Okay, I'll level with you: if there's one film on this list that's primed for disaster, it's this one. Drug-addled Libertines frontman Pete Doherty as a French, uh, libertine named Octave in a so-called "rockmantic" saga set just after the Napoleonic Wars? Charlotte Gainsbourg as the war widow with whom he falls dementedly in love? A synopsis containing the line, "Can he find the strength to believe in the future?" Why do I want to see this at all? The answer lies in the director, Sylvie Verheyde, whose tender, brilliant and criminally under-distributed 2008 coming-of-age film "Stella" earned her my attention, whatever thorny path she has chosen for her follow-up.