La Fidélité

Zulawski is an undisputed master at extracting blistering, smouldering and heartbreaking performances from his female leads, and here in this magnum opus soap-opera take on the classic 17th-century French novel La Princesse de Clèves, elicits a career-defining turn from Sophie Marceau -- who, shortly after the completion of La Fidélité, would no longer be Zulawski's real-life spouse. Marceau plays a world-class photographer whose need for steady work leads her to a sleazy Parisian tabloid; once there, she must battle out her rhapsodic affections for both a violence-obsessed paparazzi colleague and a hound-dog ineffectual publishing executive. Covering the span of many years, this baroque saga, complete with its dark labyrinth of emotional betrayals, feels like a wickedly satisfying literary journey into a culture of centuries past transposed onto a Zulawskian modern-day France -- one with organ trafficking, locker-room sex and underground dogfights pleasingly nestled alongside fancy hot-air balloon jaunts and unswerving romantic declarations"