Well I just finished another Jean-Jacques Beineix film (same director of Betty Blue, Diva, etc.) and this auteur is quickly becoming one of my favorites. This is basically about a guy and a girl who meet due to sharing an aspiration to become lion tamers. The footage featuring the lions is just unbelievable, and pretty much suspenseful every time they step into the cage. They begin at a zoo, move on to a small traveling carnival, and then wind up at Germany's biggest circus.
This new DVD version (all of his stuff has just been released in the U.S., most of it for the first time) is a director's cut with 40 minutes of extra footage, and like Betty Blue clocks in at about 3 hours, but isn't boring at all.
Not as good of a screenplay as the other Beineix films I've seen, nor are the actors as interesting, but the main attraction here is the lions and they deliver. Plus, considering these actors had to TRAIN to become tamers for the film, they do pretty well on the other stuff.
So along with the other films I've mentioned before (Diva, Betty Blue, The Moon in the Gutter), throw this one on the queue if you want to see the best French filmmaking of the 1980's.