Vanessa Paradis doesn't make too many movies, preferring rather obviously to nurse her career as a French pop star and be Johnny Depp's other half. Her most recent role of any note was in The Girl on the Bridge in 1998, and presumably it was the connection with that film's scriptwriter, Serge Frydman, that tempted her to take the lead role in his directorial debut. Frydman has concoted a film that comes on like a Low Country answer to Gloria, the John Cassavetes film about a woman forced to look after a kid who is being hunted down by gangsters.

In a very Gallic reorientation, Paradis plays a shop-window prostitute landed with a schoolboy and the key to a locker full of cash after his mother is murdered by a pimp. The dank, whisky-sour storyline sits rather oddly with the cheery, gabled landscape of Holland and Belgium that forms the film's backdrop; Frydman seems to be trying a little too hard to put clear blue water between his film and more traditional noir atmospheres. Paradis brings a certain leggy intensity to the role, but her character's motivations are never convincingly reconciled with her fecklessness. A curiosity of a film, rather than a special one.