“Strong sex”, declares the British Board of Film Classification in their verdict on Jacques Audiard’s latest. And I’d have to agree: the sex here really is rather impressive. This shimmering romantic drama, shot on the eve of the second 2020 lockdown in France, is a timely celebration of physical human connection – as a source of pleasure and solace, as a means of self-discovery, and also (this being a French film) something that’s just, you know, extremely hot.

Audiard’s film has been freely adapted from three stories by the American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, with a script written by Audiard, Léa Mysius and Céline Sciamma, the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. At home, it goes by the far more evocative title of Les Olympiades, after a collection of tower blocks at the heart of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. 

Working for the first time in a pristine, mythic black and white redolent of an Ansel Adams landscape, the Rust and Bone and A Prophet director begins with a visual survey of these concrete monoliths – and, between them, the low, curving roofs of La Pagode, the Asian shopping centre which serves the area’s large Chinese and Vietnamese population. Through countless windows, ordinary life unfolds: birthday parties, quiet nights in front of the television, and even a nude karaoke session, as Émilie (Lucie Zhang, tremendous) sings a traditional Eastern ballad on the sofa, while her male lover Camille (Makita Samba, ditto) fetches drinks in an equal state of undress. 

What brought both of these young Parisians to this private pocket of bliss? “It began like this,” an onscreen caption notifies us, before the plot hops back a few days to Émilie interviewing Camille as a prospective flatmate. She’s a spiky and spirited call centre worker and waitress, he’s a bright but slightly directionless teacher, and their chemistry is scorchingly evident within seconds of him ringing the doorbell. 

Together, they make up the first side of the film’s central romantic quadrilateral, and not much time passes before we meet the other two vertices. One is Noémie Merlant’s Nora, a pensive law student making a fresh start in her early 30s. And the other is Amber Sweet (the French singer-songwriter Jehnny Beth), an online adult star to whom Nora, when she dons a blonde wig for a themed club night, bears a passing, gossip-sparking resemblance.