In love? In between, in danger.

Her character an enigma, she takes a risk with scripts

Benoit Magimel and Ludivine Sagnier in the love triangle story ''A Girl Cut in Two.'' (Ifc films)

NEW YORK - Don't expect to catch Ludivine Sagnier in line buying the latest CD by Carla Bruni, former model and current first lady to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, anytime soon.

"Imagine if Paris Hilton were married to [Barack] Obama," the petite Parisian says ruefully. "[In France] we don't need to watch real TV anymore, because we have their life. It's like a soap opera. A cheap soap opera."

Leaning back on a hotel sofa, both hands absent-mindedly rubbing her pregnant belly, Sagnier is tired after a day of promoting "A Girl Cut in Two," a serio-comic thriller about a woman caught between two inappropriate suitors. But the 29-year-old actress can't help but perk up when discussing politics, which she follows avidly, or working on "Girl," her first cinematic collaboration with the prolific French New Wave writer and director Claude Chabrol ("La Cérémonie").

"Working with Chabrol is like hunting for treasure: You get a map, but you have to figure out the clues by yourself," she says. "He writes his scripts in these big notebooks with his little tiny writing and he knows everything about the film, from the music to the editing, but he really doesn't tell anyone about it."

Just don't mess with his dialogue.

"He says, 'If I wrote it in this way, it's because it has a certain meaning,' " says Sagnier. "He loves to play the grumpy granddad on set."

In "Girl," Sagnier plays Gabrielle Deneige, a TV weathergirl from Lyon who finds herself ensnared in a complicated love triangle between an older, married author (Francois Berleand) and the flighty, spoiled heir to a pharmaceutical fortune (Benoit Magimel). Shot in De cember 2006, the dark comedy is loosely based on the real-life story of American architect Stanford White, who was gunned down in 1906 by the husband of his then-mistress, Evelyn Nesbit.

"Gabrielle thinks she's clever because she's fond of literature and has seen the whole world, but she's naive, much more than she thinks," says Sagnier. "When she falls in love with the writer, she's flattered because she thinks she's being taken seriously for the first time in her life, when she's really just a target for his lust and perversion."

In notes about the film, Chabrol has said that he set his film in the backstage world of television because it's "a world of trickery and illusion that absolutely reflects the world of appearances and pretences in which these characters move. . . . ["Girl"] is an entirely chaste film whose characters are nonetheless haunted by the most perverse ideas."

Having unsuccessfully auditioned for Chabrol in the past, Sagnier was so pleased to be offered a role by the director that she immediately said yes without reading the script - an unusual move for the normally selective actress.

"I didn't think I was a good fit for his universe," she says of Chabrol's films, which tend to chronicle the bad behavior of the bourgeois. "So what I said to him was, for you I would have done anything - including walking on my knees with a feather in my backside."

Sagnier was also surprised to learn that it was her role as Tinkerbell in Australian director P.J. Hogan's "Peter Pan" (2003) that prompted Chabrol's call. "Claude saw Gabrielle as a kind of luminous fairy," she says. "And both characters are capable of jealousy, and are fighting for love, so that was the link.

"Ultimately, I was really moved by this character because she's fighting all the time - she never cries, or complains about her life," says Sagnier. "She just goes on, and even if she gets her heart broken, she still fights back. It's a bit how I'm like, so I wanted to talk about it."

Sagnier has been moving audiences since she made her screen debut in "Les Maris, Les Femmes, Les Amants" at age 8. "I went with my sister to the audition because my mother didn't want to leave me home alone and I got hired," she says. "So I really didn't have anything to do with it."

Despite whatever initial misgivings she may have felt, Sagnier quickly grew into one of France's most sought-after actresses, officially breaking out at age 19 with the film "Water Drops on Burning Rocks." The drama was the first of Sagnier's three films with filmmaker Francois Ozon, who also directed her in 2002's "8 Women," alongside French icons Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, and 2003's erotic thriller "Swimming Pool." The former role earned Sagnier the Prix Romy Schneider, an award that is given annually to a promising young French actress, as well as a nomination for a Cesar Award, France's equivalent of an Oscar, in 2003.

Sagnier's next films are "A Secret," in which she plays a WWII-era Jewish mother whose husband is in love with another woman, and the duo "Death Instinct" and "Public Enemy No. 1," a two-part action film about the gangster Jacques Mesrine (played by Vincent Cassel).

"The experience was fun, but difficult at times because cinema is so realistic nowadays," says Sagnier. "For one scene, I had some explosives and blood packets hidden in my clothes, and a little dog on my knees, and after the guns were triggered, the packets exploded, and there was blood everywhere. Every time I had to shout; I forgot I was doing my job."

When Sagnier's not acting, she's working on - alert, Ms. Bruni - a pop album. "In France, the movie industry is much smaller than in America, so the amount of projects is not very satisfying given how demanding I am," she says. "I need to stay creative and as an interpreter, I can easily sing a little, so I'm slowly working on an album. Slowly, because. . ." She gestures to her full belly.

"Family is very important," says Sagnier, who has a 3-year-old daughter, Bonnie, with actor Nicolas Duvauchelle. (She declines to name the father of her current baby.)

"Being an actor is something that really drives you, and pushes your boundaries," she says. "You need to be grounded in your real life so you can take risks with your on-screen life."