Amants review – painterly thriller is sullied by a silly script

Sex, surf and scuba diving make Nicole Garcia's crime drama easy on the eye but there's little substance behind the style

You look like a painting," a rich gentleman tells the heroine, Lisa, in the early stages of Nicole Garcia's stylish, silly thriller. I forget the name of the painting. A dark, gloomy one." Minutes later he's dead, laid out on the carpet while Lisa clutches her bathrobe. Whether he was killed by the purple prose in his mouth or the contaminated cocaine in his nose is best left for the coroner to decide.

In any case, the rich gentleman was not entirely right. Lisa (played with blank sullenness by the Nymphomaniac star Stacy Martin) looks like a model in a glossy magazine photo-shoot. A dark, gloomy model posed against a series of eye-catching backdrops (grungy Paris; tropical paradise) with a hackneyed plot scaffolded around her slender frame. Amants, unaccountably, is competing for the top prize here in Venice. At least if it wins the presentation pictures will be pretty.