A story about a chance encounter; told in a way that gives chance, improvisation, a role of its own.Two young couples happen to be stranded in a remote spot near a chateau when their cars break down. The immense house is only inhabited by one man: the eccentric old man Raymond, who behaves like a modern Bluebeard and who seems to take pleasure i disrupting the relationships between his young guests and by psychologically undermining each of them individually.The role Raymond is literally written for Michel Piccoli. Thanks to the improvisational approach of the young director Guillaume Nicloux, Piccoli has an opportunity to work on a capricious and almost satanical character. The film is set almost exclusively huis clos inside the chateau. Alongside the five characters, the only other person who appears is the unworldly postman. The film is grim. The reactions between the characters are overwrought and aggressive; not much speaking is done but a lot of hitting. It is the grimness and the aggressive acting which Guillaume Nicloux has in common with his contemporary Arnaud Desplechin and which separates them from the more modest and often serene atmosphere of a previous generation of French film-makers.Nicloux acquires his first experience in his own theatre group and that is primarily visible in how he works with actors. They perform almost without text and certainly without written text, and primarily exploit their body language. Nicloux sees the process of film-making as an adventure of which the outcome has to be open and in which the development should not allow itself to be dictated by a psychological logic.
