Pity the bourgeois: everyone has it in for them, from punk rockers to novelists to filmmakers. Cue French director Patrice Chéreau, whose 1998 film Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train essayed the grief of bohemians mourning a late friend. That film was a warm, human triumph, but Gabrielle -- adapted from Joseph Conrad's story The Return -- finds its gifted director struggling to say something profound about the sad, sterile lives of monied folks.

Stone-faced Pascale Greggory is well cast: his role consists mostly of rambling monologues over frowning close-ups. He has reason to scowl: his wife Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert) leaves a note explaining she's left him for another man, and then returns as if nothing happened.

It's an old-fashioned two-hander as a pair of unhappy people tiptoe around each other in well-manicured surroundings before throwing down with emotional fisticuffs. Chéreau tricks out his tale with a variety of stylistic devices (shifts from black and white to colour, large-type text that occasionally translates the characters' unspoken thoughts) but the carefully deployed artifice is stifling rather than stimulating.