#if there was no isobel and she were a romance option i would be losing my mind with the worst dilemma ever 💀

[what-is-it-to-be-pk-esque]

I would watch Dame Aylin kill Lorroakan a hundred times over. Like yassss queen break that stupid wizard in two!! 😍✨

[celticbarb]

📚⚔️📚⚔️📚BOOK🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿REVIEW📚⚔️📚⚔️📚

“To make women learned and foxes tame has the same effect - to make them more cunning.”

King James I of England - VI of Scotland

Book: Much Ado About A Scot

By Gerri Russell

Series: All the Kings Men, #5

Release Date: October 1, 2020

Reviewed by: Barb Massabrook of

1.Tartan Book Reviews

2. Purple Tulip Book Reviews

3. World of Historical Book Reviews

4.Celic Barb’s Kilted Book Reviews Blog

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Overallsd Rating: 5 Stars and 5 Kilts

2 August 1593

Alexander Godric Ross, is one of the Magnificent Seven working for King James VI. He is on a top secret mission to locate the traitor who is actually King James cousin, Francis Stewart, the fifth, Earl or Bothwell. He has attempted so many heinous crimes to kill his majesty, he really should have been executed or in Edinburgh’s Tolbooth prison by now. He has attempted abduction, hiring people with supernatural abilities, and murdering our sovereign while actually pooping on a chamber pot! Since he is a cousin and a family relation he has been very lenient on him. Now Alexander needs hard evidence to be able to convict this evil black guard, as Bothwell will do anything to steal his throne! Now rumors are flyinng Bothwell is going to try another murder attempt and is gathering a bunch of his brainwashed followers and possibly them into a cut throat army of spies!

The King’s spies updates the King and the Magnificent Seven that Bothwell is hiding in the village of Haddington, in the home of David Graham, at Dunbar Manor. Alexander has been keeping watch on both Graham’s home and Amelia Seton-whose lands border hers and the perfect place to spy from. In addition Alexander hears Isobel is in a bad situation losing two husbands and needing help with the harvest on her farm! The only way to obtain this is to go undercover with an alias name. Now he is known as the drunken thief, Xander Godric, to the people of Haddington plus his childhood name. Now his brother in arms were worried that he would be abused by the villagers, might get his ear nailed to wood, have his face branded with a T for thief or hand cut off!

Isabel Seton has hit rock bottom and her only option is a marriage to a complete stranger. Therefore, she offers this handsome prisoner an option for his freedom from the pillory. If she does not marry she will lose everything,her harvest, farm, property and son’s inheritance. She knows people call her names like witch and black widow, but Xander knows the woman just had some tragic bad luck. These small minded villagers were very cruel. He accepts her offer under his terms to end the marriage after two months and not a day longer and never asks questions about Xander’s past. Yet playing house as man and wife Xander falls completely in love with Isobel and her young son Jamie. He also soon realized Isabel’s life is in danger as someone burns her harvest as she is being set up for sorcery

Will Xander be able to save her in time? Will he abandon her when she needs him the most? Does Isabel think she brings bad luck to the men she loves? Does Xander and Isabel have a future? Will Jamie ever obtain a father figure that lasts? Read and find out!

Gerri Russell pens another magnificent about swoon worthy hero and a heroine who troubles broke my heart! Readers will love her fifth book book of ���All the King’s Men” series and does not leave anything out. It is a book that can be read as a stand alone book or series order.

This is a fictional romance but again factual history is brought in this book. If you know Scottish history like myself Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell really was a great conspirator. He did try to arrange the King’s death through Sorcery, attempted murder and failed abduction. This was also a difficult time for women as this King is a big believer in witchcraft and witch hunts. King James VI is the son of Mary Queen of Scots and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Of course I loved the fictional romance between Isobel and Alexander very much too. For me this book was pure perfection.

Again another riveting, fast paced, page turning, romantic adventure that historical romance readers will love. This book is also filled with treachery, blaming innocent women for non existent crimes, false confessions, jealousy, royal troublemakers who want to sit on the throne, twists and turns not knowing what to anticipate next. Plus the treatment of women in the sixteenth century for witchcraft and how they tortured them was absolutely horrifying! It was how they got a forced confession which was absolutely frightening. If you read the true history. this part is very true which is truly heartbreaking. I absolutely loved this book so much and a book to definitely re-visit again.

