Movies about unbelievably hot young women who fall in love with grizzled old men are always problematic. Problem one: You never know with whom to sympathize less—the old man bartering money, a paternal aura, and the illusion of wisdom for a few purloined autumnal screws with a pretty girl who's bound to get wise sooner or later, or the pretty girl herself, whose quest for worldliness leads her into the withered arms of someone whose only real hope of hanging on lies in bribery and manipulation. Worse still is when the couple stays together at the end of the movie, but that's another discussion. The biggest problem with the May-December dynamic is that it's such a potent metaphor for so many things (power, corruption, trust), that lesser filmmakers make the mistake of treating it literally.

French master Claude Chabrol makes no such error in his new film, A Girl Cut in Two, about a young woman torn between a decadent literary codger and a mentally unstable billionaire dandy. Just the opposite—at times he seems so committed to the metaphors set loose by a hopeless love triangle that he fails to suggest what the players see in each other. There's no mistaking what a graying eminence like Charles Saint-Denis (stately French monument François Berléand) sees in spry, young Gabrielle Deneige (the preternaturally desirable Ludivine Sagnier, best known in the U.S. as Charlotte Rampling's bikini-wearing hallucination in Swimming Pool). An aging hedonist disguised as a respectable novelist, Charles's books are both serious and best sellers—vive la France! His nouveau-riche dream house is adorned with erotic art, infinite books, a saintly wife, and a breast-implanted publisher who looks like a defrocked underwear model. Gabrielle is a sunny weather girl at the provincial TV station where Charles is promoting his new novel. Less clear, obviously, is why she's so taken with this dour man of letters who resembles Pete Townshend (now) and wonders in interviews whether France is heading toward "puritanism or decadence." By the time they get to ramming, in Charles's garret hideaway, we know it's not puritanism, especially when she refuses a shower afterward because she wants "to keep you with me."

The affair is an exercise in light depravity and consensual abasement: He directs her to give him head under the desk as he does his morning writing; she surprises him (on her birthday) by crawling into the room almost naked, on all fours, with fanned-out peacock feathers sticking out of her ass. Ah, love. The thing is, she's super into it and into him—she feels neither embarrassed nor ridiculous. Gabrielle's ardor emboldens Charles to declare, "I love you more than I've ever loved anyone," and to press his luck. Later that night, up a spiral staircase in his private club, he treats her to the ultimate abasement, one so intense that Chabrol won't even let us see it (he's strangely detached from the perversion throughout, generally opting to let it happen off-camera, though it drives the story). When she later confesses herself to wealthy third-wheel suitor Paul (Benoît Magimel, in a showy performance that energizes the film whenever he's on screen), the knowledge of what she's done obsesses him. Of course, everything obsesses Paul, the schizophrenic heir to a vast chemical-company fortune: Gabrielle's diffidence toward him, her continued love for Charles, and above all, Charles's continued existence in Paul's world.

These obsessions drive Paul—to whom no one has ever said no—to dangerous action. But the love triangle is simply the fulcrum for Chabrol's examination of a war between two classes—the merely rich and the absurdly rich—and the classless girl who becomes the fetish they fight over, and who is, all but literally, cut in two as a result. It allows Chabrol to make intriguing observations about decadence and puritanism alike, dread and temptation lurking beneath every polished surface. Unfortunately, as is common in movies about the destructive psychology of wealth, the metaphors trump the drama. There's no one to identify with here, no one to sympathize with, no one, finally, to enjoy. It's just two different kinds of bastard and the inscrutable girl who bounces between them. As is usually the case with May-December stories, nobody wins. Not even (as is rarely the case with Chabrol films) the audience.