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Roz (Robin Wright) and Lil (Naomi Watts) have been friends since childhood and years later, they remain close, in the way that young girls might have always imagined. The pair lives across the street from one another, happily married with children – a son for each of them – near the beach. They are successful and beyond intimacy, at least the kind most of us can fathom. Those on the outside watch and wonder, is there more to the relationship between these women?

Early on Lil loses her husband, and we see Roz and her family rally to support Lil and her young son. Time passes fluidly from this point, to years later, when now we have Tom (James Frecheville), Roz’s son and Ian (Xavier Samuel), Lil’s son, who also happen to be best friends, surfing together with their mothers looking on, admiring the young men. Dreamily, Roz even points out just how stunning the boys are, comparing them to “young gods,” and in the comment, we get the first hint of the mythic and mortal falls to come.

It is inevitable and it starts with pictures. Roz and Lil looking back on their youth, recalling their high times together, sharing stories with teasing elements of sensuality that their sons pick up on. They want to know about their mothers’ bodies when they were young. It is risqué talk, but playful, meaningless, right?

Until it is not; when Roz peeks in on Ian, who is staying overnight in what amounts to his home away from home. When it happens, the fall from innocence between Roz and Ian, we see and understand it on some level as an expression of the feelings, the almost psychic rapport between Roz and Lil. Why not? The sons are gender-swapped reflections of the mothers, younger and beautifully in their prime, so, yes, why not?

But when Tom discovers the physical transgression between Roz and Ian, he reacts out of spite and retaliation, making a move on Lil that, initially, seems less about desire, although it is not long before the emotional tide turns. Once sex between the couples commences, the squaring forms a barrier to anyone on the outside. Roz’s husband Harold (Ben Mendelsohn) accepts a job offer that requires a relocation, and disappears without any direct acknowledgement of the arrangement, but there has to be a nagging sense, a lurking realization.

In full bloom, Adore, from Coco Before Chanel director Anne Fontaine and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, A Dangerous Method), tackles Doris Lessing’s novella (The Grandmothers) with the same wonderfully muted sensuality and foreboding Louis Malle brought to his adaptation of Josephine Hart’s Damage. No good can come from such matings, no matter how progressive the participants imagine themselves to be, but Fontaine wisely follows through on the promise of the visual parallels and the not-quite incestuousness of the crossed-up romantic pairs. To gaze upon Roz and Ian as a couple, the age discrepancy fades and we are left with two impossibly blond idols that belong together; it would simply be wrong if somehow these two didn’t end up fighting against the odds and social confines that might dare to keep them apart.

And while there a bit less of that expectation in the physical connection between Lil and Tom, Watts, through a naked emotional performance, lets us see the need to express herself sexually, that Lil buried when her husband died and probably never considered unearthing again. Wright has the more confident character to work with (and she certainly enjoys it, a nice change of pace for her), but Watts handles the trickier aspects of Lil’s situation with subtle grace.

Probably too much taboo for the mainstream to ‘adore,’ but for adventurous voyeurs, Fontaine and company present a titillating tease of intimate possibility.