The film's full French title is Post Coitum Animal Triste, which, after Ovid, translates as, "After sex, the animal [i.e. man] is sad." In Post Coitum, we're all animals, just waiting to be dragged down by our baser nature. Over the credits, we hear the sound of what sounds like a wailing baby, only to find out that it's the cry of a restless cat. Cut to Diane, writhing around on her bed, hand clutched between her legs, the moans issuing from her mouth sounding more like pain than pleasure. In fact, even when she's in bed with Emilio, Diane never seems to be having much fun. True, after her first encounter with her new lover, Diane is shown tooling around Paris on a fluffy white cloud, a misplaced and forced attempt to add whimsy to the grey proceedings that only succeeds in making Ally McBeal look subtle. Only for a moment, as Diane quietly caresses her ears after putting on the earrings Emilio has just given her, do we feel the rejuvenation that Diane is supposedly looking for.

The general lack of pleasure might be seen as some sort of moral judgment on Diane, whose life even Hester Prynne might not envy. But no, it's just part of Roüan's knee-jerk fatalism, the deliberate wallowing in ugliness that ceases to pass for profundity around the time most people declare a major. After Diane's masturbatory death-dance, we're next treated to a seemingly out-of-place shot of an elderly couple sitting down to dinner, when suddenly the wife removes the carving fork from the roast and plunges it into her husband's neck. (It's rendered in gruesome closeup, of course, blood spurting with Peckinpavian force.) Roüan regularly returns to the old woman as she's processed through prison, strip-searched and thrown in a cell, and if that weren't unsubtle enough, Philippe ends up being her attorney. Turns out that the woman had been putting up with her husband's infidelities for 43 years, and that when he finally asked her for a divorce, she snapped.

It may seem pedantic to demand exact meaning from such a metaphorical counter-story, but with its broadly sketched characters and lack of human feeling, Post Coitum invites pedantry. Can Roüan seriously be suggesting that all marriages end in cuckoldry, or that if Diane hadn't had an affair she would have murdered her husband? If Philippe is supposed to identify with the old woman, why do we see him putting a carving fork to his own neck? If any of the characters had a shred of humanity, such abstract questions might seem less important, but Roüan only seems to be interested in the abstract. As with the cloud-floating sequence, Post Coitum makes brief, spasmodic gestures in the direction of magic realism, as if even the film's director recognized the suffocating bleakness of her inhuman outlook. That Roüan must turn to such a gesture to end Post Coitum is somehow appropriate, the circle-closing act of a self-indulgent, solipsistic film.