Audrey Tautou is enticingly sweet, and quite magnetic, in France’s He Loves Me . . . He Loves Me Not (2002).  She enacts a psychologically damaged woman who loves, and wants to run away with, a happily married cardiologist.  He’s played by Samuel Le Bihan, who is excellent, getting right the doctor’s manly professionalism and intermittent anger.

Directed by Laetita Colombani, the film plays like a Claude Chabrol opus until it strangely comes to a halt and rewinds in order to tell its story a second time.  It intends to let us know whether the cardiologist bears any culpability with respect to Tautou.  And it’s all fascinating.  The film verifies that an individual assertion about “my truth” is, in this case, no truth at all.

In her direction, Colombani is very sensitive to what her characters are going through, and, along with Tautou and Le Bihan, Sophie Guillemin (as Tautou’s friend, Heloise) gives an especially persuasive performance.

(In French with English subtitles)