Isabelle Huppert, an icon of French cinema, has to engage all of her artistic power to give meaning and complexity to a screenplay that is not too far from a self-help paperback made with cut-out figures. The film analyses superficially how to handle divorce, career threats and family issues by being cool, calm and collected in the presence of the others involved. You can let go in private, and howl. It is an ironic reflection of the problems faced by Huppert's character, who writes complex academic books which her publisher wants to dumb down into glossy, primary-coloured, mass-market items; meanwhile, her husband of three decades announces flatly one day that he is moving in with someone else. Other family members, young and old, also have textbook problems. The shallowness is a fault of construction and direction in the film, since there is nothing wrong with the acting talent. Huppert, with her characteristically surgical style, attacks each situation forcefully in turn. When it is time for her character to let go, you see the emotional abandonment and devastation. But the film is not committed to her themes and wants to do other things. Huppert is frequently cast in French promotional cinema and this is no exception - there are travelogues in Paris, Brittany and the Pyrenees, elegant clothing styles, charming cottages, regional produce, and quotations from French philosophy, which is itself a national product. The resolutions to the various personal problems are conventional; but then, perhaps it is advertising traditional family values, too. By all means be impressed by what you see here, as that is the intention; and it is worth it just to watch Huppert wrangle an inferior cinematic product into some consequence.