In “Looking for Cheyenne,” director Valerie Minetto’s feature debut, a Parisian science teacher named Sonia (Aurélia Petit) struggles to reconcile the feelings she harbors for her ex-lover Cheyenne (Milla Dekker). Via flashback, we witness Sonia picking over the ups and downs of the couple’s time together, right up to the point when Cheyenne’s lengthy unemployment and growing political passions extinguished their relationship. Rather than accept help from Sonia or from France’s welfare system, Cheyenne chooses to live off the grid. But when Sonia balks at the notion of a candlelight and Sterno existence, squatting and shivering in abandoned buildings, Cheyenne accuses her of being “a lackey of capitalism” and the two part acrimoniously.

At the same time that “Looking for Cheyenne” revisits the past, it documents Sonia’s ineffectual and halfhearted attempts to duplicate or obliterate the love she had. An extended affair with a young male pickup only succeeds in confusing her. A lesbian seduction in a bar follows suit. Everyone Sonia meets is just a circus mirror of the one who got away, the one who is still out there somewhere, clad in Gore-Tex and riding a bike through Paris with all her worldly goods strapped to it.

Despite the intimate nature of the relationships that make up this slight and ultimately repetitive chronicle of lost love, “Looking for Cheyenne” is on the whole a chilly, murky, and passionless enterprise. Perhaps sensing what little material she has given herself to work with, Ms. Minetto embraces almost every conceivable form of modernist and postmodernist conceptual lily gilding to plump up a sigh of a short film into some sort of personal and political feature-length statement. The opening credits appear handwritten on the wall of one of Cheyenne’s temporary rent-free homes. In time-honored, latter-day, Paris-set movie fashion, the camera (or is it Cheyenne?) spies on and studies everyone through exterior windows. Tuneless music casts a pall over already arbitrarily foreboding shots of people driving through deserted streets or waking up alone.

Most irritatingly, characters address the audience directly, confessing their intentions and sharing their doubts about the tenuous connections they neither place much stock in nor invest much time or effort in strengthening. “I like her,” Sonia’s lesbian pickup informs us in a preliminary romantic self-diagnosis near the end of her first night in Sonia’s bed. “I know, because I want to make her suffer.” Um, thanks for sharing. If she, Sonia, and everyone else in “Looking for Cheyenne” lightened up, cut down on their pouting and pontificating, and actually listened to something other than their own musings and the sound of the blood rushing behind their deadly serious, attractive, but ultimately vapid faces, they might actually succeed in getting on with their lives.