In a crowded nightclub, Nelly (Isabelle Huppert), bourgeois-bred and married to an advertising executive, is taking her passions out for air. She finds herself dancing with a happy, drunken lout, leaves with him, and stays with him. Maurice Pialat, consummate director of character, explores a woman's multifarious desires for sexual liberation in Loulou. (The film is drawn from the life of the screenwriter Arlette Langmann.) Though the title carries the name of Gérard Depardieu's leather-jacketed lothario Loulou, it is as object, not subject. Depardieu graciously plays along, before our eyes calibrating his outsized, undereducated, hypersexual character to Huppert/Nelly's perception of him. Nelly and Loulou make stabs at normal living—she continues to work for her husband, they play their part in a typically animated Pialat family gathering. But when they walk off into the night at film's end, it's not forever after, but until desire is played out.