All The King’s Men Series:

1)Seven Nights with a Scot

2)Romancing the Laird

3)A Temptress in Tartan

4)A Laird and a Gentleman

5)Much Ado About A Scot

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary ARC copy from the publisher. I voluntarily agreed to read, review and blog an advance copy of this book. All thoughts, ideas and opinions are my own.

BUY-LINKS:

https://www.amazon.com/Much-About-Scot-Kings-Book-ebook/dp/B08FF6QQP6/ref=nodl_

https://books.google.com/books/about/Much_Ado_About_a_Scot.html?id=l5j6DwAAQBAJ

https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/much-ado-about-a-scot-gerri-russell/1137452316?ean=2940162785828

https://books.apple.com/us/book/much-ado-about-a-scot/id1526864757

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/much-ado-about-a-scot?utm_source

[ratherhavetheblues]

PAUL VERHOEVEN’S  ELLE “You’re so selfish it’s frightening…”/ “I know…”

© 2017 by James Clark

   This film (from 2016) is as devoted to the undeclared war, between old world-history and something beyond that, as Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997). The latter, in its denouement, pours out a Bronx cheer upon an oldie for the sake of its overwhelmed eccentrics, knowing all too well that victories will be very scarce and very incomplete. Elle shows us what such victory of the “selfish” self-starters is apt to look like.

   Our more than unusual protagonist, Michele, on being raped one evening in her house by a figure pleased to look like Spider-Man, has her doctor arrange a STD blood test next day—a “full panel”—and, in line with the physical and financial authority she exerts, the specialist suggests a new medication, PEP. She has already covered that avenue and declares, “Too many side-effects… I can’t miss any work.” She adds, metaphorically blowing the roof off the tony clinic devoted to classical science, “I guess we roll the dice…” Albert Einstein, a master of pushing the envelope the better to hide out, poured forth a Bronx cheer of sorts upon youthful researchers in the early days of quantum studies, who were struck by a creative field shot through with uncertainties, by, that is, unpredictability in the ways of nature as crucially including humans. He capsulized his contempt for those renegades by declaring, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Immediately after that appointment she and we are in the midst of the first of a series of locales (at Christmas time) where chains of small white lights flash about, approximating elemental phenomena soaring in electrodynamic outbursts. That such heady take-offs are far from carefree is announced—truth to tell, with nearly as much shock as the oddly truncated sexual assault—at a lunch bar (lights in its doorway and visible through the whole scene) where a splenetic diner dumps the dregs of her tray all over Michele’s shoulder and sleeve, along with the denunciation, “Scum! You and your father!” Her still and silent response is a reprise of her undemonstrative rally after the rape.

   Although several melodramatic narratives seem to be vying for attention which would pay dividends, we might find that the outcomes very closely approximate that inconsequentiality of the suicidal obsessive in Taste of Cherry; and that it is the major-league (which means far from perfect) coordination of Michele amidst myriad cons and a few pros which lifts the proceedings to regal stature. (Isobel Huppert’s performance as Michele, though marvellous, constitutes another distraction by which those not having a clue about what is going on can invest the action with a shot of the “powerful,” which can mean anything they want it to mean. This is, in fact, a film [like so many of Kiarostami’s works, and those of Jarmusch] to embrace, not to pigeonhole.)

