Anaïs In Love wins over audiences with its heroine's consummate French charms

“Was that your mistress on the phone?”

In most contexts a question like this would kick off a series of accusations, threats, confessions, slammed doors. But Anaïs In Love, a charming if slight first feature from actor turned writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, is not representative of most contexts. This is a drôle French film, and one that revels in its Frenchness.

The Anaïs of the title is played by Anaïs Demoustier, whom audiences may remember as Isabelle Huppert’s daughter in Michael Haneke’s 2003 dystopian drama Hour Of The Wolf, or as the airport hotel maid who transforms into a sparrow in Pascale Ferran’s Bird People. When we first meet her here, she is racing through the Paris streets, late for an appointment, with a big, winning smile on her face.

This is her natural state: being late, but always smiling. Anaïs, you see, is “impulseeve,” which is often another word for being annoying, but she’s so adorable that she can get away with it. People will wait for her because when she finally shows up she brings with her an explosion of radiant energy.

Our young heroine doesn’t have much money but knows the landlady would never kick her out. She’s dragging her feet on her thesis (about “17th century depictions of passion”) but her advisor merely sighs when he’s shrugged away. Her ex-boyfriend knows, deep down, that if she wants him back, he’ll come running. He doesn’t kid himself.

At a party she meets a friend of her friend’s parents, Daniel (Denis Podalydès), a man her father’s age, and they begin an affair. (It’s France.) He’s married, and swears this is the first time … well, at least since 12 years ago when he cheated on his first wife with his current wife. Anaïs fools herself into thinking Daniel wants a serious relationship (though she’s unsure if she does) but when he prevaricates, she’s out.

Licking her wounds, she picks up a novel written by Daniel’s wife, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and becomes infatuated. Further shirking her responsibilities, she heads north to Brittany where Emilie is in residency, giving an author’s seminar.

What’s key to making Anaïs In Love so enjoyable is that these simple plot points seem ready and willing to allow interruptions from just about anything. Again, Anaïs is “impulseeve,” and so must be her movie. If she and her mother want to sit barefoot in lawn chairs and talk about Marguerite Duras for a while, then that’s what’s going to happen. Anaïs’ brother’s friend’s lemur gets sick? Okay, let’s spend some time on that, too.

What Bourgeois-Tacquet recognizes is that it is too much of a good time to simply be in Anaïs’s presence. She’s the friend who always brightens the room, and not in an annoying magic pixieish way, but just by being positive—even when sub-letters nearly burn her apartment down.

As with many great laid-back French movies (Éric Rohmer feels like a big influence here) the locations are gorgeous, but grandeur is balanced with simplicity. The literature seminar is at the Château de Kerduel, which looks astonishing on tourist websites but Bourgeois-Tacquet shoots it in a down-to-earth style. The rooms are just rooms, the field is just a field, though it does have a few wild apple trees. Attention stays with the characters, like Anaïs who, as the title has suggests, becomes more than just intrigued by her older lover’s wife, and soon finds herself in love.

Anaïs In Love triggers some memories of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, another charming film, but it is definitely from a newer era. While this is hardly Exhibit A in any catalogue of feminist films, it is very much told through the young woman exploring romantic possibility, rather than spotlighting her. Anaïs no doubt would find the mid-’90s arthouse classic invigorating, but probably show up 20 minutes late and leave before it ends. But you gotta love her anyway.