Paradis was born for talcum, not to mention Chanel. There she is, the tethered bird of paradis flying up your nose in those Coco ads. La voila, the Paris pop gamine in distressed '60s trash fashion singing Lenny Kravitz and Lou Reed songs in a breathy accent that makes men weak. But here she is, sans talcum, reaching for gravel and gravitas on screen. Elisa, her first movie in five years, is the reason Paradis is in Montreal, the reason she is smoking Phillip Morris cigarettes and talking about toughness and sensitivity and Gerard Depardieu, and not pop music. The pop career is on hold. In fact, everything is. No albums forthcoming, no tours waiting to unroll. "I have no plans in music and no plans in movies. It's the scariest moment of my life right now. Right now I'm walking toward nothing." She isn't even walking the streets of hometown Paris, instead finding privacy amid the clamor of New York - away from France, where "you're part of the furniture. Like the Eiffel Tower." Don't underestimate her acting Right now there is just Marie, who has no furniture and plays out her passions far beneath Eiffel. Marie is the orphaned, vengeful street urchin Paradis plays in a movie that matches the gamine with the man most consider to be France's greatest actor. On paper, it seems a mismatch, but many have made the mistake of underestimating her. Paradis is a natural presence on screen, and her role in Elisa just one more challenge. "It's scary to have this danger and this risk all the time, but I think you need this risk," she says. Film, it turns out, carries less pressure than the singing career, although at first glance it isn't clear how this is possible. In Elisa, Paradis plays 17-year-old Marie, the orphaned daughter of the woman whose name provides the title. Mother is dead, a desperate suicide when Marie was a child. Dad (Depardieu), is alive, but won't be if Marie has a say. Marie has sworn to avenge her mother's broken life by hunting down the father who abandoned them. The story carries her from Artful Dodgerisms in the streets of Paris to a crazed elemental climax right out of Lear. Unsurprisingly, the part was written expressly for her by Jean Brecker, the French director of L'Ete Meurtrier. Paradis is a paradox, a woman who consistently has to prove herself to the critics on one hand, who consistently earns praise from her star collaborator/mentors on the other. Brecker sent her the script minus the ending, stoking Paradis's interest, but it was the character that won her over. "I love her," she says, hazel eyes widening. She brushes aside comparisons with her own life. Marie is an orphan who steals, plays den mother to two partners in crime (Clothilde Courau and Sekkou Sall) and has her sights set on a fatal reunion with Dad. Paradis gets along with her parents and stays with them in Paris when she isn't disappearing into her Little Italy apartment. She was pulled in by "the rhythm of emotions," as in a scene that has Marie terrorizing the grandparents who turned her and her doomed mother away years earlier. Over-the-top climactic scene "First she's really soft, really gentle. And in one minute - bang, she makes all this mess and becomes really hard and cold and aggressive. That's what I'm talking about - a lot of emotion, and you're going from one to another in one second." It's very much the rhythm of the movie. The over-the-top climactic scene, where a half-naked gun-toting Paradis confronts her father on the rocky shore of a storm-toss'd island, is writ large and lurid across the screen. Paradis expected her first meeting with Depardieu to be no less dramatic. "Before I met him it was terrifying. I thought I was gonna be the worst actress on the planet in front of him, that he was gonna so impress me that I would be bad, bad, bad-bad-bad." Few can say the words like Paradis, but she had little to fear. "I met him two months before the shooting, and when I came to the room, he stood up and opened his arms like this. And that was it." Now she beams whenever his name comes up. "You know what's great about him also? For me, he is l'homme presse, a busy man. Monday he's in New York and Tuesday he's in Tokyo and Wednesday he's in Paris but tomorrow he'll be with you on the set. When he comes on the shoot, he's with you 100 per cent." Emotions run rampant in the movie - and spilled over into the real world around it. The climax was filmed on an island off the coast of Brittany, whose 120 sailors and fishermen suddenly found themselves overrun by 80 Parisian beautiful people with their cameras and wind machines. A perfect setting for confrontation . . . . "When we left the island, we were on the boat and all the people came in front of the boat and started to sing. And we left and everybody's crying." Time, and reviews, will tell what response Elisa draws from the hoi polloi. Whether it is seen as wide-screen Bronte for the '90s, or massive purple melodrama, Paradis's goal has been achieved. "Il faut provoquer," she says, turning her attention to the unplanned future ahead. "You can't wait comfortably on your sofa that the greatest film is gonna fall from the sky." Not even when your name is Paradis.