Starring Isabelle Huppert. In English, French, and Portuguese, with English subtitles. Rated PG

Take a cast of topnotch international stars, put them in a gorgeously touristic setting, and give them some universally intriguing problems to solve, and what you have is a recipe for… meh?

Such is the puzzling fate of Frankie, which stars Isabelle Huppert as enigmatic movie star Françoise Crémont, known as the above, who has gathered her extended family in Portugal’s seaside town of Sintra, to deliver sad news. It’s honourable enough to build a story, or a situation at least, around conversations, and let audiences gradually figure out who the people are and what they mean to each other. But most people want just a little more.

Veteran indie filmmaker Ira Sachs, best known for 2005’s Forty Shades of Blue, has been compared to such talk-tastic directors as Woody Allen and Richard Linklater. But his obvious touchstone here is French new-waver Éric Rohmer, whose films were deceptively gentle character studies. The debt is doubly clear when you spot, as Frankie’s first husband, Pascal Greggory, from Rohmer’s 1983 classic Pauline at the Beach. Irish stalwart Brendan Gleeson plays Jimmy, her present partner, and both have children from earlier marriages.

Frankie’s middle-aged son (Belgian Jérémie Renier, who played Pierre Bergé in Saint Laurent) is the most resentful of the bunch, and Mom is hoping to hook him up with her makeup-artist pal (Marisa Tomei), although it turns out that the latter has brought her cinematographer boyfriend (Greg Kinnear). Jimmy’s daughter (Sherlock’s Vinette Robinson) is having her own marital problems, in the most extraneous of the subplots, none of which are explored with anything resembling real energy. In any case, her rebellious teen daughter (Sennia Nanua, young star of The Girl With All the Gifts) really does have some Rohmer-like fun at the beach.

Even there, Sachs goes a bit off. There’s very little music on the soundtrack, but the seaside sequence is suddenly accompanied by a concert recording of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”—a choice as obvious as it is out of place in this unsentimental story. Elsewhere, characters are introduced, such as a tour guide played by Portugal’s Carloto Cotta, and then disappear after a few scenes. The whole thing feels too hastily written (or improvised) to carry much weight, and you would think such a slight tale would compensate with stylish aesthetics. But at least Frankie has the grace to give its Gallic star some moments that glow for no other reason than that she’s in them.