"France's Henry Bernstein was an enormously popular playwright in the period between the two world wars but his enjoyably trashy melodramas are now considered 'unplayable' by critics for whom good taste is all. In filming his 1929 play Mélo (as in melodrama), Alain Resnais has taken a calculated gamble, particularly since until now he's scorned the very idea of adaptation. Resnais triumphs, successfully bringing the pleasures of theatre to film, not by 'opening up' the play-and certainly not by camping it up or embalming it-but by emphasizing its theatricality. In this he is aided by extraordinarily nuanced performances by the central players in this doomed ménage-à-trois: André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi. Not only is the musical structure the director finds so fascinating in the playwright's work brought to the fore, but as the characters in this wildly unfashionable story move under a painted sky through an obviously artificial set, they mysteriously succeed in moving us deeply." Peter Scarlet