Alors

IN THE SHADOW OF WOMEN (B-minus) - Another relationship churn from the Garrel squad.

Veteran French filmmaker Philippe Garrel ("Burning Hot Summer," "Jealousy") burrows deep into a love triangle, sticking close to his wheelhouse. We follow glum Pierre (Stanislas Merhar), a struggling filmmaker, who works with the aid of his wife, Manon (Clotilde Courau), and uneventfully ends up in the bed of a young intern, Elisabeth (newcomer Lena Paugam).

Pierre is anything but excited by the thrill of the cheat. In fact, he is downright miserable, and outside of the romps with a hot young thing, he shows no emotion or joy. Merhar comes off as a working class Keith Urban with a nasty Kurt Cobain streak. A narrator (Louis Garrel, the director's son) conveys Pierre's thoughts, which skew mostly to whines about the curse of being a stereotypical male.

The women fare a little better. Paugam comes off as a bit of a prop, but Courau, as the bewitched wife, is a perfectly controlled roller-coaster of emotions throughout. It turns out that Manon has a secret of her own. That sparks a hypocritical hissy fit on the part of Pierre, who responds the only way he knows how: by launching stinging putdowns to her and his innocent young lover.

Yet, neither woman wants to quit him. Yes, it's quite French. A subplot about the subject of Pierre's documentary -- a French resistance fighter from WWII -- exists, apparently, to contrast Pierre's petulance with the gravitas of the Greatest Generation.

Garrel shoots in crisp black-and-white, which fits the throwback New Wave mood. He also reels this in at 73 minutes. If you know that going in, you'll have more patience for these brooding agonistes.