‘Love After Love’ (NR)

In Diane Kurys's lamentable "Love After Love," the issue is adultery. In most places, infidelity is seen as a fall from grace; here, it's viewed as a natural part of life, like having a membership at a gym.

Not only do Kurys's characters have lovers, their lovers have lovers -- lovers and children out of wedlock and eager future partners. The central character is Lola (Isabelle Huppert), a novelist who lives with an architect named David (Bernard Giraudeau). As the movie opens, David is throwing a birthday party for her, but just as the cake is brought out, she slips outside to meet Tom (Hippolyte Girardot), a musician with a wife and kids of his own.

After Lola's embarrassing tryst with Tom, you might expect a flurry of temper from David, but since he has a couple of children with Marianne (Lio), who telephones him at all hours, he's hardly in a position to protest. In the hands of another filmmaker, this scenario might give rise to a torrent of passion and guilt, but Kurys's people are portrayed as being too worldly and sophisticated for either.

What's amazing here is that so little seems to happen. Even with all the bed-hopping, the action feels empty and without genuine conflict. It's like a menage a mannequin. Partly, this is because Kurys isn't interested in examining the moral implications of her characters' actions; in fact, her previous movies -- "Entre Nous," "A Man in Love," "C'est la Vie" -- seemed completely without a moral dimension.

Perhaps this explains why they play like art house versions of bad romance novels. In Kurys's world, affairs aren't bad because they're hurtful or dishonest, but because they create such sticky scheduling problems.