry off without looking like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?
Anyways, this outburst of naked envy has a point (for once), for this teasing and pleasing French diversion is all about girls checking each other out. Anne Fontaine’s kinky and distinctly feminine take on voyeurism casts Ms. Ardant as a mired, bourgeois doctor troubled, yet fascinated by her husband Bernard’s (Depardieu) casual infidelities. Her very continental response involves hiring Beart’s tart-without-a-heart to sleep with her wayward spouse and report back the juicy details. As Beart is rather unsophisticated in aspect or trade (‘The last taxi I was in played jazz’ says Ardant at one point. ‘It had what?’ comes Beart’s befuddled reply), the two women fashion her a language student alter-ego named ‘Nathalie’ to enhance her more obvious charms. In no time Ardant’s buttoned-up physician has gotten very excitable - eyeballing the occasional barman (though the boy in question does play ‘Atmosphere’ which would probably work on anyone), lurking around the club where Beart works and lapping up the hooker’s increasingly lurid accounts of relations with Bernard. But can ‘Nathalie’ be trusted, and more pertinently, just who is getting off on whom?
This seductive conundrum is greatly enhanced by the uniquely Gallic pouting competition that ensues between Grande Dame Ardant and wearied beauty Beart. The latter just about shades it in the Battle of the Bouche, though Beart’s hooker make-up does allow for more promiscuous usage of ruby-red lip-liner, so technically she’s cheating. Still, one suspects that Pier-Luigi himself wouldn’t yellow-card her for the offence were she to set her bottom lip atremble.