NEVER leave your mobile unattended. Sleek, middle-aged Parisienne gynaecologist Catherine (Fanny Ardant) already suspects her absentee husband Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) of playing away from home, when she cannot resist playing the messages left on his cell phone one afternoon.

She discovers a "thank you" of the most intimate kind, only exacerbating the chasm that has developed in their passionless marriage. Out of paranoia, curiosity or maybe in a subliminal wish to spice up her dormant sex life, she visits a strip club and employs chain-smoking erotic dancer Nathalie (Emmanuelle Beart) to put her husband's fidelity to the test.

The sting is set in place, and so begins a weekly meeting where the beautiful, ballsy Nathalie will report full details of her latest session with Bernard, in turn stoking Catherine's anger... and more besides. Catherine is perversely drawn to Nathalie's increasingly frank descriptions, and a frisson begins to develop between the two, albeit one where they remain emotionally remote from each other.

We hear plenty of dirty talk from the voluptuous Beart - well, it will save on the phone bills to naughty chat lines - rather than seeing sex in this Gallic psychological drama. Those more used to the bed-shaking sexploits of Beatrice Dalle in Betty Blue may be frustrated by the lack of full-on French action, but the purring sound of the ever alluring Beart and the sight of her feline, gymnastic pole dancing will keep the Hello Boys brigade feeling perky for a while. And no one has smoked a cigarette so suggestively since Lauren Bacall blew in the face of Humphrey Bogart.

Trouble is, you need more than Beart's beauty and hot breath. Writer-director Anne Fontaine's ultimately frustrating and surprisingly predictable account of a love triangle is built on the premise of voyeurism from the female perspective. That should be interesting - for men and women alike - but you feel as removed and void as you did in the company of Stanley Kubrick's self-indulgent valedictory, Eyes Wide Shut.

Carnal, but not as cerebral as it thinks it is, Nathalie requires a far bigger jolt at its finale. Instead, it is an anti-climax and no one wants that in a sexy movie.

Updated: 15:56 Thursday, July 29, 2004