Beloved, review - Telegraph Dir Christophe Honore; starring Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Ludivine Sagnier Christophe Honoré"s Beloved features a very different family, and it must be said, a far less agreeable one from the family in another of this week's releases - All in Good Time. Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni play mother and daughter (as they are in real life) in a French soap opera of love, grief and loss, dragged out across five decades and four countries. It starts out well enough in 1960s Paris, with Ludivine Sagnier as Madeleine, a young woman in a chic shoe shop who falls into "occasional" prostitution. She sets the tone, bursting into song in the style of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. But that's the high point. The years pass, Deneuve takes over as the older Madeleine, Mastroianni is cast as a woman looking for love in all the wrong places, and events take us to Prague, London and Montreal. The script clumsily name-checks key historical events (the Russian invasion of Prague, the Aids epidemic and, most gratuitously, 9/11) in a doomed attempt to lend a backdrop of substance to a leaden narrative. Curiously, it's just about watchable, despite a strong whiff of self-absorption. It feels like a vanity project, and it doesn't help that the songs - tremulous, world-weary and melancholy - sound much the same despite the changing times.