stories by Hanif Kureishi (who also wrote the eponymous novel in 1998). The cast includes Kerry Fox, Mark Rylance, Timothy Spall and Marianne Faithfull. The film deals with "the possessiveness of a musician from London who regularly meets a woman for sexual encounters". It "was a tale of sexual obsession which sparked a debate about unsimulated sex on screen. But, Chéreau said, 'It is not like a porno film, not at all erotic sometimes, but it is beautiful because it is life." In 2003, he directed His Brother (Son frère), centred "on the relationship between two estranged brothers, one gay, the other straight. They come together when the latter suffers from a potentially fatal blood disease. The hospital processes are shot unflinchingly, without sentimentality, which makes this meditation on mortality even more moving." Koch notes the similarity of a scene when the moribund is shaved for a last futile surgery he lies on a table similar to Mantegna's Dead Christ. In 2003 Chéreau served at Cannes as president of the jury. His staging of Mozart's Così fan tutte was shown in 2005 and 2006 in Aix-en-Provence, the Opéra National de Paris and the Wiener Festwochen. In 2007, he staged Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at La Scala, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. He had stayed away from the opera because he regarded it as "predominantly a musical rather than a theatrical work", but his "sombre, subtle direction – with Waltraud Meier an acutely vulnerable Isolde – was intensely moving". He directed Leoš Janáček's From the House of the Dead, again conducted by Boulez, first shown at the Vienna Festival in 2007, and later at the Holland Festival, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Metropolitan Opera (his debut there in 2009) and La Scala. Chéreau's last film was Persécution (2009), "a gloomy, episodic film" about a man who is "haunted by a love-hate relationship with his girlfriend". His last production was Elektra by Richard Strauss, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, shown at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2013 and scheduled for the MET's 2015–16 season. A review noted: "The clichés of Fascist brutality and expressionist exaggeration are astutely avoided: this is a situation that involves human beings, not caricatures, in a visually neutral environment of bare walls, windows and doors (designed by Richard Peduzzi) which is also blackly portentous in atmosphere." Personal life and death Chéreau was in a long-term relationship with his lover and favorite