Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini) is a displaced soul, a pre-op transsexual hooker romantically involved with two men, Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine), an illegal immigrant and ex-client of hers, and Jamel (Yasmine Belmadi), her roommate. As if Stéphanie's love-life wasn't complicated enough, Jamel and Mikhail are linguistically-mismatched boyfriends who communicate in bits of English, French, whatever gets communication across. Stéphanie brings both men to her home town in provincial France, to care for her dying mother, who still calls her Pierre, her male birth name. Stéphanie's mother is a ghost-like presence at the centre of the three melancholy principals' meandering search for emotional warmth.

Wild Side is an exquisitely beautiful and intelligent film that won major awards at the Berlin and Gijón film festivals. Cinematographer Agnès Godard's work is gorgeous, peppering the film with divine, reverently aesthetic scenes such as flocks of doves flapping around on cloudless blue skies, verdant fields with crumbling farmhouses, and glamorous street hookers holding court in ruby-lit night alleys, dressed in furs and jewels. Editor Stéphanie Mahet gives these scenes ample screen time, but this indulgence in the beauty of the film overwhelms the gentle, almost inert narrative. Lengthy dialogue free periods and a relative lack of linear story propulsion may be a problem for some: I thought the film was slow.

Wild Side is more like a picture book than a moving picture. The lovely images never cease, and given that the characters rarely speak to each other, and, in the case of the two guys, have trouble verbally communicating in any kind of sophisticated way, I wonder if the sparse dialogue could have been omitted altogether. The intense emotions that radiate from Michelini's great face tell us everything we need to know about her character: a scene where she asks her mother if her long-dead father ever loved her (he did) is redundant, in a way, because we've already guessed that Michelini's Stéphanie would have harboured such psychic wounds.

Elliptic films of this type invariably drown in their own inscrutability but there's an emotional and psychological authenticity here that elevates Wild Side from the problems of its coma-inducing genre. As mentioned, Michelini is outstanding in what is her film debut. Observed in a cafe by the director and cast after an apparently "incredible" audition, she has a strong elemental presence and reminded me at times of Carmen Maura, an Almodovar alumni.

Belmadi and Nikitini don't have as much to work with and they don't make as great an impact. Their relationship is dreamlike, drifting in and out of existence and rarely reaching any kind of corporeality. Precisely where Stéphanie slots in is something that's hard to figure out, and we aren't given too many explicit clues. Interestingly, though the prostitution scenes are as graphic as could be, there's a distance and discretion applied to the love scenes between the main characters.

Director, Lifshitz said that he was curious about the idea that a love triangle can be a form of family, with each lover playing rotating roles of father, mother and child. He renders this exploration with tenderness and subtlety, and though his oblique and poetic approach to story telling remains the same, intellectually and technically, he's made a quantum leap from his previous film, the rather simplistic Presque Rien.

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