Decisions don’t come easy in “The Man of My Life,” and that’s true on both sides of the camera. While on the big screen we watch a vacationing family as it arrives at a torrid emotional crossroads — a father torn between his familial obligations and a crush that develops between him and a male neighbor — behind the camera we sense a similar conflict in the way the film wanders between themes and styles. Ultimately, as things alternate between the routine and the ravishing, some of the year’s most beautiful imagery — calm summer mornings dissolving into more than a few nervous nights, transcendent landscapes, and provocative dance sequences — finds itself weighed down by a melodrama that can’t quite keep pace.

“Man of My Life” is the second feature by the actress-turned-director Zabou Breitman, after her cerebral 2001 debut “Beautiful Memories,” and one can feel a daring sense of experimentation rippling underneath this otherwise standard, love-me-or-leave-me homosexual drama. As a result, there’s an intensity and vibrancy to the movie’s look and mood that may be enough to whisk viewers through its murky narrative. However, for those who feel a tad underwhelmed as they scrutinize the story’s characters and their decisions, the pretty picture simply won’t suffice.

The title, as is the case with just about everything here, is more complicated than it initially appears. At first glance, the movie appears to be about the unexpected man in this husband’s life, in the way Hugo (Charles Berling) shatters Frederic’s (Bernard Campan) comfortable world. But as the days draw into weeks, we begin to see the other relationships scattered in the margins. As much as Frederique (Lea Drucker) craves closeness with her husband, it’s her young son who occupies the majority of her days — her role as wife and lover reduced to that of mother and caretaker. As far as the child is concerned, his father is the only meaningful man in the world, but daddy would rather spend these lazy summer afternoons wasting away the hours until he can have another late-night conversation with Hugo.

In the beginning, it’s a subtle disconnect, as dad drifts into drowsy laziness while mom holds down the fort. But it soon becomes clear that Frederic is intent on shutting out his family completely. During many of Frederic’s summer naps, Ms. Breitman depicts the mere presence of his family as an intrusion; the father is awakened repeatedly by a son whispering into his ear, or by a flirtatious wife who, to his embarrassment, is not satisfied in the bedroom. Instead, Frederic’s life becomes increasingly focused on those late-night chats and midday runs with Hugo, sunny jogs through the forest that Ms. Breitman molds as euphoric, sumptuous, almost dreamlike sequences, sheer ecstasy waiting for both near the end of the wooded trail, at the water fountain where they douse themselves before sitting down together, sweaty and exhausted, for an espresso at the café.

In this way, Hugo is not just the man of Frederic’s life, but Frederic gradually becomes the man who leads Hugo to reconsider his approach to companionship. Forget the confused child or the ostracized wife: In many ways, the real story of “Man of My Life” is to be found with Hugo, who makes a subtle transition from a man concerned only with promiscuous encounters, to someone who sees in Frederic a reason to commit.

So why, then, does all this feel so distant, so redundant? On the printed page, the story reads like an emotional epic, about a son feeling abandoned by his father, about a wife feeling abandoned by her husband, about a gay man considering commitment, and a married man realizing he has made a profound mistake with his life. But the more beautiful and surreal the look of the film becomes, the more we are forcibly separated from the emotions surging beneath this family’s upheaval.

In the movie’s most beautiful sequence, Hugo and Frederic make their first tentative steps toward a place of admitting their feelings for each other, and Ms. Breitman captures them repeatedly as small, silent specks, lost among the pastoral beauty of the French countryside. Yet we appreciate such splendor more than we embrace it, marveling at the construction while losing sight of the characters at its center. As dialogue repeatedly gives way to montage, a story of self-discovery is replaced by a beauty rooted in framing, editing, and sophisticated mise-en-scene.

No doubt this is why it feels as though “Man of My Life” wanders on and on, as if it’s director couldn’t decide which of the four endings was the right one. Ms. Breitman is so focused on proving her artistic mettle that she has lost sight of the most basic rule of storytelling: Know when to wrap it up.