The French title — L'economie du couple — catches the social relevance of the film better than the English version, which narrows to the couple's emotional state.

A divorcing couple is forced by finances to live together. This may be the most harrowing treatment of a crumbling marriage since Bergman's TV series and film, Scenes from a Marriage. The film opens in the heat of the couple's hatred. We fill in the background as the drama proceeds. It ends with the cold impersonal voice of a notary spelling out the terms of their final settlement.

The incompatibility is apparent. Marie has a job and for years has been carrying Boris, who is a capable builder/renovator but lacks self-discipline. Marie's mistake was to confuse desire with love. That's what leads to their one-night stand here, which fails to resolve the couple's tensions and antagonism.

Now their anger prevents each from understanding the other's position. The crux is economic: Boris can't afford to move out and Marie won't give him the half share of their apartment's selling price he demands.

The split ramifies beyond the family. Boris disrupts her dinner party with some mutual friends and bristles at a possible "suitor." He manipulates her mother into hiring him for a repair job against Marie's wishes.

But the twin daughters become their principal battleground. Because Boris keeps forgetting to buy the one girl's soccer boots, Marie finally buys them. When they're "lost" at their first game, Boris buys a replacement. Boris resents Marie's limits on his access to the girls, Marie the mishaps that occur in his care.

But there's another issue: class. This is what gives the film a broader scope than marital emotions turned martial. Rugged Boris is working class; Marie was born wealthy and elegant. Her social and economic advantage persists to the end. Even after reluctantly giving him half their home's selling price, she still will have the money from her father's bequest, her childhood home that Boris has been hired to repair.

That makes this psychological study of a splitting couple a reflection of a society — Belgium, France, Europe — that in this century remains as frozen and fragmented by a harsh class structure as it was two hundred years ago. The story of a breaking couple exposes a hatefully fractured social structure.

A divorce is never easy and such settings have been plainly used by movies in any countries. This movie however adresses a specific topic, as the matter is on separate maintenance, money and housing. Here, the focus is not the fight for the children, as almost always in such movies. This topic is addressed through a specific situation: if the couple separates after years of common life, they continue to cohabitate, because of the money issues the man has and because they couldn't find an agreement on the split.

I felt this movie had somehow two parts, one with the conflict between the former couple, the rising of tension, the dynamics. At that time, I would have given it a 8: well shot, well directed, we are faced with a situation that can't last. The second part tries to go on with the story, with the objective to make things move and reach a conclusion. It was necessary but less successful.

Although I found this a brilliant film I also found myself thinking throughout why don't this couple go to arbitration, something they actually did at the end and of course the short answer is that had they done the obvious thing from the get-go we would have wound up with at best a two-reeler. I've never found myself in the position that the two protagonists share but the overwhelming impression is that millions of couples all over the world have and are. The two leading actors are simply outstanding and the real-life twins who play their twin daughters are not far behind. I first became aware of Berenice Bejo in the cod James Bond movie OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies, in which she played opposite Jean Dujardine long before they co-starred in The Artist and I always found her watchable and more than competent but here she really comes into her own and earns a place alongside the best actresses in French cinema from Isabelle Huppert on down. Renaissance man Cedric Kahn - Writer-Director-Actor is more than a match for her and together they lift a potentially depressing film to another level.