There’s some life in the old biopic yet. Martin Provost directs this French film about the novelist Violette Leduc, famed for alarmingly frank writing that laid bare everything from her same-sex affairs to her late-term abortion.

The film starts with Leduc’s (Emmanuelle Devos) life as a black-marketeer in World War II and progresses through her friendship with — and unrequited love for — the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain). It all plays out against a weirdly empty-looking Paris and French countryside.

Leduc is unpleasant almost to the point of being detestable: a liar, a stalker, a whiner so grating that at one point playwright Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé), himself a strong personality, calls her a “drama queen.”

But in Devos’ hard-charging performance, she’s also fascinating, and that’s all a film requires.