Deceptively simple in form and content, Eustache’s Une Sale Histoire is a fascinatingly complex investigation of the relationship between  fiction and documentary, verbal and visual storytelling, and personal  and universal desires. The film’s two sections mirror each other: in the  first Michael Lonsdale acts in the role of a man explaining to a  roomful of friends his past voyeuristic obsessions, while the second  section shows an unscripted recording of Jean-Noël Picq, the man  Lonsdale has played, recounting the same real-life tale. Eustache  presents dramatic and authentic versions of the “dirty story” without  authorial commentary and thus encourages the viewer to untangle a web of  structural correspondences between the two sections as well as the  sexual and moral implications of Picq’s candid confession.