We are first introduced to betty (Beatrice Dalle) and her boyfriend Zorg (Jean Hughes Anglade) in his beach house during a highly energetic bout of early morning sex. Full of comic asides, Beineix’s modern parable of amour fou is hot in seductive colour that darkens as the story unfolds. A failed novelist with a seemingly terminal writer’s block is prodded into fulfillment by an uneducated girl with a dangerously free spirit. For a time, her rebellious nature seems comically refreshing. But when her inexplicable depression degenerates into self mutilation, the picture darkens with a tinkling fatalism that seems to mock the life giving energy of the opening images of uninhibited lust.