LET'S TALK ABOUT THE RAIN

CONVERSATIONS about the weather are so mundane that it takes a brave or foolhardy film-maker to put them in a movie title. Then again, Agnès Jaoui's previous outing as writer, director and star had a similarly bland title in Comme une Image, or Look at Meas it was released here.

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE RAIN/ PARLEZ-MOI DE LA PLUIE ****

Directed by Agnès Jaoui.

Starring Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jamel Debbouze, Agnès Jaoui, Pascale Arbillot, Frédéric Pierrot 15A cert, IFI/Light House, Dublin, 98 min

Perhaps Jaoui assumes that her status - particularly in her native France, where her work has been compared favourably to the serious comedies of Woody Allen - will encourage audiences to expect something more substantial than her titles suggest.

Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, her co-star, co-screenwriter and real-life partner, are adept at devising multi- layered scenarios that adroitly link the fates of disparate characters. Let's Talk About the Rainstarts, appropriately enough, in lashing rain. It's summer, and as feminist author Agathe (played by Jaoui) returns to Avignon where she was born and raised, she's planning to announce her entry into politics as an election candidate.

Michel (Bacri), a smug but struggling film-maker, and Karim (Jamel Debbouze), a good-natured hotel receptionist, decide that Agathe would be an ideal subject for the documentary they are planning on successful women. It helps that Karim's Algerian mother, who dotes on him as if he were still a child, is the housekeeper at Agathe's family home.

Meanwhile, Agathe's sister (Florence Loiret) is torn between her relationship with her husband and children and her inexplicable attraction to the self-absorbed Michel, with whom she's having an affair. And Agathe's relationship with her own partner comes under pressure because she is so distracted by all the professional commitments she brings on herself.

In establishing these and some peripheral characters, Jaoui appears to adopt a wilfully loose structure that feels distancing up the point when we realise just how subtly and seductively she has drawn us into their lives.

As the documentary project stumbles along under Michel's incompetent direction, it serves as an apt outlet for exploring the assumptions and prejudices of individual characters, and for revealing their thinly disguised brittleness.

While the movie does not pack the emotional punch of Comme une Image, it is just as perceptive, and it prompts responses that blend laughter and discomfort in equal measures as it effectively trades in the comedy of embarrassment. The cast is uniformly satisfying in their unshowy ensemble playing.

This is sophisticated, classically structured contemporary French cinema of shifting moods and tones in which the characters talk effusively. But they're trying to hide their feelings so often that they tend to digress into talking about the weather, perfectly justifying the movie's title after all.