In 2005, Jean-Claude Brisseau was given a one-year suspended sentence and fined EUR 15,000 for sexually harassing two actresses (Noémie Kocher and Veronique Hirat) during auditions for the film between 1999 and 2001. A year later he was convicted again after a third woman (Julie Quéré) came forward. The auditions required the young women to masturbate themselves or one another in hotel rooms or in public places. Brisseau sometimes filmed the sessions, though not always. According to the actresses, the director sometimes masturbated himself — a point he acknowledged during the investigation but denied at trial. The auditions were repeated over several years before the director dismissed the actresses, saying they did not fit the role. Brisseau consistently maintained that the auditions were conducted solely for artistic reasons.
Selected by the French magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma as one of the top 10 films of 2002 — placed at No. 1 jointly with Ten.
On two occasions the French translation of the Bhagavad Gita is quoted: (1) "...bien que tu tiennes de savants discours, tu t'affliges sans raison. ni les vivants ni les morts le sage ne les pleure." (...even though you utter learned words, you grieve without reason — the wise do not lament the living or the dead...); (2) "...car jamais ne fut le temps où nous n'existions, moi, toi, et tous ces rois des hommes ; et jamais dans l'avenir, aucun de nous ne cessera d'être." (...for there was never a time when I, you and all these kings of men did not exist; nor shall any of us ever cease to be in the future.).
