As of the beginning of March, Film at Lincoln Center was abuzz with plans for the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, with On a Magical Night to screen, and filmmaker Christophe Honore, and his star Chiara Mastroianni to attend. The festival kaboshed, like much of everything, the film is now available: strandreleasing.com. The director and star, distanced in Paris apartments with their respective cats, talked about their film on Zoom.

The French do have a way of making infidelity, especially a beautiful, feisty older woman with younger men, seem a rite of passage. Mastroainni plays Maria, married to Richard (Benjamin Biolay) who catches on by reading her student’s sexually charged texts on her phone. She leaves for a hotel across the street and the apparition of Richard’s younger self (Vincent Lacoste) comes calling. That’s the movie’s set up, and even when it is charming and funny, disloyalty carries its own weight.

As Mastroianni says about her role as Maria, “She could have been unbearable. For me it was wonderful to have the energy of that character; Christophe created a feminist in her way. I wish I was like her.”

A frequent collaborator with Christophe Honore—she was in his Sorry Angel, for example—Mastroianni reveals an easy manner with her director, naming him and Wes Anderson among directors who inspire her. And he, in jest, says he cannot say he is writing another movie during this time: “Chiara Mastroianni will be all over me.”