"I've loved four men. I've killed two of them." It's the sort of admission you'd expect from a typical French femme fatale in a film noir.

Nora may be French, but she's not your usual scheming murderess. In fact, she's the stereotypical embodiment of a bourgeoise career woman and mother.

Except she's has skeletons in her closet. To be honest, even the skeletons in her cupboard have their own secrets festering away in the dark recesses of the family history.

We see her life through her own eyes - a student affair that ended in death and the birth of her son and her subsequent relationship with the irrepressible Ismael (Almaric).

It's his story that provides the second narrative - how he finds himself in a mental hospital after being sectioned by his sister for "damaging the family name."

It sounds like a tortuous process but the loosely-assembled plotting allows the characters to breathe, taking detours down dramatic sideroads before returning to the main path.

Nora's is the sober story, a chilling journey of young love snuffed out and her apparently sunny relationship with her terminally ill father hiding a dark secret.

Ismael provides the laughs. He's a clownish asylum inmate and viola player who asserts that "women have no soul" (to Catherine Deneuve's indulgent psychiatrist).

His psychiatric hospital seems like no other - the pharmacy practically runs an open-door policy for chemical goodies while nurses feel free to shag the patients. You wouldn't get it on the NHS.

The bond that links them is Nora's son Elias - and Ismael's poignant explanation why he can't adopt him is one of the most poignant and wise moments in a movie never short of either.

Persuasive proof that water can be thicker than blood.

Tim Evans