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Just as Lé os Carax made an uneasy attempt in Pola X to find a modern screen idiom for Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Andrzej Zulawski here tries to film Madame Lafayette's 17th-century novel The Princess of Cleves, set in a France of the near future.

The result is a bizarre, extended melodrama with its own strange sense of urgency. However, its operatic emotions are never anything other than absurd, and the theme of marital fidelity is entirely lost in the blizzard of commercial and sexual modernity with which Zulawski bombards us.

Sophie Marceau, beautiful as ever, plays Clé lia, a photographer who is always snapping away with her camera at "real life" and naturally transforming it with her passionate, artistic gaze. Words cannot convey how incredibly irritating she is. Anyway, Sophie is hired by bullish media mogul Mac Roi (Michel Subor), to put a bit of class into his tabloid, La Vé rité . So artistic Sophie has to enter the morally squalid world of a tabloid newspaper office, which Zulawski imagines to be all white and brilliantly lit like an art installation but populated by bohemian drunks staggering around screaming.

For some reason, Mac Roi publishes Sophie's blurred pics in some kind of artistic supplement. Meanwhile, Sophie has married the patrician publisher Clè ve (Pascal Greggory) but is tempted by the young photographer Nemo (Guillaume Canet), with a funky barbed-wire tattoo, who appears to be an investigative reporter, shrugging off danger as he blows the lid off child prostitution in Asia and the black market in body parts.

The film shows Andrzej Zulawski to be as innocent as a child about how the mass media works. Mac Roi, who is supposed to be such a crude tabloid merchant, would not be interested in these earnest investigations, which in any case require expensive teams of reporters, not a single hunky guy with a camera and a leather jacket. The fact that every single aspect of the movie's world is so strenuously unreal precludes us from taking it seriously.

Last year at Cannes, the veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira presented his own modernisation of Madame Lafayette in La Lettre, and that too was a little absurd, but it was carried off more lightly, more simply and with more otherworldly charm than Zulawski's cumbersome epic.

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