Mélanie Laurent: the real star of Inglourious Basterds

Last year, Quentin Tarantino released his Inglourious Basterds, and despite being in many ways this director's number one fan I couldn't hide my disappointment with it. However, I hope I've got the good grace to concede Tarantino's remarkable flair for picking and bringing on new talent. All the world knows how the movie made a star of Christoph Waltz. This is also true of Mélanie Laurent, who played the fugitive Jewish woman Shosanna Dreyfus who was being pursued by Waltz's creepy SS "Jew hunter". Laurent had appeared in a number of films before this, but IB was the real breakthrough. Her father, Pierre Laurent, is incidentally also a professional actor who dubs the voice of Ned Flanders in French broadcasts of The Simpsons.

Laurent stars as a gifted violinist in a new film, The Concert, which is due to be released this Friday. To be honest, it is Mélanie Laurent who single-handedly saves this film from being a complete washout: she is a natural film star, and those qualities that brought her to Tarantino's attention are conspicuous here. She has a cool, reserved intelligence, a sense of self-possession, a way of dominating the screen by doing little or nothing, and is, of course, beautiful in a distinctive way that could be described as jolie-laide, but in a ratio of about 92:8. She could easily be the new French star to make the crossover into the Anglo-Saxon film world, like Catherine Deneuve or Juliette Binoche or Emmanuelle Béart or Marion Cotillard.

There's something else, though. Mélanie Laurent is also a writer and director. I have just watched her short film De Moins En Moins, or Less and Less, which was entered for competition at Cannes in 2008. It is a strange, intriguing piece of work: arguably unformed, wilfully opaque perhaps in declining to show a clear meaning, but confident, eloquent in its way. Eric Caravaca plays a psychotherapist; Delphine Benattard is Lisa, his patient, who is evidently suffering from some form of traumatically induced amnesia. Probing, the therapist asks what she can remember of a woman called Marion — evidently a close friend — and of a man called Sacha, and of her brother. Intensely troubled by the effort, and even in a certain amount of physical pain, Lisa sees fragments of a garden party, a lunch date with Sacha, a glimpse of him at a nightclub. What happened? It is up to us to piece together the partial jigsaw as best we can.

Less and Less isn't Laurent's only work. She has written and directed a short erotic film for French television, À Ses Pieds.

I haven't been able to see this, but it is apparently about a man who is seduced by a woman in a bar, and then, obsessed, goes on her trail. He winds up in a dream-like hotel and finds himself in a world where reality and fantasy are blurred, becoming a voyeur. It is part of a series called X Femmes, co-produced by Canal Plus and the online magazine Second Sexe, which, broadly inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, has commissioned films on the theme of female sexuality; the directorial lineup includes names like Tonie Marshall and Zoe Cassavetes.

My guess is that Laurent, as well as being a super-cool acting presence, is going to be an entrepreneurial player in French cinema, and write and direct her first feature in the next few years. An outing at Cannes – where Mathieu Amalric also made his directorial debut – is a distinct possibility. If it were possible to buy shares in actors (and writers and directors) I would invest in Mélanie Laurent. She is going to be a bull market.