Sophie is an examining magistrate who interviews Juliette, a young woman accused of “fraudulent abuse of a person's weakness” when Juliette’s lover commits suicide. Sophie quickly realizes that this young woman is the birth mother of her adopted son Léo. Worried and unsettled, Sophie decides to hide who she is and not to recuse herself from the case, so that she can keep an eye on Juliette. Meanwhile, her husband Olivier approaches Juliette under an assumed name …

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The seductive stare of Mathilde Bisson, which bores a hole into the audience during the movie’s first few minutes, is the only interesting part of this mediocre movie by Yves Angelo - the director of photography who won three Césars for costume dramas like Le Colonel Chabert and Les Ames grises. With a premise more in keeping with a summer TV movie, Au plus près du paradis falls generally flat, somewhere between a melodrama and a thriller, dragging itself along until finally ending up in a dead end – there is a seemingly endless scene on a cruise ship that perfectly illustrates the director’s inability to get a handle on his story. A failure that is all the more disappointing given that Angelo has at his side solid actors like Sylvie Testud and Grégory Gadebois, who are unfortunately stuck in dull characters.