Synopsis
Paris doctor Catherine starts to think her husband, Bernard, is having an affair when she hears an unfamiliar woman's message on his voice mail. Hoping to learn more about his extramarital activities, Catherine heads to a strip club, where she hires call girl Nathalie to have a fling with Gerard. As the affair progresses, Nathalie gives Catherine regular status reports, and the relationship between the women evolves from business to personal.
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Cast
- Fanny ArdantCatherine
- Emmanuelle BéartNathalie / Marlène
- Gérard DepardieuBernard
- Wladimir YordanoffFrançois
- Judith MagreCatherine's Mother
- Rodolphe PaulyThe son
- Évelyne DandryThe boss of the bar
- Aurore AuteuilCatherine's patient
- Idit CebulaGhislaine
- Sasha RucavinaMarianne
Recommendations
- 88
New York Post
Similar to the recent Emmanuelle Devos drama "Gilles' Wife," but it's as cool as that one was melodramatic. - 80
Salon
Nathalie becomes a complicated three-handed game, far more concerned with the narcissistic, pornographic and mutually manipulative relationship between Catherine and Nathalie than with the latter's purported affair with Bernard. If you live in New York, run, don't walk to see this on the big screen, because it won't be there long. - 75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
A stylish, sharply observed erotic mystery. - 75
TV Guide Magazine
In different hands and different lands, the same story could easily have been a pretentious bit of "Red Shoe Diaries" piffle. But exceptional performances and the oh-so-Frenchness of the complications instead produce an erotic tale that plays like the best gossipy story you ever heard about people you thought you knew. - 75
ReelViews
So what keeps the movie from being boring? Nathalie... is like lewd Eric Rohmer - that is to say that what the characters have to say is INTERESTING. - 70
Village Voice
Nathalie is intricate, provocative, cleanly acted, but it's never entirely convincing--and never more so than in the table-turning climax. - 70
Chicago Reader
Depardieu, a great actor who in recent years has delivered several overblown performances, is here measured and naturalistic, a sympathetic match for Ardant's icy obsessive, and Beart is suitably mysterious as a spy in the house of love. - 70
The New York Times
Anne Fontaine's seductive film Nathalie is mostly about French star power and sex, so it's somewhat surprising that it is also subtle and intriguing.
