MILF hunters beware: Isabelle Huppert might be the most desirable 50-year-old woman in cinema right now, but tread carefully, 'cos if her on-screen sexual history is anything to go by, then you're in for some seriously f'ed up shit. Fuck, being the operative word in Christophe Honoré's appropriately depraved take on Georges Bataille's posthumous novel Ma mère (My Mother): basically the birds and the bees, role-played for real, with not a pamphlet or euphemism in sight.

Louis Garrel as Pierre, still half-naked from The Dreamers, still whiny and horny for immediate family members, does no favours for the emo-crowd. Fresh out of Catholic school repression and a mess, he's roped into practical sex ed. by his whore-of-a-parent Hélène (high class, as only Huppert knows). If fornicating in public wasn't enough of a hazing ritual into the art of getting laid, having mom watch you sure cherry-tops it in a hold-my-hand kind of way. Then there's more: fondling in the back of a cab; finger lickin' sodomy; more voyeurism and groupish sex. All involving mother. Caligula would have been proud.

In between Pierre's nocturnal escapades and precursors to immorality, hormonal pandemonium kicks in: he beats off furiously, dry humps his dad's porno mags (paper cuts, somehow not), before descending further into a pit of confused, groin-enduced despair via sextrovert Rea and the cute but sadomasochistic Hansi. Couple such debauchery with the majesty of rolling sand-dunes to Adagio for Strings – albeit screamingly obvious metaphors for the desolate and lost – and you have just about the perfect alloy for the indecently absurd. But as Pierre battles a haywire moral compass (an erection his one and only bearing), Honoré needs a little faith and direction of his own; indeed, by the time we reach the film's final, shocking scene, we're not sure whether to laugh or repel.

Meanwhile, Huppert goes from teaching piano lessons to workshopping intercourse without so much as a flinch. In effortless transit between the Haneke and Honoré-directed roles, there's clearly no other actress adept at exuding the "I fuck, therefore I am" swagger of a sexed-up nihilist. Call me perverted, but if anyone's capable of rationalizing incest, it's her.—Tim Wong

» Christophe Honoré | France/Portugal/Austria/Spain | 2004