La confusion des genres (2000)

Alain is nearing forty, but he still doesn’t know how to choose, define himself, or love. He keeps starting tentative affairs with partners of both sexes and, professionally, confines himself to the role of a second-rate lawyer pleading uninteresting cases. He works for Laurence’s firm. Laurence is an old friend and a cool “working girl” who would like to marry him. Tempted, Alain agrees to sleep with her to test their compatibility. It is a partial failure. Meanwhile, troubled by the beauty of one of his clients, Marc, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, Alain agrees to the prisoner’s request to harass his girlfriend, Babette, so that she will visit him in prison. Babette wants nothing more to do with Marc. However, a mutual but unspoken desire develops between her and the lawyer. For his sake, she agrees to go to the prison. The visit is a disaster. Alain eventually marries Laurence, who is pregnant with his child. But they continue to live apart, and Alain moves in with a young man, Christophe. When he is about to begin an affair with Babette, Alain backs away. She eventually lets herself be seduced by an ex-con whom Marc had sent to kill her. Laurence gives birth to a baby boy. Realizing that she has no maternal instinct, she suggests that Christophe and Alain raise the child.