“It’s weird to talk about Jeune femme here,” Dosch concedes as we sit down in Knightsbridge’s Bulgari Hotel. “The film has certain moral values. It’s about the situation in Paris, about loneliness, about not having money. And to talk about it in a beautiful hotel is weird.”

Dosch has been in London for over a month now. She’s leading a stage production of The Malady of Death, and is considering a permanent switch. “Paris depresses me,” she sighs. “If you want to live there, you have to be selfish, or else you’re hurt every 10 seconds. Léonor wanted to show the disillusion and beauty of it. Paris is full of dreams, but it’s a harsh city.” She adds, “It was snowing there a few weeks ago. It was so cold. There are immigrants in tents, hundreds of them. Then the police came and took the tents away. It’s terrible.”

“Paris depresses me. If you want to live there, you have to be selfish, or else you’re hurt every 10 seconds” – Laetitia Dosch

On her CV, Dosch boasts an extensive filmography, including collaborations with Catherine Corsini and Justine Triet. However, Serraille made her casting decision after a Google search conjured up an inexplicably wide variety of images. “Léonor thought I couldn’t really be described physically,” Dosch explains. “Sometimes I was beautiful, sometimes not. Sometimes I looked fat, sometimes too slim. She didn’t know who I was.” Is that a compliment? “The first time, it’s a compliment,” she laughs. “If it happens all the time…”

The pair not only watched Mike Leigh’s Naked in preparation, they even emulated the director’s rehearsal methods. “We talked a lot. We improvised. We took the time to know each other and build the character. We built a vision of a woman we wanted to see onscreen now. This film is an answer to what’s happening in French cinema: the way women are treated, the way they’re always being sweet, always asking stupid things.”

I admittedly went into Jeune femme expecting something like Cédric Klapisch’s 1996 comedy When the Cat’s Away, another Parisian tale about a young woman’s feline-related antics. But Jeune femme, a film with considerably more bite and anger, delves into subjects such as mental health, sexual violence and abortion. So, really, such comparisons are unhelpful. Still, as I do in my daily life, I bring up Frances Ha. I mention that the journalist who spoke to Dosch before me wrote in his review that she’s “France’s answer to Greta Gerwig”.

“He did?” she says. “Well, it’s a good comparison. But actually, we were afraid of Paula looking too much like Frances, too much like a wacky girl. We thought Paula should be somewhere between Frances Ha and Sue Lost in Manhattan. She’s having to deal with keeping her child or not, finding a job, concrete things.”

Serraille has instead cited Winona Ryder, not Gerwig, as an inspiration for Paula. Dosch mulls it over. “I understand it. Paula was a muse, and she isn’t anymore. She has the same rage as Winona Ryder in Black Swan.” She then jokes, “And Winona Ryder also used to steal things, like Paula.”