In Girl on the Bridge, it's an option. But off screen, women like Vanessa Paradis are too rare to lose.

"I speak a good English," says model, singer, actress, and professional gamine Vanessa Paradis, "but I got a hard time understanding Bob Dylan, and people have been crazy about Bob Dylan for years." No such luck for French pop stars, which is why Paradis needs the movies to make sense in America. Onscreen, her charms are more easily... absorbed, and her latest film, Girl on the Bridge, may earn her a place in that shapely line of French actresses -- Signoret, Bardot, Deneuve -- who have encouraged Americans to feel oh-so-very Continental about sex. Says Paradis of the script, "I read it in an hour without taking any breaths."

Shot in black-and-white, Girl on the Bridge is a fable about a young woman who's so innocent that she accepts the come-ons of every man she meets and, after quickie sex in cramped spaces, gets dumped every time. Those brown orphan eyes working overtime, Paradis almost makes you believe that her only choice in life, besides ending it off a bridge over the Seine, is to become the assistant and platonic soulmate of an erratic circus knife-thrower. (As we said, this is a French film.) When your real-life paramour -- and the father of your child -- is Johnny Depp, you might expect cynics to say that pinning your hopes on a volatile homme makes being a knife-thrower's assistant look good. But Paradis is steadfast. "We are not gods; we are weak, and we have bad in us," she says. "You just have to deal with it. And you gotta have compassion." She's right, of course. Even if she weren't, we wouldn't have the heart to disagree.