A captivating and beautifully shot love story.

It is offbeat, with shafts of tender feeling and truth. But trying to touch on too many subjects makes the film uneven.

Very beautifully shot, in widescreen and luminous black-and-white, it is also formally astonishing, with all the minor characters serving as variations on the central couple.

To Demy, unrequited love remains an essential and inevitable element of the human condition; the most wonderful, horrible part of being alive