Special Treatment

Synopsis: Alice (Isabelle Huppert) is an upmarket prostitute who is sick of her life. Xavier (Bouli Lanners) is a psychoanalyst who is sick of his. The two meet and find that they have much in common.

Ten years ago Isabelle Huppert seemed to be in most of the French films that arrived on our shores. She regularly played cold, hard characters, often with some kind of sexually-motivated emotional disturbance. Her performance as a self-harming masochist in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher was typical of her specialty. Although she has worked continuously since we have seen little of her. Well, now she’s back and doing what she does best - playing a cold, hard characters with some kind of sexually-motivated emotional disturbance.

We don’t know anything about Alice other than that she provided sexual services to middle-aged men. Clearly however she’s tired of it. The other hand we know a fair bit about Xavier. He is living in a condition of what Sartre called "bad faith"  - he’s no longer interested in his wife or his job and everyone, even his patients, can see through him. Both Alice and Xavier assuage their sense of emptiness by buying expensive objets d’art. As we find out, this becomes an important element in their stories.

For much of its running time, Sans Queue Ni Tête, which translates as “Without Head Or Tail” a much apter title than Special Treatment, seems to be yet another instalment in the seemingly endless catalogue of French films dealing with one form or another of middle-class sexual behaviour . But about two-thirds in, after Xavier visits some kind of kinky sex club, the film shifts gear, moving from familiar voyeuristic titillation to more realistic matters.This comes with the introduction of a psychiatrist (Richard Debuisne) who represents the antithesis of Alice’s and Xavier’s aimless lives, and who profoundly disturbs Alice’s defences.

One might say that the turn-around is a too easy and in real life terms it is. But stepping beyond the conventional bourgeoisie-behaving-badly cinematic template, Labrune, who co-wrote the story with Debuisne, offers a quite poignant story about the eternal search for love.

 

 

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