In “My Worst Nightmare,” Isabelle Huppert plays an icy museum director who falls in love with the Belgian sleazebag — played by Benoit Poelvoorde — who’s done repair work on her palatial Paris apartment. A movie like this needs almost no further explanation since, as romantic comedies go, this is old-testament ancient. But the movie has more writing than you’d get in an American version of similar material (see “Playing for Keeps,” Page 12, which opens today; or don’t). It has too much writing, in fact.

Their teenage-ish sons have become inseparable, and child services is threatening to take the sleaze’s boy, who, by all accounts, is brilliant, while the ice queen’s son is an underachieving punk. He needs to find the boy a suitable home to win over the authorities, and there could be no more suitable home in the city than the one he’s just fixed up. Meanwhile, her vaguely older live-in partner (André Dus-sollier) finds himself on the sort of humiliating dates with a younger woman (Virginie Efira) that you might expect of a middle-age Frenchman of Dussollier’s calibre.