Jackie Oudney’s romantic comedy about English and French sexual mores has a nice scene at London’s National Film Theatre, as the BFI Southbank was once more satisfactorily called. Hugh Bonneville, one of the four troubled lovers at the film’s centre, interviews Grimaldi, a self-important French director, on the importance of his work. The sillier the director gets, the more a fawning audience applauds — which is often par for the course.

The fact that the director is played by a bearded Eric Cantona — one of Manchester United’s best ever players who, before he became an actor, was given to make philosophical remarks about the game that no one could decipher — adds spice to the sequence. Here, his gnomic pronouncements about love are similarly obscure.

Bonneville’s character, Jed, is in an on-off relationship with Cheryl (Victoria Hamilton).

When they seek counselling from another French expert on love — a psychiatrist this time — he decides that Bonneville only proposed to his live-in lover after 10 years because he didn’t actually love her. Ah, the French...

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The other English couple in trouble are played by Douglas Henshall and Anne-Marie Duff, who apparently met when, copying one of Grimaldi’s fairly awful films, Henshall pretended to be about to throw himself off a Parisian bridge in order to get the attention of Duff’s character.

The film never seems sure whether the French actually do know more about love than the English, for all their passionate talk.

Otherwise, it is typically British. Which means good acting and a screenplay from Aschlin Ditta that has some shrewd moments but not an awful lot of cinematic flair.

It is certainly watchable, and shrewder than the usual rom-com — but it’s not quite Woody Allen’s Manhattan.