This is a captivating cinematic autobiography by French art-house director Catherine Breillat, perhaps known best for her picture Fat Girl. In 2004, a brain hemorrhage partly paralyzed Breillat, resulting in months of hospitalization and rehabilitation. The same fate befalls thinly fictionalized heroine Maud (Isabelle Huppert) in the first act of this film. Later, adrift and susceptible in her diminished physical state, Maud sees a notorious, but reportedly reformed criminal (Kool Shen) on television and is intrigued by his prison-yard bluster and salt-of-the-earth charm. She ushers him into her rarefied world and promises to cast him in a lead role in her next film. At once disarming and intimidating, he amuses and teases her while slowly gaining her confidence, and soon she is underwriting his gaudy, lavish existence amidst shifty promises of reimbursement. The truth becomes clear to the viewer much sooner than it does to Maud: the relationship is poisonous and could result in her financial and personal ruin.

His character, too, is a thinly fictionalized representation of real-life criminal Christopher Rocancourt, and much of this film's storyline truly transpired between he and Breillat. Sensitive, but also unyielding, this is a riveting exorcism of personal demons via cinema. It is not an easy viewing experience, but it proves rewarding and highly poignant. "It was me, and it wasn't me," Maud hesitantly says as she tries and fails to justify or at least provide insight into her inexplicable and self-destructive actions, and the film dives directly into the maelstrom of delusion, desire, ego, isolation, and physical pain her contradictory words indicate. In the lead role, the legendary Huppert delivers a performance haunting in its details. She is completely without artifice and vanity in her portrayal of the character's debilitating physical symptoms, from her ungainly, half-dead left hand, its insistence on remaining attached to her body a nuisance, to the way she pulls herself along every hallway and road, always unsteadily slow and fearing a catastrophic fall. She also vividly renders the psychological torment endured by an artist whose cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and independent lifestyle is undermined by the day-to-day cruelties and disruptions of disability.

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