Bright sunlight streaks through the foliage decorating the patio lounge at the Bowery Hotel, the ornate and clubby boutique establishment that has taken over a still-scrubby block along the city’s historic, and rapidly evaporating, desolation row. Inside, the popular French actress Ludivine Sagnier has her sunglasses on. They’re those big, round, glamour shades, the kind that might once have graced the face of her idol, Elizabeth Taylor.

“I have a friend who lived here for awhile, and he was telling me about Alphabet City,” Ms. Sagnier, catching up on modern Manhattan real estate history, said. “‘A’ was for adventure. ‘B’ was, uh, whatever. ‘C’ was crazy. And ‘D’ was death. But he said that’s not right anymore.”

Indeed not — despite the neighborhood’s lingering, vestigial reputation for bohemian wildness. Ms. Sagnier’s image may be a bit deceptive as well. Still best known to American art-house audiences for her role as Julie, the impetuous, often naked, wild child in François Ozon’s 2003 suspense film “Swimming Pool,” the actress is a settled 29-year-old, the mother of a 3-year-old daughter (with actor and former mate Nicolas Duvauchelle), and now well along into her second pregnancy.

In person, her image is also a far cry from the one she has constructed in Claude Chabrol’s forthcoming film, “A Girl Cut in Two,” which opens next Friday — that of Gabrielle, a love-struck weather girl whose last name translates as “Snow,” and who falls into an obsessive and perverse relationship with a married older man, the celebrated novelist Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand). The seasoned sensualist uses Gabrielle for his own amusement, introducing her to kinky sex and private clubs for libertines. When he cruelly abandons her, she falls prey to the filthy rich persistence of Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), a schizophrenic playboy with a closet full of dark secrets. Bad things happen.

But they never really happened to Ms. Sagnier. “When I was younger, I was surrounded by gay men,” she said, laughing a bit at the confession, “and they helped me to build myself without having the need of this kind of sexual promotion. I didn’t really have to go through Gabrielle’s experience. I was much more mature than she really is, so I could see the tricks for what they were.”

Nonetheless, Ms. Sagnier said she admires her character, whose story was based in part on the case of a 19th-century New York architect named Stanford White, who was shot to death at point-blank range by the millionaire husband of his mistress.

“The big difference is Gabrielle’s story is located in a period of time when women have the weapons to fight back and wash themselves of any type of scandal,” Ms. Sagnier said. “Even if she goes through very bad experiences, she has the strength to fight back, and that’s what makes her a very modern character.”

The 78-year-old Mr. Chabrol, a prolific filmmaker and one of the original gang of 1950s Cahiers du Cinema critics who launched the French Nouvelle Vague, has long been known as “the French Hitchcock.” Ms. Sagnier, a huge fan of both directors, smiled a bit in acknowledgment that she seemed a natural Hitchcockian heroine.

“Why? Because I am blond?” she asked, rhetorically. “I thought that I was not bourgeois enough to fit into [Chabrol’s] stories. But he offered me the job and, weirdly, when I asked him why he hired me, he told me he has seen me as Tinker Bell in ‘Peter Pan.'”

Ms. Sagnier confessed a complete fascination with her director, whom she would join each day for lunch during the shooting of “A Girl Cut in Two,” and interview as if she were a journalist. “It’s like visiting a monument that you have heard about from when you were young, and so it seems familiar,” she said. “But at the same time I was very surprised, day after day, by his humor, the way he controls things, the way he’s completely relaxed. And the guy is an encyclopedia. He knows everything about everything. He’s like the dictionary. And I’m the kind of actress who needs a lot of information.”

The dynamic of the beautiful younger woman and the powerful older man is not exclusively French, but it certainly underscores a very contemporary Gallic narrative that arose, unavoidably, in conversation with Ms. Sagnier. Gabrielle, the actress said, “thinks that as long as you’re in love, anything can happen.” And how different is France’s first lady — the model-turned-singer-turned-ambassador Carla Bruni? “Of course she married him because she was in love with him,” Ms. Sagnier, her voice lilting to an exaggerated rhythm, said of Ms. Bruni’s marriage to the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. “Wasn’t she? It’s a real debate. People say no, but we’re sure she’s in love. It’s obvious isn’t it? It’s such a stupid debate. This could be a very good television show, what’s going on in the French government at the moment.”

Ms. Sagnier reserved explicit political comment, but her animated gestures spoke loud enough. “People don’t need to watch TV anymore. They have a reality show in front of their eyes. If you like Sarkozy, just press button 1 on your telephone.”