After a perfunctory couple of shots lifted from the end of the first installment of The Deathly Hallows , the film begins in earnest with a scene of slow, quiet urgency at an oceanfront cottage that could have been imported from Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 .
Furthermore, the incorrigible voluptuousness of Bertolucci's style could not be further from the hungry, emaciated, heartbroken cinema on the run of Garrel or Eustache (or, for that matter, from the edginess and confusion of aftermath in Rivette's Out 1 [1971] or Doillon's Les Doigts dans la tête [1974]).