There really are fish in La Truite ("the trout"): The film opens as Isabelle Huppert is bored silly squeezing semen out of a fish on the family trout farm. It's an allegory for her own mailaise, and within 20 minutes of screen time, she's abandoned her gay husband and is off to Tokyo with a wealthy businessman.

Ever the free spirit, Huppert's Frédérique has a vague Peter Pan syndrome crossed with exhibitionism. Since her youth (you can tell it's a flashback because she has really long hair), she's made a vow to always woo money out of men by playing neo-whore, but without having sex with them. Heading to Japan with a man (Daniel Olbrychski) she meets in a bowling alley (where else would she encounter him!?) is just this to the nth degree. There she encounters another man's wife (Jeanne Moreau), who tells her about satori, the "world of ecstasy."

Too bad that Joseph Losey's movie finds satori in little more than scenes of Huppert cutting off her hair into a pixie-do and dancing in her underwear at a nightclub. Hell, 9 1/2 Weeks has more satori than this.

Huppert is reasonably charming and fits the bill here well, but the story is vapid to the point where it's hard to really care about her. Do we really care about Frédérique's unsexual exploits? She uses a man for a few days, then jumps on to someone knew. Eventually she returns home to the gay husband, and no one's really changed as a character except for some of the guys, who've become hopelessly sexually frustrated. Losey is alluding to a story, buried somewhere in the film, about love being mythical and unattainable, or at the very least temporary and fleeting. His choice of a dour muse to express that is awfully strange -- not to mention deeply depressing.