In Benoit Jacquot’s excellent Sade (2000), lissome French ingenue Isild Le Besco gave a seductive performance as a teenage girl corrupted by the legendary marquis. This absorbing thriller by Jacquot casts her in a similar role, as a comfortable Parisian art student who falls for a handsome Moroccan criminal (Ouassini Embarek) and impulsively follows him into hiding after a bungled bank robbery. Shot in wide-screen, low-grain black and white, this sleek suspense narrative quietly unpacks the delusions and emotional hunger of its upper-class heroine: her love for the confused hood matures and deepens once they’re on the run together, but her naive excitement fades as life underground grows increasingly drab, sordid, and lonely. In French with subtitles. 95 min.
