Just after reading in the production notes for Bridge to Terabithia that the lovely Zooey Deschanel, who plays the children's sympathetic music teacher, was so named because her parents loved JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey, I saw a chic French movie, Christophe Honore's Dans Paris. Its self-conscious narrator lies in bed with one of his numerous conquests reading Franny et Zooey. Is the Man Upstairs, the figure Cecil B DeMille once called 'the Divine Projectionist', giving me a sign? Honore is no Balzac, and his picture is a homage to the French New Wave, especially to the early films of Truffaut and Godard. Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier, both veterans of Truffaut pictures, play a divorced couple having trouble with their sons, the withdrawn Romain Duris, who's broken up with his partner, and the irresistibly attractive Louis Garrel, and they're all grieving for a wonderful daughter and sister who committed suicide aged 17.

The lowest moment in Honore's movie is when Duris and his estranged girlfriend converse soulfully on the phone in the form of a regretful little love song. You've heard of the luck of the Irish. This is the yuck of the French.