Starring Virginie Ledoyen and Emmanuel Mouret. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, April 10, at the Park Theatre

Emmanuel Mouret’s romantic comedies have often been compared to those of Woody Allen, but his aesthetic really owes more to the films of Eric Rohmer and the what-if plots of Alan Ayckbourn (a quintessentially English dramatist with a surprisingly strong French following).

In Shall We Kiss?, Mouret’s latest confection, there are not one but two sets of protagonists. Emilie (Julie Gayet) and Gabriel (Michaí«l Cohen) are two strangers who meet in Nantes. Although both are already emotionally involved, the attraction between them is palpable. Nevertheless, when Gabriel puts some rather chaste moves on Emilie, she staves off his advances with the aid of the cautionary tale of Judith (Virginie Ledoyen) and Nicolas (writer-director Mouret himself), two “best friends” who belatedly discover that they might be something more than that. Being eminently civilized, they want to make sure that if passion does explode between them, the flames of same must not burn either Claudio (Stefano Accorsi), Judith’s immensely loyal pharmacist husband, or Caline (Frédérique Bel), Nicolas’s good-natured airline-hostess girlfriend.

Throughout, Mouret consciously maintains a One Thousand and One Nights story structure (with Emilie serving as Scheherazade, although at one point Gabriel does add a narrative of his own), with the emphasis heavily weighted in favour of the film-within-a-film.

The end result is sexy, enjoyable, surprisingly responsible, and utterly predictable. Still, if you like this sort of thing, that doesn’t really matter (indeed, it might seem like an added plus). In any case, bedroom farce obviously still lives, even in the 21st century.