Amalric, best known as the villain in the Bond flick Quantum of Solace and most acclaimed for his extraordinary eyes-only performance in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, stars and directs the movie, which he wrote with Drucker, his real-life partner and on-screen lover, from the 1978 novel by the imperishable Georges Simenon.
Julien, married with a daughter, is a dealer in agricultural machinery in a provincial town; Esther is the wife of the local pharmacist who, we will learn, has indifferent health. We meet them first in the room of the title during one of their illicit afternoon assignations, but from the get-go the atmosphere is more menacing than sexy. "Did I hurt you?" we hear her ask, and he says no, but his answer is belied by a drop of blood.
In short order, we find Julien undergoing an interrogation by a judge (Poitrenaux, superbly inscrutable) the reasons for which, in True Detective-style, emerge only slowly. For most of the snappy length, the question isn't so much what he's done, but what's been done, to whom and why; only in the final couple of minutes does the last of the puzzle pieces fall into place.
The way the narrative skips back and forth in time, often overlaying dialogue from one scene over another, may annoy those who like their whodunnits to be high-velocity and uncomplicated and the directorial flourishes sometimes cross the thin line between elegance and mannerism: the colour palette - the red of that blood shows up in other places and blue walls in another room that is important in proceedings feels a bit forced.
But there's a brilliant brief scene, reminiscent of Sirk or Hitchcock, in which we watch the lovers' first kiss. The score swells, the light glows and for the first time, we get the clammy sense that Esther - who, tellingly, stands a head taller than Julien - may not be what he imagines her to be.
