You probably have never heard of Sara Forestier. Until now, there hasn't been a reason to. She's a young French actress, not yet 25, and she has been notable in films for about six years. She has a distinct screen quality: extremely talkative, often angry and bug-eyed with aggression, morally outraged, totally sure of herself and just as often dead wrong.

These are arresting attributes, but not always appealing, and then came writer- director Michel Leclerc and "The Names of Love" to provide a role that made sense of her. He took all of Forestier's angry energy and skewed it slightly, so that everything that had been overwhelming about her became dazzling and everything off-putting became fun. The result is that she won the best-actress Cesar this year.

"The Names of Love" is the story of a woman (Forestier) of strong leftist opinions who is pretty much convinced that everyone who doesn't agree with her is a fascist. But instead of fighting the right wing, she makes it her mission to infiltrate, which she does by having sex with conservatives — and then using her influence to convert them to her point of view.

Forestier's performance is a tour de force of comic acting. She creates a driven, manic character who is so easily distracted and so lost in her thoughts that she makes it completely believable that she could, for example, leave the house naked and not know it.

Jacques Gamblin, as the older man swept into her orbit, makes an able audience surrogate, a witness to Forestier's inspired madness.