How Much Do You Love Me? (2005)

How Much Do You Love Me? is the kind of romantic provocation only Bertrand Blier would dare: a comedy-drama that treats love like a high-stakes negotiation and then watches the heart refuse to follow the contract. Set in a neon-tinged Paris that feels both dreamy and slightly dangerous, it lets Monica Bellucci play Daniela as an enigma—tender one moment, untouchable the next—while Bernard Campan gives François a quietly aching humanity that makes his fantasy of “buying” happiness feel unsettlingly plausible. Gérard Depardieu’s arrival adds a looming menace and absurdity that keeps the film vibrating between farce and melancholy, never settling into the comfort of a conventional romance. It’s candid about sex and morally slippery by design, so it won’t be for everyone, but if you like films that flirt with taboo to ask what love is really worth, it’s darkly funny, oddly moving, and hard to shake.

How Much Do You Love Me? is trying to be a sly, adult fairy tale about love as a transaction, where money, desire, and fantasy keep slipping into each other instead of landing on a neat romantic lesson. Bertrand Blier leans hard into provocation and ambiguity, so if you want characters who behave logically or a relationship you can actually root for, you may find it chilly, episodic, and oddly detached. The tone swerves between comedy and melancholy without warning, and the film is more interested in teasing ideas than delivering emotional payoff, with explicit sexual content and a late jolt of menace that can feel out of step. If you’re on board for a stylish, talky French oddity powered by Bellucci’s enigmatic presence and a deliberately unresolved ending, it can be intriguing; if not, it may feel like a long, expensive joke that never fully lands.