People in veteran André Téchiné’s film make their biggest decisions on the fly. A French crime novelist (André Dussollier) goes to rent a house on an island outside Venice, and that very day asks the beautiful rental agent, Judith (Carole Bouquet), to move in with him. She accepts, and is plunged into his fraught relationship with his daughter Alice (Mélanie Thierry). Alice goes swimming with Judith, takes a few strokes in the opposite direction and never returns. To find her, the novelist hires a vodka-swilling private detective (Adriana Asti) who herself has an emotionally disturbed son (Mauro Conte).
The plot, via a novel by Philippe Djian, spirals out to include all manner of sexual liaisons, as well as drug-dealing Venetian aristocrats. The complicated doings are poised on a knife’s edge between absorbing and ludicrous, and the characters’ decisions are often, by any rational standard, bizarre. Téchiné uses these broad strokes to pursue heavy questions — primarily, what parents and children bring each other (inevitable agony, it seems) and what it means not to have any kids. “Being a mother, being a father — there’s nothing worse in life,” says the detective.
Both Venice and Bouquet are photographed to ravishing effect, and like the city, Judith is meant to suggest something trapped into being a fantasy for others. As she works to carve out an identity, her own childlessness gives her a freedom — but, the movie suggests, also a hollowness — the other characters will never know.