   The out-of-the-starting-gate-assault upon Michele brings her emotive sensibility to the forefront where it endeavors to thrive—until she loses heart. The remarkably abbreviated outrage consists of a longish run of black screen with screams and smashes to set the tone of cosmic pitfall rather than protracted prosecution and life-long emotional pain. The visuals, when they do come, show a swift trespass and an equally abrupt exit involving his wiping her blood from his midriff with a piece of fabric torn from her dress. Far more absorbing than the chaotic intimacy is Michele’s prompt rally, from being sprawled out on the floor, as her limbs take carnal precedence over the option of a crusade. The closing of the scene is as understated as the rest. The torque of her spine brings her upright. Then she’s seen to be vigorously clearing away broken Chinaware from the tablecloth she had clutched as a straw. Then to a bubble bath from out of the pretty froth of which a red stain surfaces for the sake of an organism with better things to do. Then she’s on the phone ordering sushi delivery. “What’s a Holiday Roll?” she needs to know at that moment when more mainstream women would be asking what the police can do for her. In comes her 20-something son, Vincent, with whom she has some daunting business while sampling the quick bites, Vincent having very recently suspended his drug dealing and now planning to spend the rest of his life as a father to his girl friend’s imminent baby. Michele is no enthusiast to that conventional conversion, referring to the-mother-to-be as “clearly dysfunctional…She hasn’t a clue. She was raised in a commune by unwashed idiots…” (Vincent thinks to correct an oversight, by interjecting, “An arts collective…”) He drops his chopsticks, along an almost endless vista of proceeding in darkness. Nevertheless, she acts as if he might be induced to acknowledge that the romance is a travesty (physical rapists being brief; child-scammers being nearly endless). “Why you? What’s she after?” The now-burger-joint-employee, experienced in contretemps with the police, reads out, “What could she be after? I have no money…” Michele rhetorically slaps him around with, “I have.” The hardened lawbreaker comes back with the fat-cat-in-the-wings complicity, “What’s with you today?”

   That sprung-by-powers-that-be significantly includes Michele—for all her hard-boiled push-back in a world of uncertainty—who goes on to evince a striking indifference to probability. She feels some obligation (details of which coming up, as the heart of this film) to set them up in what is more a consortium than a marriage—her asking Vincent if “the black guy left” and the love story disclosing, before long, that three’s-a-crowd at the maternity ward with its black baby. The designated money machine coughs out (for starters) a three-month down payment on a one-bedroom flat. On her inspection of the outlay, she finds that the happy couple have taken possession of a spacious two-bedroom (Josie, of the arts collective, declaring the place Michele had tolerated to be “a dump”). Josie refers to a wall accommodating very well a 120 cm television screen, and Vincent concurs, “A TV makes a better homecoming gift than a microwave…” On the seeming cash cow’s finding the arrangement not to her liking the long-term, publicly-fed dignitary delivers, “I don’t give a shit about your money!” In response to our protagonist’s asking, “How will you get by?” [without it], the lifetime parasite obliquely moots a return to crime, which she reckons Michele can’t stomach. (At which point, of course, Michele’s most resolved and fertile move would be to let them twist in the wind. That nothing of the sort takes place makes clear that new-frontier precepts by the likes of Kiarostami are not in vigorous force, but rather that the fount of generosity within that bountiful sensuousness at the heart of Michele’s adventure is dangerously broken. Verhoeven and his writers want us to contemplate not the rarities of deep dynamics, but those more numerous anti-heroes who should not be entirely dismissed.)

   When was the last time we encountered such vain and rude delusion just waiting to be squashed like a bug? Why, of course, in Kiarostami’s Ten, where a “collective”-comfort imam has primed his early adolescent son to pour viciously arrogant charges upon his secular and investigative mother, now happily divorced. Perhaps better still, she rope-a-dopes the doctrinal child into full-time with a dad who had been too busy with righteousness to contribute to raising him. Her “Alright” [you’ll never again inhabit such an evil orbit] does not end her having to deal with various and odious assailants; but getting the little complainer dumped into outer space fosters her outreach (longshot, to be sure) to find some tuning at a better than savage level. During Josie’s address from her imaginary dais, Michele states to Vincent, “You see she’s an idiot…” Fair enough, on one count; but has that matrix somehow disarmed her capacity to pull the trigger which the lady in Tehran so satisfyingly did? After beholding the considerable aplomb of our protagonist’s maintaining cogent traction after the attack by a stranger/ action hero (she accounting, to Vincent, for her abrasions, as falling off her bike—definitely a rhythm or system having been interrupted; but, then again, it’s very unlikely she is a confirmed cyclist at all), we feel embarrassed for her allowing her anger toward Josie to impel her to name-drop her previous coup in the land of twitchy-fingered cyber-games. In response, Josie, clueless except for the dregs of visceral provocation, induces Vincent into a long kiss while keeping her eyes on the older sucker, in the capacity of bringing off a clever heist, a variant of rape. (Over sushi, Vincent had assured his mother, “I planned to ask you to provide collateral, not money.”) As a measure of Michele’s more resolved interpersonal energies, there is her visit, after the daring at the blood lab, to her mother, now devoted to Botox and a well-paid young boyfriend. The latter asks, “What would you say if I remarried?” Our protagonist finds some fire in the belly, as expressed, “It’s simple. I’d kill you. No need to think.” The elder mumbles out, “You always wanted a sanitized sense of life… You’re so selfish it’s frightening…”/ “I know,” the tough-talker quietly admits. Within that quietness, we discern far from an acknowledgement of a sanitized sense of life. An earthy uncanniness has descended upon her, a perspective endowing her with the sense that very few people count for anything to her. Finding the paradox that that’s so, and not so, keeps her flipping haplessly like a character in the grotty profit centres she calls a career. (Terrence Malick’s Song to Song [2016] is a kindred spirit to Michele’s showy rout, amongst movies where the stars are largely lost; but in their very lostness being light-years beyond Einstein and his ilk.)

