Catch me if you can: "Anaïs in Love"

What's the collective noun for messy women? Anaïs in Love follows hard on the broken heels of March's The Worst Person in the World (whose box office the new film surely hopes to emulate) and its Parisian sister Jeune Femme in describing the misadventures of a twentysomething not-quite-girl-not-yet-woman, the better to illustrate the tricky passage from carefree studenthood to adult responsibility as it now is. We find our heroine (Anaïs Demoustier) playing permanent catch-up: late for everything, running from one messy situation to the next, unlikely ever to give herself the time she clearly needs to sit down and have a long, hard think about what she wants to do with the rest of her life. Oh, and she's pregnant, too - accidentally, of course, news she breaks to her notional beau several minutes after she's turned up late to the movie they had plans to see, and an inconvenience that doesn't stop her from going on to sleep with Daniel (Denis Podalydès), an older married man she stumbles into at a party. Debutant writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet would seem to have set herself the very great challenge of filming a character who would be a patience-trying nightmare in real life - someone so flighty you could only ever wave her on, or away - and seeing how long an audience will stick around. 

This may only count as a qualified triumph, but I stuck around physically for all of it, and mentally for three-quarters of it. Bourgeois-Tacquet has an ally in Demoustier, prominent demoiselle of new French cinema (Elles, The New Girlfriend), who at least possesses the creative intelligence to put some satirical distance between Anaïs the actress and Anaïs the role. Authentically looser than the headgirlish Renate Reinsve in her summer dresses and defiantly mix-and-match underwear, she's a Rohmer heroine trapped in the city and the wrong century, around a bunch of people who mostly remain baffled by her. (For a while, only the camera and an ailing mother are in full sympathy with her movements and motives.) Anaïs is manic, and prone to saying yes when she means no, mouth forever outrunning mind and heart, but she's not without charm - witness her gabbling out her fears about the Métro in broken English to two Korean tourists - and Demoustier steadies the film during its second-act lurch into cringe comedy, wherein Anaïs further complicates her own situation by developing a girlish crush on Daniel's other half Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi at her most womanly, underlining the distance between these two perspectives).

Here, Anaïs in Love starts to become more conventional - more conventionally melodramatic - than the screwball first half leads us to expect, which comes as a slight disappointment. We're headed towards the learning of lessons, the getting of wisdom, which may just be what follows naturally when you're locked in a closet with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and a haul of rare erotic prints. It does strike the eye as one of those films its maker approached with the very specific aim of getting Demoustier and Bruni Tedeschi to make out at some point - which is fine, not least as it bears out an old Suzanne Vega lyric ("When you lie on the ground in somebody's arms/You'll probably swallow some of their history"). Still, it's a bit of a shame that this should entail making Podalydès' Daniel the bad guy, just because, you know, girls rule and boys drool. (The worldliness behind the camera extends only so far.) If it's not the grand sociological statement The Worst Person in the World implied from its title on down - more a broadly agreeable late-summer sorbet - I chuckled often and fondly while Anaïs in Love was still funny: at the look on Podalydès' face when he realises he's being cuckolded by the girl he failed to perform with, at the fact Anaïs's meanderings become entangled with the fate of a sick lemur, the movie's second most pressing loose end after that unplanned pregnancy. Bit random, bit of a mixed bag, but that may just be what life's like when you're pinballing through your twenties.

Anaïs in Love is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube and the Peccadillo Pod.