On her way home from school, a teenager named Europe meets an attractive truck driver who calls himself Jupiter, the god of all the gods. Captivated, she lets herself be seduced. He tells her the story of Io, who was transformed into a heifer to escape the wrath of Juno, and takes her on a journey to hear more tales in the same vein.

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Christophe Honoré’s career has been wide-ranging, from the beautiful Love Songs to the astonishing Making Plans for Lena and the pompous Man at Bath. Metamorphoses, arrives in the wake of the relative failure of the ambitious Beloved and is unfortunately of the same type. A free and modern adaptation of Ovid’s poems, it does have a freedom and an energy that are both remarkable, but it is far from being a movie that works in its entirety. Multiple layers of narration and spare settings make it somewhat interesting, but the melody resulting from amateur actors reciting words from another time is not harmonious enough to be convincing.