Dirty Like an Angel

Desire and the law become endlessly entangled in Breillat’s drama about a gruff 50-year-old cop named Georges (Claude Brasseur) who finds himself helping a criminal (Claude-Jean Philippe) whom he has known since they were young. Enlisting a junior colleague, Didier (Nils Tavernier), to keep an eye on the criminal’s family, Georges simultaneously begins an affair with Didier’s young wife Barbara (Lio), and consequently the situation these characters are embroiled in grows ever messier. A complex, parable-like examination of how male-male relations mirror and differ from male-female relations, Dirty Like an Angel is yet another provocative work on the possibility of being together in a social world marked so profoundly by yearning and lust.