Here’s a sexy film of enormous sexiness set in the sexy world of, erm, container ships. Ariane Labed plays Alice, an engineer on a freighter ironically named the Fidelio. She wears blue overalls and is sometimes fetchingly smudged with engine-y oil on her face. Alice has a boyfriend when ashore: a Norwegian graphic novel artist Felix (Anders Danielsen Lie). But onboard she’s having an affair with her captain and old flame Gaël (Melvil Poupaud) and also boinking a Romanian crew-member called Vali (Bogdan Zamfir). When not working or indeed shagging, Alice is reading the thoughtful diary of a engineer who died of a heart attack on board, a death that the captain is oddly covering up, pretending it was a man-overboard-type accident, for reasons never properly explained. The sheer physical beauty of Labed and Poupaud in these surroundings is odd, and the whole thing is contrived and just a little preposterous: it reminded me, not unpleasantly, of the BBC’s eccentric 1980s soap Triangle, about steamy goings-on aboard a North Sea passenger ferry which travelled between Amsterdam, Gothenburg and Felixstowe.
