My Man

Over the course of his long career, director Bertrand Blier has merrily stunned filmgoers with darkly comic examinations of incest (Beau-Père), ménages àtrois (Menage), and spouse sharing (the Academy Award-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs). This one is a real shocker, though: My Man is dull. Grinberg comes on like Juliette Binoche's nympho cousin as Marie, a hooker with a self-described ''happy mind and a happy ass'' who falls for homeless guy Lanvin and refashions him into her pimp. But what starts out as a pithy, erotic study of the ways people beg — for sex, for companionship, for forgiveness — fizzles into oddball plot tangents. Worse, Grinberg starts out a charmer and ends up a chattery pain. C-