Ne nous soumets pas à la tentation

In the French cinema ,the multiple POV trick began at the same time as "citizen Kane " and well before "Rashomon " (remade by Ritt as"the outrage" ) : in the occupation days,an unsung director ,Albert Valentin did it twice ("Marie-Martine"(1942) and "la vie de plaisir (1944) );it continued in the sixties with André Cayatte who made two movies called "la vie conjugale " ,one seen through the husband's eyes ,the other through the wife's .Besides ,the initial situation is a perfect example of what the French call "théâtre de boulevard" which deals with the love triangle and mistaken identities .

Although the title is taken from a well-known Christian prayer , religion,a subject Miss Carron has often broached ("l'apôtre" , "la morsure des dieux",even "le corps sauvage " begins in a church) ,is completely absent here ;the very first picture ,which shows an injured man walking aimlessly on a road to nowhere is that of a God-forsaken world.

Carron dynamites the theatre de boulevard ,twists its codes ,and ,if it were not enough , did the same for the traditional melodrama ; it is not always successful ,particularly in the second part ("Anna" ) which is too often a mere repetition of the first ; past the effect of surprise (the same situation again) , it does not bring anything really new to the plot,except for a secondary male character (too underwritten to be interesting). But the movie regains its strength in the last chapter ("Rachel" ) ;although the truth is revealed long before the ending ,it makes sense for Carron did not want to make a traditional thriller either ; " do not lead up into temptation " is a psychological drama , in which the director watches her characters a la Claude Chabrol the entomologist of the bourgeois ,as though they were insects. One feels the husband is a grown-up kid (see the way how the young girl ,his "niece" ,plays with him ) who has always been dominated by a woman who's got the dough ("I'm a tiny tiny lawyer") and whose biggest misfortune ("we could never get one) is revealed by the girl's gaffe (but is it really a blunder? Wasn't she aware of his situation? )

Carron also dynamites the thriller : the young couple ,planning a swindle, is it a red herring?

This French movie has a VERY familiar French-movie plot of a precocious teenage girl seducing a middle-age married man. That is really just a jumping-off point as the movie is told from three different perspectives--the man, the girl, and the man's wife--and a very different story eventually emerges. The multiple POV device is hardly new, but goes all the way back to "Citizen Kane", "Rashomon", and Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing", but it has been used most recently and famously in films like "Pulp Fiction". It doesn't always work and at times does little than make a film insufferably pretentious, but it does work here for the most part. Rather than the three stories contradicting each other (a la "Rashomon") the stories here are more like different puzzle pieces out of which the REAL story eventually emerges. It becomes obvious eventually that the wife and the girl have some kind of previous relationship even though it's not revealed until the very end.

Agnes Delchair, who plays the wife is the best actor in the movie, but she unfortunately stays rather opaque and mysterious until the end of the movie and her back story ends up being kind of rushed and includes her having an unnecessary relationship with the girl's jackass boyfriend. Guillemette Barioz fares better as the young seducer. Her character is a university-age "teen" seducer as opposed to the more perverse young teen seducer suggested by the lurid promotional materials, and the actress looks mature even for a university student. Her character goes through several interesting changes from a seemingly hapless waif to a sociopathic schemer, and finally to a character who is sympathetic but for an entirely different reason. She also has some nice nude/sex scenes, but for some reason, they take place in HER story whereas you'd think the sex would be much more memorable for the older man and appear in HIS story. Unlike with most young girls in movies like this, she does at least have a MOTIVE for getting sexually involved with a much older man.

Jean-Francois Garread, who plays the husband, is a pretty hapless and uninteresting character who is closer to elderly than middle-aged (his wife is already a much younger woman). The movie would definitely have been improved by a stronger and younger actor in this role, like say Mathieu Americ. Swann Artaud, who plays the abusive boyfriend and fourth character is flat-out miscast since he's skinny and effete and frankly Barioz looks like she could eat him for breakfast and pick her teeth with his bones afterward. This role would have benefited greatly from a scary thug as opposed to the typical French pretty-boy. Still, despite some miscasting and rushed reveals of the last story, this is pretty effective overall.