Available on DVD: “The Names of Love”

Sara Forestier and Jacques Gamblin in The Names of Love

How many years has it been since you encountered someone waving a placard or wearing a T-shirt with the slogan, "Make love, not war"? Resurrected in the French satirical farce The Names of Love, that hippie free-loving attitude is personified by Baya Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier), a charming, insouciant whack job in her 20s who boasts that she always sleeps with a man on their first date.

The daughter of an Algerian immigrant and a onetime French radical, Baya carries that philosophy to comic extremes that would have been unimaginable even in 1968. She is also a walking wardrobe malfunction, who is so absent-minded that her breasts are repeatedly falling out of her shirt. In one of the movie’s funniest scenes she dashes into the Paris Métro naked but for a pair of boots and startles an Islamic fundamentalist couple across the car.

Baya blithely wields her body as a weapon of political persuasion. On meeting a man who is even a shade to the right of her avidly left-wing politics — or in her words, a "fascist," a term she drops as casually as others say "dude" and "babe" — she drags him into bed for a quickie conversion. Just as he is about to lose control, she whispers things like, "Not all Algerians are thieves." The screenplay by Michel Leclerc, who also directed, and Baya Kasmi doesn’t pretend that her sex magic always has the desired effect.

Forestier, whose performance won her a César (the French Oscar) for best actress, is the spark plug igniting a movie that has the tone and structure of early-to-middle Woody Allen, but infused with a dose of Gallic identity politics. At any point the characters are quite likely to be joined suddenly by their younger selves or their dead parents.

The free-for-all structure allows for wildly funny set pieces. One is an illustrated history of a character’s tendency to embrace the wrong technology, be it a Betamax or a miracle cheese grater. Another is a dinner party hosted by Baya, who innocently drops words like "bake" and "oven" that evoke the Holocaust, a taboo subject for one guest.

The Names of Love is also an odd-couple rom-com in which Baya hooks up with Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin), an expert on avian diseases and a quintessential square. One of the movie’s many jokes that only French audiences will get is that Arthur Martin is a French washing machine brand, a fact that everyone to whom he is introduced feels obliged to note. Many obscure political references and a cameo by Lionel Jospin, the French prime minister from 1997 to 2002 and two-time Socialist candidate for president, will also be lost on Americans.

The film’s original French title, Le Nom des Gens (The Name of People), is also much more to the point than its fluffy English title. For this is a movie that pokes serious fun at ethnic and religious stereotyping based on names and appearances. Arthur’s mother, Annette (Michèle Moretti), escaped the Holocaust when she was sheltered in an orphanage under a changed name; her mother’s death in Auschwitz left her burdened with crippling depression and guilt. Arthur’s French Roman Catholic father, Lucien (Jacques Boudet), who runs a nuclear power plant, served with the French Army in Algeria.

Baya’s gentle, self-effacing father, Mohamed (Zinedine Soualem), is an Algerian Arab whose father was killed by French soldiers during the Algerian war. Her French mother, Cécile (Carole Franck), was a left-wing rebel. When both sets of parents meet, discomfort reigns. Although the light-complexioned Baya could pass as a non-Arab, she flaunts her Algerian heritage. Arthur, a nonpracticing Jew, never mentions his half-Jewish background, but when Baya learns of it, she is thrilled.

"That’s so cool! The two of us embody France," she crows. "We’re the future of humanity!" With its implication that the world’s problems might begin to be solved by one Arab-Jewish coupling, The Names of Love succumbs to glib sentimentality.

For all the potentially dangerous subjects it glosses, above all the tangled legacies of the Holocaust and the Algerian war, The Names of Love dances away from any uncomfortable provocation. Even when sticking out its tongue, it is finally just an airy comedy riding on one cheeky, incandescent performance.