Directed by Joachim Lafosse. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Jérémie Renier, Yannick Renier, Kris Cuppens, Patrick Descamps. Club, IFI, Dublin, 95 min ****

IN JOHN Boorman's Where the Heart Is(1990), a father, impatient for his grown-up children to fend for themselves, decides to throw them out of his house. In Private Property, a mother (Isabelle Huppert), longing to have her own space and allow a new relationship to blossom, plans to sell the family home, to the dismay of her grown-up twin sons.

Pascale (Huppert) is divorced and squabbles with her ex-husband (Patrick Descamps) when he comes to visit the two young men. The sons are immature, caught in a suspended state between childhood and adulthood. Thierry (Jérémie Renier) is at college, but shows so little interest that he forgets when he has classes. François (Yannick Renier) indulges in odd jobs around the remote country house where they live.

The brothers lead indolent lives, playing ping-pong and video games, and shooting rats in a nearby river. They appear to have a close bond and they still take baths together and wash each other's hair. However, both feel wounded and resentful because of their parent's divorce, and this tension is released in frequent bouts of sibling rivalry.

This intense, intimate drama is set on the outskirts of a city somewhere in Belgium. Perhaps out of guilt for the break-up of her marriage 10 years earlier, Pascale has pampered her sons, cooking and cleaning for them, and is subjected to barbed teasing from Thierry in return. Roles are reversed to the point where Pascale and her new lover (Kris Cuppens) go to the woods to have sex in a car while her sons idle around the house.

Writer-director Joachim Lafosse observes the characters dispassionately, often from fixed camera positions that make the viewer feel complicit in a voyeuristic view of this disintegrating family unit. What's left unsaid in these sequences can be as illuminating as in all the rows that erupt at the dinner table.

Pallid and often appearing without any make-up, Huppert proves as fearless as ever, immersing herself in the character of Pascale as she bares her soul. Renier (from L'Enfant and a cameo in In Bruges), an actor half Huppert's age, is a match for her in their fraught scenes together.

His real-life brother Yannick has a more low-key role (the Reniers are not twins and are actually six years apart) in this brooding, involving drama that could be aptly retitled Home Is Where the Broken Heart Is.

MICHAEL DWYER