This film should be put among lists of the Ten Best of the past ten years.

Viewers who saw Catherine Deneuve as a vampire-lesbian in "The Hunger" are in for a big treat. This time round she's a lesbian-teacher, a university professor yet. Teacher, vampire, what's the dif? Right?

The plot is impossibly complex, and in French too! It's centered on a family of crooks, from the points-of-view of four Outsiders (non-crooks).

The first narrator (who also delivers the epilogue) is a ten-year-old boy. Next: a police detective who comes from but has left behind his Mafioso "family." (The action takes place in a city in the South of France which seems to have a Mafioso). And then a young woman, once a druggie and--it's half hinted--prostitute. Finally--and most impressive--Catherine Deneuve as a philosopher, professor, female, who has somehow met the young woman, herself only a half-time thief (her brother being full-time.)

Try and follow this thick-thick plot as the young woman, half-prostitute, half-thief becomes--are you ready for this?--the lover of the policeman and the professor!

There's more. The professor becomes her mentor and finally her collaborator in a book about her, The Child of the Street!

The film moves from one center (the murder of the father of the young boy) to another (the love affair of the two women) to yet a third (the love affair of the detective and the thief), to a fourth--which at the end one feels is going to be the kernel of the film: the relation of the detective to the professor.

Enough? Hold on! There's an epilogue where we see a New Relation: between the 10-year old, now an orphan, and one of the thieves, the brother of the young female druggie who had been loved by both the detective and the professor!

There's enough material here for a thick novel and the director Andre Techine, in a script written by him and three others, carries it off.

One part towers over all: that of the very outside-outsider, the sophisticated university professor, who moves into and through an underworld. As Marie, the professor, Catherine Deneuve here achieves one of the great triumphs of her career. Odd to think that this woman, who has gone to court to prevent a lesbian magazine from using the name Deneuve as its title, has here elected, fourteen years after The Hunger (1983) to again portray a woman in a lesbian situation.

The object of her affections, the girl called Juliette, played by Laurence Cote is rail-thin and very young (played by an actress of thirty!) and very magnetic. She is beautiful in a peculiar way. We believe her capable of loving both the detective and the professor. In the terrible years she has spent in the twin underworlds of theft and prostitution, she has given up everything but her basic honesty, her ability to find and give love.

Most of the action in this film takes place at the criminal family's estate. Other scenes take place in the police station, at the detective's home, and in the apartment shared by Juliette and her brother.

Rabelais once wrote: "In my world everyone is saved in their own fashion," and in this film, rich-as-a-novel, each conclusion is a logical end to the road(s) taken.

To be noted: the beautiful, rich photography, whose landscapes starting with bitter winter, ending with Mediterranean sunlight, are much more than mere backdrop.

Also to be noted: the odd music. The city wherein the action takes place is not named but we see many Arab faces and three of the background songs are in an odd melange of French-Arab-Berber words and tonalities.

They signal the message of this rich, great film: we are all together. There is not black/white, male/female, married/unmarried, legal/criminal, straight/gay. We are all bonded and must live together or not at all.

And a final message, given very late by the "intellectual"--the university professor: "Get it down. Record It!"

See this film.