    That being the case, the swarm of incident features feckless appalment surrounding Michele’s on-again/ off-again delivery of warrior initiative. The pseudo-parents split on the hardly credible grounds of Vincent being unable to keep up the payments on his car as prompting him to quit his job because the Metro is a swarm of germs. At the hospital, she’s too disgusted to stick around simpering at the alien baby; and seated with a nurse on the grounds she declares, “Sometimes I have to admit I don’t know him” [Vincent]. She moots that her child died at birth and that the lout she calls her son was the result of a bureaucratic error. The father of this error is more of the same, she having ditched him years before, but maintaining cordial relations nevertheless. He’s a college literature professor, prone to believe that the real must be what serves interests making him feel good. He decries the field she’s in, inasmuch as it’s focused upon “a demographic oblivious to quality…” He’s invited, as usual, to her Christmas Eve party (a hiving of those little lights); and, as usual, he bores the assembly with his ideals of a rationality whose time has come, and gone. “The art muscle needs training. That’s what we’ve got now—flabby culture!” While Michele, unhappy about that drift, tries to arouse the neighbor, Patrick, by rubbing his leg with her foot—Patrick now clearly to her the first assailant seen, the early mistake drones on, “Originality or singularity used to be valued and sought after.” (To twist the knife farther, the ex [Richard] is dating a yoga instructor [Helene], also at the table, whom Michele had visited at her studio and heard her rounding off a class reminding them to give motion to the floor, roll-the-dice-style. Helene’s connection with Richard crashes when she gives the wrong answer—another Richard—to his demand, “Which of my novels is your favorite?” The art-muscle maven jumps at the chance to contribute to a constituency oblivious to quality, namely, those addicted to pricey games; and, in the final frame, Michele and her business partner, Anna, chortle about playing him along to be inevitably dumped back to the church of academia.) During the Christmas feast, the protagonist’s mother and the rapist’s wife prove to be loyal viewers of Midnight Mass on TV, filmed in such an array of spectacular and bulky costuming and baroque decor as to veer toward the flashy hulks populating the works-in-progress that Michele never finds embarrassing enough to quit.

   The structure of the narrative is such that the early episodes (ending on Christmas Eve) find her to be a devote in fairly good standing of that roll which promises to change everything. And as we proceed with her downfall we must realize that the pulse of the work does not unduly dwell on her personal loss, but rather the leeway she takes to delude herself all is well. Verhoeven and his writer outriders provide us with a visceral disaster the better to convey the nature of a most wide-spread evasion. Minutes after the Midnight Mass, Michele’s mother suffers a massive stroke and dies on Christmas morning. During the meal, her daughter had noisily and cruelly laughed when her mother announced she was engaged to be married to a gigolo. Though a stupid move, the hostess, in being such a crude ass, was showing downward motion in face of an array of alien guests. She maintains that errancy by questioning the doctor, later that night, if the bride-to-be could be faking. (Her mother, soon after the ridicule, had denounced her with, “You’re cruel when you find anything or anyone unpleasant…”) Before sinking into a coma, her mother urges her to visit her father who had been in prison for 39 years after a rampage of serial murder, ostensibly in revenge for no longer being able to deliver ritual benediction to the neighboring children. Michele had filled out more detail of intent in telling Patrick, with the Midnight Mass still polling healthy numbers, “He decided to burn everything in the house. I helped feed the fire… It was exciting. You get caught up in it! The police arrived and someone snapped a photo. Bizarrely, it’s that photo that stuck in people’s minds… The photo of a little- girl psychopath, next to her father, the psychopath… My empty stare in the photo is terrifying…” Her mother, in tasking her to see her father, counted on some vestiges of valuable residual sparks. No such eventuation would be likely to register in our protagonist’s wading through a quagmire of contradictory initiatives. But the stamp of death delivers her to an investigation she could not have explained (just as the investigation on tap with her assailant). Informed of the child he found unwelcome, he commits suicide before she arrives. She bends over his body at the morgue and imagines herself on track by whispering, “I killed you by coming here.”

