Gives moviegoers a funny, observant, evanescent approach to the mysteries of human desire.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

With husband and wife starring, you can't help but wonder which details here are autobiographical. No matter: This is obviously a deeply personal work for Attal, whose comic timing and passion can only serve him well both on screen and off.

Happily Ever After is an exhilarating, joyous picture, but it's sometimes terrifying, too. It offers a vision of marriage as an adventure we embark on together, alone. If you didn't cry, you'd laugh.

A marital comedy as perceptive as it is delectable.

It's French. It's sexy. It's got a killer soundtrack.

If this strikes some as some kind of gallingly blasé, ostentatious Parisian sophistication, it's far from it.

The most important aspect of the stories about all five characters is the way they are told. Attal and his editor Jennifer Augé have found an attractive playful style: they never let the stories rest, almost juggling them, and keep them gamboling before us.

Nobody does adultery in movies with more style and zest than the French, especially when the mode is frivolous. And anyone who watches Happily Ever After can identify with the grass-is-always-greener daydreams that haunt its characters.

You need a scorecard to keep track of who's bedding whom in Happily Ever After, a tres French take on sex and love, in that order.

Where My Wife was offbeat and original, Happily Ever After gets bogged down in midlife-crisis cliches.

Manages to be a diverting and funny character study, at least most of the time.

On the whole, the film is a shallow, shrill, and all-too-familiar marital roundelay.

Gainsbourg has some cute scenes with Johnny Depp, a debonair stranger she meets in a Virgin Megastore, but otherwise this is a fairly banal installment in the battle of the sexes.