Metacritic reviews

In his elliptical and somewhat loopy drama about the slipperiness of love at any age, French filmmaker André Téchiné uses the sight of scudding motorboats on the waterways around workaday Venice as a visual reinforcement of time as a river.

Among other things, Unforgivable is a free-floating meditation on the distresses and exhilarations of being a parent.

The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye.

Both Venice and Bouquet are photographed to ravishing effect, and like the city, Judith is meant to suggest something trapped into being a fantasy for others.

Téchiné is a restless director, a fastidious storyteller who is not interested in what less adventurous movies have to say about human relationships. He wants to dig deeper, even if the results aren't always clear.

Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.

While Unforgivable stays true to this approach, its disparate souls feel too scattershot to be interwoven into a meaningful narrative tapestry.

Unforgivable isn't one of Mr. Téchiné's greatest achievements, but it's engrossing even when its increasingly populated story falters, tripped up by unpersuasive actions, connections and details.

It's some kind of monster of romanticized antiromanticism, filleting and exalting its characters, cheating and rewarding its breathless audience. The closest the film gets to a thesis is this shoulder-shrug torpedo: "People do things like that without knowing why."

That seems to be one of the main theses of Unforgivable: that nothing is as dramatic as it appears, and presuming otherwise means risking unnecessary trouble and pain.