Now, Jacquot does "male gaze" better than anybody, scrutinizing young women at a level of detail that would be embarrassing if his skills as a visual filmmaker weren't so impressive. And while his previous U.S. release, last year's Seventh Heaven (Le Septiéme ciel), was weighed down with the albatross of heavy-handed psychoanalytical musings, this film is a return to luminous form. Jacquot's aesthetic mastery stems in part from his fruitful working relationship with cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who previously photographed his equally lovely The Disenchanted (La Désenchantée) and A Single Girl (La Fille Seule). The widescreen shots are assembled by ace film editor Luc Barnier (known for his work with Olivier Assayas), who finds sublime connections between disparate images and takes full advantage of the juxtaposition. The result is a film with a poetic rhythm that taps into the sometimes half-cocked logic of impulse and emotions.

Far more than American film, French cinema pays tribute to the idea that human behavior is often inexplicable. A perfectly reasonable response to this film, for instance, would be to ask what on earth a well-heeled professional with Huppert's looks and demeanor thinks she's doing, mooning after an angular gigolo whose idea of a good time is a video game in a dark, noisy arcade. As Woody Allen put it before stepping out with Soon-Yi, "the heart wants what it wants," and obviously other organs do too.

Once you've accepted Dominique's neediness, there's a lot to enjoy in this film -- not least Huppert's own face, oddly serene in its tear-streaked blankness. This film's American doppelganger would be Living Out Loud, which placed Holly Hunter in a similar midlife situation, but with whimsy and sentimentality. The School of Flesh is more sober than that film (no choreographed dance routines here), and relies on less identifiable character trajectories. But both films are admirably apt at creating a central female character who's both beneficiary and victim of her upper-class environs, and who's impulsively pushing at the envelope of her sexual routine.

The film closes on a little coda that recalls the epilogue that nearly wrecked the understated elegance of A Single Girl. The difference this time around is that Jacquot has given us more reasons to care about what these people think of one another in retrospect, and that the words they share in the film's closing moments have an impact on our understanding of the strange love affair that has come and gone. If The School of Flesh is in some ways the least demanding of Jacquot's features so far, it's also the most traditional, the most accessible, and in some ways the most valuable.