Last year a dusty Monica Bellucci cried beautifully as Mary Magdalen, the prostitute-turned-believer in Mel Gibson’s version of The Passion of the Christ. We saw all of two seconds of Magdalen before her conversion in that passion play, but French director Bertrand Blier has now made a film to redress the balance, at least if Magdalen would have lived in 21st century Pigale, the red-light district of the French capital. In Combien tu m’aimes? (How Much Do You Love Me?), Blier and Bellucci exploit each other for mutual benefit; never has there been a film that was more about someone’s physical assets as this film (except for porn, obviously), but Blier keeps the proceedings on such a level of garishness that it could actually be called stylish.

Elfen-eared office-worker François (Bernard Campan) has been lucky in the lotto and decides to buy himself some company with his newfound fortune. His eye falls on the ravishing Italian seductress Daniela (Bellucci), who changes her customary window in the Pigale district for the dingy apartment of François, apparently for good. Daniela soon transforms herself in the domestic housewife of every man’s dreams: she cooks him spaghetti and wriggles and squeals endlessly during their long sessions of lovemaking (much to the annoyance of the female neighbour, played to turgid perfection by Farida Rahouadj). It almost seems as if nothing could go wrong, at least until Daniella’s pimp Charly (Gérard Depardieu) turns up.

The film offers endless shots of an unclad Bellucci being beautiful from all sorts of angles; her face seems secondary to her rounded curves; her acting chops tertiary or somewhere even further down the priority list (not that impersonating a hoarsely voiced Italian hooker presents a difficulty for Ms. Bellucci). Campan is, in fact, the real acting talent of the film, giving us an excellent, almost nuanced turn as the grey office mouse turned besotted Casanova because of a sudden windfall. The fact that François' heart condition makes his pulse-racing infatuation an above-average difficulty only adds to the fun. Not one for subtlety, director Blier sprinkles the coarse proceedings with a whole lot of Italian-language opera that verges on the obsessive (La Traviata anyone?).

The screenplay, from Blier’s hand who wrote it specifically for Bellucci, should carry the warning “any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental”, and not all of the film’s humorous set-ups work (notably all the scenes involving the inquisitive colleagues of François and the scenes at a party at his apartment). The people of the night as they call themselves are grotesque and circus-like to an almost unbearable extent and the seedy Parisian sex-for-pay milieu looks an awfully lot more glamorous than the last time I visited Pigale, mostly due to the expertly lit photography courtesy of François Catonné and the work of production desiger François de Lamothe. Combien tu m’aimes? is a mostly coherent fable that poses as a particularly low-brow sex comedy set in a faux high-brow, very stylised version of the Parisian night. Anyone who thinks that sounds appealing(and/or anyone willing to shell out some dough to drool over Bellucci’s assets) has found his or her match.

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