Kind-hearted prostitute Marie (Anouk Grinberg) is on the game because it is her vocation and she loves it.

There's only one thing missing from her life. A permanent live-at-home man. Then one day she finds - or almost falls over - Jeannot (Gerard Lanvin), a wine-soaked, battered and stinking derelict, whom she invites home, feeds and f*cks.

Then, after she has bathed him, this prostitute makes him the sort of career offer no pathetic derelict could refuse. Move in. Become my pimp. Take all the money I earn, and spend it as you want. But be a nice pimp, not a nasty one.

He accepts. Trouble is, Marie isn't enough for him. Before long the well scrubbed and well-dressed Jeannot is training Sanguine (Valieria Bruni Tedeschi) to become a prostitute too.

And so it goes. Later in the movie, Marie gets together with another total stranger, Gilberte (Olivier Martinez). She just walks up to in a bar and asks him to father two children for her. Interesting pick-up line. Happens to me all the time.

This film, directed and written by Bertrand Blier (who wrote and directed the recent reasonably successful comedy The Actors), is billed as a comedy. But the comedy vein is very thin. It's all very arty, and very wish-fulfillment sexist at the same time.

There are moments here when Blier attemps a similar sort of displacement of reality and inversion of normalcy that Luis Bunuel uses to such pungent effect. But it all seems pretty banal and pointless - and such a waste of good actors, with Anouk Grinberg and Gerard Lanvin in particular posting very fine performances despite the paucity of their material.

The anamorphic transfer is first-rate, with the atmospheric dark tones of the movie never straying towards murkiness. The soundtrack switches erratically between execrable Barry White numbers to Gorecki's religious opuses, and is reproduced well.

The extras are poor. There is an extensive anamorphic photo gallery of scenes from the movie, marred by a strange masking over the bottom quarter of each pic. And there are text biographies of Anouk Grinberg, Gerard Lanvin and Bertrand Blier.

The only other extras are the obligatory theatrical trailer for My Man, and good quality widescreen trailers for four other movies, My Wife is an Actress, Angela, Read my Lips and Like Two Crocodiles.