A beautiful, pouting young girl, an older man, an oblique plot and masses of symbolism ? so much about L?Annulaire is in danger, at first glance, of making it a cliched rerun of hundreds of other modern French movies.

But there is something here, a lovely simplicity in the way Yoko Ogawa?s novel is interpreted for the screen, which stops it from treading a tired and well-worn path. Director Diane Bertrand, who also wrote the script, is not afraid of silences. Her central characters ? the stunning Olga Kurylenko as Iris and Marc Barbe as her mysterious boss ? don?t say a huge amount but their wonderfully expressive faces convey a great deal.

The pair meet when Iris comes to a port town looking for work after slicing the top of her ring finger off in an horrific factory accident. She finds a job at his laboratory, in an old girls? school, where he preserves and stores personal items.

The people who bring their belongings for preservation are looking for closure, he tells her. They pay their money and are allowed to visit the piece, but never to take it away.

Iris goes to work each day, carefully taking down the details of the broken hearted, bereaved and dispossessed who come seeking solace. A little girl brings a mushroom ? all that remains of her burnt down family home; an elderly man brings the tiny bones of a pet bird; a middle-aged woman brings a score of music written especially for her by a lost love. Each item represents something, some memory, some pain, which the owner believes can be taken away. As the film progresses, it seems that Iris too has something she wants to preserve.

She embarks on an affair with the laboratory man after he buys her a pair of exquisite shoes ? but a customer warns her that the shoes themselves may trap her. Away from the laboratory, Iris shares a room with a sailor she never meets as he works at night and sleeps by day while she is out. She becomes intrigued by his possessions and he with hers.

There is a thread of eroticism running through the core of this film ? involving Iris and both men ? that works wonderfully well. It gives tension to an otherwise slow-paced and essentially plot-free piece. But the real beauty in the movie is in the details ? the way the camera lingers over Kurylenko, the way her summer dress billows in the breeze as the sailor watches it from his bed, the haunting soundtrack by former Portishead frontwoman Beth Gibbons.

We never discover the secret of Iris?s past, the thing she wants to preserve and be free from. The ending is utterly open and the questions raised in the film about love and letting go remain unanswered.