Prostitutes and psychoanalysts are poured from the same bottle. At least, that's the somewhat obvious point of writer/director Jeanne Labrune's intriguing but ultimately laboured film. Bound by the seemingly cold and airless world of French upper classes, Labrune makes her case without the courage to face the coal black world she presents. Perhaps she fell foul of a therapist, or a prostitute. It's hard to tell.

Alice (Isabelle Huppert) is good at her job, offering clients the specialist care they need whether ball-gagged and eating from a dog bowl or as a 50's housewife. She has an exit strategy involving antiques and in this search, encounters Xavier (Bouli Lanners), a therapist whose domestic life is unravelling. It's clear she can help him, but can he help her? Does she even need help? While these are questions that could propel a better film, they signal the frustration that is Special Treatment.

Lengthy passages and unrelated subplots (witness Alice's girlfriend or Xavier's unlikely visit to a sex club with pigs) serve to illuminate their character, but do nothing for the film as a whole. Labrune's inconsistent screenplay is her film's greatest weakness as once the earlier professional point has been made, she's left herself nowhere to go. On the upside, Huppert is effortlessly watchable and a hotel room scene between her and Lanners offers the film's best moment in its raw simplicity.

It's not that Special Treatment is uninteresting exactly, just withheld, as if Labrune is frightened of where her characters might take her given the opportunity. And she's presented herself a terrific opportunity, one that makes you wonder where a different director, Dispentes (Baise Moi) or Noé (Irreversible) perhaps, might have gone. A darker place certainly, but one fundamentally more satisfying.

// COLIN FRASER
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