At 86, French master Alain Resnais spins a tale of romantic obsession, knowingly accentuating the surreal possibilities of le cinema – and how perfectly it can be applied to the arbitrary, unfettering force of passion. Winner of the Special Jury Award at Cannes 2009.

“Over six decades after he made his first film, Alain Resnais shows no signs of having lost any of the artistic audacity that made films like Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and Providence classics of modern(ist) cinema...

Taken from a novel by Christian Gailly entitled L’ Incident, the film explores with enormous wit, elegance and insight how one small, seemingly trivial event – the theft of a woman’s purse – can lead, by the most improbable and digressive of routes, to something comparatively very substantial and significant: a matter, in fact, of lives and deaths. The purse in question belongs to dentist Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), and it is found, devoid of money and cards, by Georges (André Dussollier)...

The theft and discovery of the purse brings not only these characters together in a weird and wonderful story... but also Georges’ wife (Anne Consigny), a policeman (Mathieu Amalric), Marguerite’s friend and surgery partner (Emmanuelle Devos), and sundry others. In other words, it’s one of Resnais’ more discursive pieces, gradually broadening out from the obsessive and often perverse mindscape of Georges to include a range of idiosyncracies, all dealt with with such a light touch that eventually the film quite literally spirals off into the ether... This latest confection, light as a soufflé, effervescent as a glass of cold champagne, and bittersweet as chocolate, feels like a summation of all the best things in Resnais’ oeuvre.” — Geoff Andrew, Time Out

“At once buoyant and melancholy, heady and erotic – a delirium of contradictory desires... Resnais, a master choreographer of camera movement, has never been this inventive or this free.” — Amy Taubin, Film Comment

“This realistic fairytale is orchestrated with something of a magic touch by a director who can’t seem to put a foot wrong, even as he approaches his 87th birthday.” — Dan Fainaru, Screendaily