All you need to know about Claude Chabrol's new film is in its title, though a more apropos one might have been Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. Chabrol opens the curtains on a one-dimensional world where little boys and girls are reared using handbooks and wine is considered the nectar of the gods, though the director's mounting indifference means that it's hard to tell if he still cares to give the finger to the monstrous upper-crust environs in his films or if he wants to be part of them. Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a TV weather girl with men raining all around her, is similarly conflicted, though her romantic crisis is not resolved as a prickly foil to bourgeois complacency. To Chabrol, she is something close to an inanimate object, tossed back and forth between Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), an accomplished novelist twice her age, and Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), a child of fortune whose nail-biting points to personal demons.