French actress Zabou Breitman occupies the director’s chair for the second time for the talky examination of love and other disasters called L’homme de sa vie (The Man Of My Life). After having bedded Monica Bellucci’s Italian prostitute in the comedy Combien tu m’aimes (How Much Do You Love Me?), a happily married Bernard Campan now doubts his own sexuality after meeting his openly gay neighbour (Charles Berling) in the French Provence. The film is staged as a dusk-til-dawn conversation between the two neighbours, fading in and out of flashbacks and flashforwards to illustrate their words. Characters are superbly drawn and there is a certain off-the-cuff attraction between the men but at two hours the film finally runs too long to sustain the built-up momentum. As with American colleague Brokeback Mountain, this tale of an intense connection between two men that is beyond mere sex might score highest with women.

Breitman (who previously directed Se souvenir des belles choses/Beautiful Memories) and scriptwriter Agnès de Sacy anchor their story in the family life of Campan’s Frédéric, who is married to his namesake Frédérique (Léa Drucker, from Les brigades du tigre/The Tiger Brigades). Their little boy is fond of dressing up as Superman and in the opening shot we see the little rascal at his father’s bedside, asking him if he is asleep in a terrific shot from the point of view of the sleeping father. “Yes, I am asleep,” Frédéric mock-grumbles. “No, you’re talking,” his cheeky son tells him.

And how much Fréd talks, even though Hugo (Berling), the new neighbour they have invited over for a family barbecue to get acquainted, talks even more -- though perhaps he says less. There is an almost immediate intimate connection between the two men, despite -- or rather, both despite and because of -- Hugo’s openness about his gay proclivities. The opening scene with little Superman also serves another purpose: it is clear from the start that Frédéric is a family man, not some frigid freak and the film (whose French title could be translated as both The Man Of His Life and The Man of Her Life) is more interested in what Fréd's feelings to do the family dynamics between Hugo and his daughter and Fréd himself and his wife than what this discovery of his feelings for Hugo mean for himself.

This wider perspective is both the film’s force and one of its weaknesses. Casting a wider net offers a vision of the relationship dynamics from several points of view, but it also takes the attention away from the central character, which through a combination of Campan’s charismatic performance and a construction of the narrative perspective very close to his character demands so much attention that when the story strays too far from him, it loses strength and interest. Several peripheral characters have their own little -- and sometimes not so little -- crises, but they feel tediously distracting rather than involving, which is odd, especially since they mostly involve the female characters and the film was written by two women (and directed by one of them).

Nevertheless, L’homme de sa vie offers plenty of joys for those willing to go along with its gentle flow, including its sometimes cartoon-like sense of humour and its arty touches that for once feel coherent rather than conspicuously added on. Add to that the two terrific performances from the male leads and there is a terribly good film hiding away in these two hours of good (but not great) artistic melodrama.