Paris, 13th District

Jacques Audiard, who won the Palme d'Or for Dheepan, adapted three short comics by the American cartoonist Adrian Tomine and handed the screenplay to Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius. The film competed at Cannes in 2021 and is unlike anything else in his filmography: no crime, no violence, no men in trouble with the law.

Émilie, played by newcomer Lucie Zhang, is a Taiwanese-French graduate working a call-centre job and letting rooms in her grandmother's flat. Camille, a teacher, takes one. Nora, thirty-three and starting a law degree, wears a blonde wig to a party and spends the rest of the year being mistaken for a webcam performer called Amber Sweet. Paul Guilhaume shot it in monochrome, which turns the concrete towers of the Olympiades into something closer to a Manhattan of the east.

The film's interest is in how people in their twenties and thirties now conduct intimacy — instantly available, endlessly negotiable, oddly formal — and its dialogue is much funnier than Audiard's reputation suggests. Reviewers noted the influence of Sciamma in the film's refusal to punish anybody for what they want. It is a minor Audiard by his own standards and one of the most enjoyable French films of its year.