Jean-Luc Godard once said: 'All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.' That was the bare-bones premise for his game-changing 1960 debut feature Breathless (À Bout De Souffle) and the same two vital ingredients are at the forefront of contemporary French director Isabelle Czajka's second film Living On Love Alone (D'Amour Et D'Eau Fraîche).

Showing in the French Revolutions section at the London Film Festival, Living On Love Alone stars Anaïs Demoustier as 23-year-old Julie, who's new to Paris and trying to make ends meet in a series of demoralising jobs. When she joins a hip PR agency she hopes she'll have the opportunity to utilise the skills she's developed during her five years at college studying communications, but instead finds herself organising packed lunches and taking her boss's bratty kids to EuroDisney.

Paris may be 'the city of love', but Julie's random sexual encounters certainly aren't the stuff romantic dreams are made of. Indeed, they seem as dead-end as her career prospects. She sleeps with an older man she meets in a club, then spends an illicit afternoon in a hotel with her married boss on her first day as a sales rep. However, her life - and the film - moves into another gear when she meets charmer Ben (Pio Marmaï) at a job interview. Disillusioned by her work failures and attracted by his free-spirited lifestyle, she takes him up on his offer of a get-away-from-it-all trip to a rural southern idyll.

Living On Love Alone is an oddly-paced film. Just as it seems to be settling into a Rohmeresque tale of smart, attractive French twentysomethings en vacance and failing to reveal their true nature... voila, the aforementioned gun comes into play. And then it's revealed as a slow-burning Badlands, with a denouement not so far removed from Godard's nouvelle vague classic.

Demoustier and Marmaï are naturalistic and utterly convincing in their roles, marking them out as actors with very bright futures. Czajka explores similar themes as she did in her 2006 debut The Year After (L'Année Suivante), with individuals stifled by an unimaginative and often heartless society, but on the evidence of that film and Living On Love Alone, I'd gladly welcome a third instalment.

Colin Houlson