    On the drive back, she’s reached by a gutter-journalist wanting a juicy statement about the sensation. That a deer dashes across the highway causing her to crash in some trees, suggests how far from managing ferocious motions her rambling has become. She calls Patrick who pulls her out of the wreck; she takes to using a cane; and, though she does regain full control of her limbs and joints, she goes on to forever be an ungainly, self-impressed, bourgeoise brute (resembling a Bunuel target; but having that extra dimension of invoking [weakly] the heady uncertainty of true power. Whereas Bunuel reveled in figures undergoing bemusing, quasi-miraculous pathology, Verhoeven loves the entirely carnal, this-worldly, stomach-churning ride which Michele provides, in its [crippled] mission of uncanny concord.)

   That smash-up in the woods was the prelude to an irony-soaked disintegration. While his wife is visiting the Vatican, Patrick hosts Michele and a Vincent in exile over a bit of precious transportation. They all have a hankering for good and copious wine, with the eternal boy getting drunk and musing that the Pope couldn’t have mere feet. (In a saga of traction, this bites.) The sort-of-father passes out; and Michele observes, “Eyes bigger than his belly.” The shortage of guts does of course also pertain to her. (What to make of her masturbating while viewing Patrick from her window as he installs the santons in his yard?) While Vincent saws logs, she is introduced to a cutting-edge design feature of the unstable neighbor’s house, which keeps the floors warm on cold winter nights. The name for this creature-comfort is ‘inverted flame combustion.” It nips at her upside-down sensibility. She allows herself to be taken on a tour of that marvel, situated in the basement, and to be once again violently raped. Her ambiguous groans devolve to waking up Vincent where he lies on the sofa; going across the road to her own brand of inverted dispensation; and, in the course of which, calling back to her catastrophic partner, “Thank you for dinner.” (“Any time,” the perfect road kill triumphs.) Her hobbling across by means of that cane reminds us of the rancid pillar of society and his fetid approach to history, in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us. The cut to Michele’s celebrating another big cash flow in the violent horror digital games dodge beats her up even worse than Patrick did. We have visited several times our guide to real-time violent horror at the animation studio she owns and operates. The central motif of this workaday/workanight industry consists of one of her staff, namely, Kurt (with the body build and hostility making him an early suspect of rapist-Spider Man), hectoring Michele for obtusely designing a literature-based vehicle when something more visceral is required. On the first glimpse of that Klondike seam, she refers to a previous coup readily making a fortune and reminds him that she is the boss—somewhat. By the time more big money is the order of the day, we’re treated to a snippet of the new product sure to keep kissing-cousins, of the righteous rat in Ten, up all night. There in all its supposed glory, a hot girl strides our way, emerging from a furnace that might be called “inverted-flame combustion.” But, this being a big-stakes game, Kurt has taken over some of the desperate abysses stalking Michele and being repelled by her pragmatic side. During the wrap-up party, she singles out Kurt as the main reason they’re all in the money. (Patrick has been invited; and though, from his stock market brokerage perspective, he declares, when Michele encourages him to sample the game’s addictive logic, “I’m not a game-player,” we can readily recognize his being very comfortably in the big tent of jerking off, a drift Jarmusch has been studying for years; and a drift another player, from way back, namely, Martin Heidegger, pondered in terms of “concern” and “everydayness.”) That Michele has departed all vestiges of being on the scent of an equilibrium (almost) too hot to handle has been handled in a very fine way, in the form of a call for a toast from management. Anna blurts out an inane expression of being happy, and then all Michele can say, about a career she’s sliding toward shareholder-status, is, “I couldn’t put it any better.” To round out a reception rubbing her very much the wrong way, she informs Anna that she’s been fucking her husband for several months. (Two incidents form a crazy alliance displaying the bewildering spin of loyalty Michele finds ultimately unmanageable. She discovers that it was the seemingly most emotionally positive staffer who had devised and circulated the CGI of the game’s hulk raping her. And it is Patrick’s widow, on leaving town, who thanks her for having provided the, in her words, “tortured soul, but essentially good” felon a bit of happiness. Michele’s gaze in this context of disinterestedness is a study of being touched by a monumental ignorance which she, for all her bravery and sophistication, cannot match. Her intentional decision to skitter into that woodwork where mechanistic, mathematical dynamics prevail would constitute tolerating the absurdity and boredom of “common sense” and its hastily assembled dogmas of science, humanitarianism and religion. On consulting the documentary news program pertaining to the empty motions for parole for her father, who added butchery of pets to butchery of owners, a sparrow crashes into her window and is immediately pounced upon by her black cat, Marty (a name carrying loads of bemusing domesticated insistence), who was an equivocal witness to the first rape. Michele, though slow to shoo Marty away, lovingly places the body on a soft cloth and covers the small life in a carriage-trade container. Late at night she’s intercepted by Patrick on her way to the recycle bin. He calls out, “I hope that’s recyclable!” She, all vestiges of mourning having disappeared, calls back, “It’s [only] a dead bird!”)

