“You’re gentle, for a boy,” says a young woman hopefully to the young man who has just picked her up. And so he is, until he doesn’t get what he wants. Philippe Garrel’s The Salt of Tears is a sort of detached, Gallic take on The Rake’s Progress, which traces the missteps of an outwardly winning young man who casually wrecks first the lives of others, then his own.

The film’s subdued, washed-out black-and-white cinematography sets a wintry tone from the first frame, where Luc (Logann Antuofermo), a fellow from small-town France, circles a nervous young woman at a Paris bus stop. He stares, asks polite questions, falls silent, stares again. Actress Oulaya Amamra, as Djemila, beautifully conjures up excitement, nervousness, and ego gratification as the object of such a concentrated salvo. They board the bus together and pause in a café. Luc is in town to apply to a prestigious cabinetry school, and they make plans to meet during his short visit.

But once they’re finally alone, Luc turns brusque when Djemila balks at what he has on his mind. The fact that she might be a practicing Muslim and a virgin doesn’t seem to occur to him. They make plans for her to visit his hometown, but something (predictably) comes up, and he lets her stew alone and humiliated in an out-of-the way hotel room.

Because that’s the way Luc is. He deploys his sleepy eyes, decent but not threatening good looks, and a low-key, confiding manner to draw girls in until they butt up against his leathery, coarse self-interest. His obduracy becomes more apparent when Luc returns to the sticks and his job woodworking with his devoted father (André Wilms). By chance, he comes across Geneviève (Louise Chevillotte), a high school friend as confident and upbeat as Djemila is shy. They reunite happily until he’s admitted to the Paris school and she informs him she’s pregnant, at which point he decamps from her life without a word or backward glance. Papa fears for Luc. As a quiet witness to Luc’s offhand cruelty, he’s conflicted over how much more he wants to know about his son’s doings. 

Although the character he has created is rather unpleasant, Garrel cannily provides a backhanded sympathy for Luc. The two women he sweet-talks are outwardly very different, but beneath the skin very much the same—so needy, so easily excited, so desperate for connection and reassurance. It’s no wonder that their desires frighten the callow young man. And it’s no wonder that he dangles false promises: A.) Because without them, he won’t have the slightest chance with the women, and B.) the women are so eager to believe the lies. It’s a bleak view of the relationship between the sexes, and it rings with disquieting truth. Garrel allows uneasy dynamics to play out in long, loose scenes that take their time exposing the characters’ insecurities unspoken expectations.

Used to having the upper hand, Luc comes across big changes when he moves to Paris. The country mouse underfoot in the big city meets an experienced, willful femme fatale (Souheila Yacoub) who arrives with an unexpected accessory—a leaner, more elegant petit ami than Luc. Broke, distracted, and overmatched, Luc helplessly watches his life fall into disarray. A reckoning will arrive with the only person he has ever really loved, and not the one he imagined. 

By staying at once removed and stealthily allowing events to play out, Garrel elevates his story of a young man’s errors into a minor-key tragedy with a greater than expected impact. Less does not always mean more, but in this film it may just.