Director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet ably channels the spirit of Éric Rohmer with this ridiculously charming romantic comedy that’s as light on its feet as it’s flighty heroine. Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier) is a slightly maddening and scatter-brained romantic who’s late for everything – trips to the cinema, parties, rents payments – but either steamrollers her way into everyone’s heart nevertheless, or at least sprints off elsewhere before the recipient of her guileless nonchalance gets too irritated. Shiftless, broke, and prying away one relationship like a barnacle of a ship’s hull, she meets the much older Daniel (Denis Podalydès), who quickly falls under her spell. It isn’t long however until restless Anaïs sets her romantic sights on Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tadeschi), a writer whom she admires, and who happens to be Daniel’s partner.

Anaïs in Love is a screwball comedy with the most delicate of touches, powered by Demoustier’s high-wire performance. Somehow this unreliable, impulsive, impish young woman doesn’t become wearying and that’s down to Demoustier constantly micro-adjusting Anaïs’ mannerisms, dimming her megawatt flirtatious charisma, or switching it to full beam in an instant. Bourgeois-Tacquet’s script is as supple as her direction, adding just enough drama to tether our heroine vaguely to earth in the form of a family illness. Like Demoustier, she knows how far the momentum of Anaïs’ innate attractiveness will carry her past her less appealing qualities. In the superb Bruni-Tadeschi’s Emilie, there is also a wise, grounded, and experienced foil who isn’t simply a rabbit in Anaïs’ headlights, and who forces the young woman to adopt qualities like perseverance, patience, and an appreciation of delayed gratification that she’s never had before.

There’s nary a foot put wrong in Anaïs in Love, its simple story is beautifully told and avoids the obvious pitfalls. Mainly this is a refusal to indirectly moralise about its protagonist. Anaïs is allowed to be slightly manipulative, needy, and to indulge her desires without the plot punishing her in some deux ex machina sense of perceived karmic justice. She has an abortion, she pursues the woman of a man she’s slept with, she occasionally lies to get out of situations of her own making. Through the course of her story, she slowly grows and comes to realise she’s made some mistakes while remaining her essence.

Like Anaïs itself, the film occasionally does get to have its cake and thoroughly indulge itself. There’s a few almost painfully French tropes that you get the sense are included as a wink; there’s the stereotypical absence of any hang-ups about sex itself (and one forgets how ingrained this is in American rom-coms) – Anaïs’ issues are purely romantic, and in its throwaway references to the likes of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the kind of ludicrously literate and philosophical intelligence possessed by even the most hapless naïf. And yet, that’s part of the appeal. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet isn’t in any way redefining the romantic comedy, or even radically twisting the sophisticated, specifically Gallic take on the genre, but she’s scrupulously aware of what makes a successful one; what to amplify, what to extract, what to tweak, and what to playfully subvert. And, most importantly of all, who to cast. One suspects this won’t be the last time director and star collaborate.

Screening as part of Glasgow Film Festival 2022