    She catches a ride home from Patrick, her slap-in the-face-mode partaking of the suicidal. As the miles go by for this nebulous and yet weighty partnership, she sees fit to denounce his failings. “…twisted… diseased!” she mentions, in a resort to a new (and very old) universe of vocabulary. “I was in some kind of weird denial [Where did that caffeeklatch miasma come from?]. But I see it now… You don’t expect to get away with what you did to me?... I’ll go to the police… [at the film’s outset, nothing could have induced her to consult a policing regime she regarded as inferior to her own attending to her needs].” She adds, “I’ll tell them everything!” But we have an angle that makes certain she’s in no frame of mind to go anywhere near that far—the true far being abandoned entirely in this pestilence of easy verity. While she is still intent on a rapid transformation to becoming as innocuous as everyone else— “There’s your wife, too…” [and how many other women had to endure that clownish savagery?] —Patrick attempts to kill her in her living room. Vincent, who had been waitering at the awesome party, intervenes in time to smash off much of Spider-Man’s skull with a fireplace log. (Omnipresent Netflix.) The large whiff of death wish in her awaiting him to don his stupid outfit at home and smash through the garden door is something else we shouldn’t fail to factor into the loss of a serious player of rolling the dice, of choosing a shot of exploration, for the sake of real excitement. She bullshits the detective as the body bag goes by, doing an effective facsimile of a long-range pussy like everyone else. “Who could have imagined that!” [being an ally of sorts with a public enemy]. With this brazen lockdown Michele is Elle, indeed—a she, and nothing else; someone to have her ass kissed for being a smart little cookie. After braining Patrick, Vincent falls to pieces and his mother tells him, “It’s over.” She buys him an expensive car, the priceless Josie returns; and we see them paying a visit to the Bank of Mom, momentarily forgetting there is a baby on board. Their sit-com lives (now Michele’s life as well) are far from over. She and Anna, now having fired her worse half, pay a mainstream visit to Michele’s mother’s grave—something the former Michele would not have seen fit to do, but now being perfect since the end of real life. (She had, not long before, articulated to Anne the lynchpin of her defeat. “Shame has never prevented anyone doing what they want.”)  As mentioned, from the perspective of what is likely to be Montparnasse Cemetery (where self-promotion is the name of the game), along the route to the Port Royal Maternity Ward and its own kind of self-promotion, the wheeler dealers dump on the idea of Richard making serious money, his fogged-in intuition going for naught.

   Talk about writing, Elle’s writing crew puts on a show of sterling discursive logic which someone really should attend to. The screenplay, by David Birke, might tend to be overshadowed by the film’s cascade of physical, stunning and relentless viciousness. But Birke (no doubt in close coordination with Verhoeven) has woven within the fabric of the hyperactive narrative a dark and discerning comedy. Not, however, to forget the writer of the novel, Oh, Phillippe Djian, from which the film more or less stems, who would also have been instrumental.