Mi Iubita Mon Amour review – touching debut from Noémie Merlant

The Portrait of a Lady on Fire star has made a superbly low-key film about the ill-fated flirtations a teenager and older woman

Noemie Merlant is the French acting star who two years ago helped make Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire a colossal critical hit at Cannes. Now she provides one of the festival's incidental pleasures with her engaging if flawed directorial feature debut, presented here as a special screening. She has written it with her co-star, the emerging Romany actor Gimi-Nicolae Novaci, whom she discovered and cast as a nonprofessional in Shakira, the short film she directed in 2019 about gypsy communities in Paris. There is a definite screen chemistry between them here, and at times Mi Iubita (Romany for my love") Mon Amour almost comes across like a straight Call Me By Your Name.

Related: The Souvenir Part II review - a flood of austere sunlight in Joanna Hogg's superb sequel