L'Ennui

For Martin (Charles Berling), the frantic hero of this latest French exploration of sexual obsession, ennui would be a relief. A ferret of a man who looks more like a caffeine-wired accountant than a professor of philosophy, he spends most of Cédric Kahn's kinetic-to-the-point-of-farcical adaptation of the Alberto Moravia novel either racing from pay phone to pay phone desperately ringing up Cecilia (Monica Lewinsky look-alike Sophie Guillemin), his zaftig, blank-faced 17-year-old lover, or humping her with fevered and joyless intensity. Perhaps the ennui of the title refers then to Cecilia herself, who apparently beguiles Martin through her utter lack of subjectivity -- she's just a gaping sexual organ, a void of female mystery he's driven to fill.

Whatever the compulsion, it all starts to get very uncomfortable, undignified, and pointless after a half-hour or so. Berling brings stature and pathos to his existentially one-note character, and Arielle Dombasle as Martin's estranged wife, Sophie, whom he also calls up at all hours for inappropriate advice, offers a glimpse of a world of compulsive behavior more intriguing than her ex-spouse's predictable routine of stalking, cross-examining, phoning, screwing, and lamenting. Somewhere between Last Tango in Paris and Romance on the scale of profound to pretentious, L'ennui ultimately succumbs to the imitative fallacy. At the Museum of Fine Arts.

-- Peter Keough