Instead, Assayas chooses to show the emotional impacts and consequences that Adrien’s social death has on a terrific ensemble cast, which includes Francois Cluzet and Virginie Ledoyen, who’s soon to appear opposite Leonardo Di Caprio in The Beach.Balibar’s particular place in French cinema is as the embodiment of cultured, middle-class, and frequently Parisian femininity. It was a cult success, a kind of loose-limbed remake of Truffaut’s Day for Night with the Hong Kong action-movie starlet Maggie Cheung essaying the part of the French silent cinema icon Musidora.Carrying over the hand-held camerawork of Denis Lenoir, the cinematographer with whom Assayas has shot all of his features, the style of Irma has been brought to bear on Late August, a story whose concerns – friendship and work, love and death – are treated in a fragmented narrative. Late August continues this tradition, but with a stylistic lightness that will be familiar to those who saw Assayas’s Irma Vep – his sixth feature but the first to get a release in the UK. But they were also attempts to find a younger audience for this sort of cinema. “Jeanne is a changeling in front of the camera,” Amalric says. “You never know quite how far she’ll go.”Late August, Early September is an anatomisation of emotions, reminiscent of older directors such as Claude Sautet and Andre Techine; and that’s part of its interest. When films like Sautet’s A Heart in Winter or Nelly and Mr Arnaud reached our shores, they did so partly on the star-power of Emmanuelle Beart.

Gabriel keeps up the salesman patter, leading the other couple from room to room. Balibar does little other than hug the wall, her face switching and twitching. The dismantling of what was once their shared domestic space hurts her And she shows this without saying a word. The film opens on a scene in which she and Gabriel, her ex-partner – played by Amalric – are showing prospective buyers around their flat.

But it was mostly in the quality of her voice, which is able to skip across several pitches in the space of a line and to suggest a cajoling, curious intelligence that was never very far from the comic.This unpredictability is well to the fore in Late August, Early September. “It’s getting a bit tiresome, having this air of anachronism.” She can change from interrogatory silences – holding her partner with luminous, piercing eyes – to skittish action, emphasised by her expressive angularity. And Balibar was electrifying as Valerie – a she-devil philosophy student who enchants Paul, then utterly terrifies him with her unpredictable behaviour.Though Balibar was plausible as a contemporary character, there was a quality about her as an actress that could belong to the French cinema of the 1930s and 1940s “I’m constantly being told that,” she laughs. Immediately they became the two principal faces of what is referred to, somewhat amorphously, as “the Young French cinema”. Amalric plays Paul, a boyishly likeable if infuriating presence, a Jean-Pierre Leaud for the 1990s. In the film, Balibar and Amalric play a couple negotiating the breakdown of their relationship and the death of a mutual friend. In life, they are married and, when I met them in Paris, were about to take off on holiday with their two children.
The couple first acted together in Arnaud Desplechin’s 1997 film My Sex Life (How I Got into an Argument).

But in Olivier Assayas’ forthcoming Late August, Early September, the on-screen partnership of two young performers – Jeanne Balibar and Mathieu Amalric – looks strong enough to widen the appeal of a genre that traditionally appeals to minority tastes. In the UK, French art films have always had something of an image problem. Even the French call them – derogatorily – nombriliste, which means navel-gazing. If all else fails, she can always teach a course in media studies.`Mi Chico Latino’ is released on 16 August.

“She’s a fighter.” But what does that mean? Try to pinpoint Halliwell’s abilities and you’re left fumbling with “ambition” and “drive” and “surviving” and “understanding how the system works”. “She’s not Brain of Britain, but she’s incredibly streetwise,” offers a friend. Perhaps it would be more illuminating to think of her as a glamorous Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together from parts of Robbie Williams, Madonna, Melinda Messenger and Princess Diana.It’s hard to say what Halliwell has that a thousand other stage-school girls don’t. Few would deny that Halliwell has weaknesses that Williams and Madonna don’t. It may all be relative, but Halliwell is a worse singer than either and is considerably less skilled at entertaining a crowd But as Mel C says, Halliwell is “a great celebrity”. Sometimes she hits, sometimes she misses, but her instincts are often spot on.”But even these comparisons don’t tell the whole story.