Starring Laetitia Dosch. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

More impressive as an acting exercise than as an actual movie, Montparnasse Bienvenüe is a showcase for powder keg Laetitia Dosch, who creates a highly improvised character whose many contradictions are united by a kind of guile-free obnoxiousness. Her character’s struggles make you care for her while feeling glad she’s stuck on the other side of the screen.

With her dark-red hair and metro-pale skin, Dosch’s Paula greets us by banging her head so hard against a Parisian door she ends up in the hospital. Judging by what writer-director Léonor Serraille shows us in her feature debut, Paula just goes from one head trip to another. Apparently, she’s been dumped by her long-time boyfriend, a well-known photographer, and is panicking at having to fend for herself. It doesn’t help that she has saddled herself with the boyfriend’s purloined and unfriendly cat.

Eventually, she finds a job as a nanny for a rich woman who, incredibly, asks for no references but is simply impressed by the manic enthusiasm of a dishevelled stranger with a bandage on her forehead. Paula later lands a second job at a mall boutique, where she earns the initial scorn and then tentative friendship of a smart-dressing security guard named Ousmane (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye). Her encounters with new people, old friends, and medical professionals are fraught with unpredictable behaviour; she can be a charming blabbermouth or a threatening presence, full of regret and ill-placed blame.

This volatility extends to a pair of encounters with her estranged mother (veteran Nathalie Richard), who literally runs in the other direction the first time she sees her daughter. Later, when Paula heads to Mom’s place in rural France, the meeting is violent but its causes remain unexplained. A subsequent meeting with the absent photog (Grégoire Monsaingeon) is similarly ambiguous; after spending most of the movie begging him to take her back, she now blames him for stifling her. “I should have gone back to school,” she shouts. “I’ve never seen you finish a book” is his quiet retort.

The film follows her with a jazz score, recalling Louis Malle’s use of Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows, and remains enigmatically conflicted. This applies to the film’s simple French title, Jeune Femme, made stranger by the fact that Dosch, then 37, is playing a 31-year-old. The export title, Montparnasse Bienvenüe, is no more revealing, since Paula already lives in the fabled Left Bank neighbourhood when the story starts. Such odd cinematic riddles can probably best be answered by this young director’s next venture.