First thing first, when I saw the running time, well over three hours, and the director, Mr. Ferrara, I thought I was going to get a jumbled mish-mash of a story with some good parts, some confusing parts and a lot of boring stuff with the whole looking as if it were edited in half an hour.

You do get this a strange mix of standard film making, seemingly hand-held guerrilla stuff, shots going out of focus and scenes with so little light you cannot see anything. Some like this style and see it as auteur but for me I need some structure, some idea of a fixed style, where we are going, how we are viewing the story. So personally, I could put up with it but I am really not so keen on scenes that make me think ‘that looks like I filmed it’.

With Bissett and Depardieu you are going to get good acting but the long dialogue scenes do seem to be very actorly even if Depardieu’s acting seems effortless and he is always watchable, apart from the sex scenes.

Shoe-horned into the earnest arguing and dialogue there is a disconnected romance with a younger woman who he is introduced to by her father in an art gallery. I think it was supposed to show the charming seducer side of his character but for me it was creepy and I could not see how any young lively attractive women would find him attractive but I guess it does happen. Another side of the coin is forced in later, this is to show him as the horrible sexual predator he is, with a very unpleasant and I felt unnecessary rape scene. At this point in the film we sort of knew he was an immoral arsehole.

All in all, I really had no idea what this film was about, what it was trying to say or push me to. Perhaps I am as thick as a gatepost but I was confused. It ends with Depardieu staring straight into the camera after chatting to the housemaid, only slightly creepy this time.
Throughout the film Depardieu is shown to be guilty and immoral but it tries to persuade us despite all this he has good points or did, or I think. Mainly, despite the long cast list, it is a two-hander with Depardieu and Bissett taking centre stage with two very stage-play-like set pieces.

This film could have been better, more interesting and said more about the type of man Devereaux was and the fall-out of his arrest but it is bloated, poorly edited and lacks a good story direction.

Abel Ferrara will win me over one day – this film was not that day.