Actresses is a meek approximation of a Jacques Rivette film. Marcelline (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is to star in a production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country as Natalia Petrovna, a part that doesn't so much consume her as it splits out of her body. On stage, she can't decide which hand she should use to open a door, to the annoyance of her director, Denis (Mathieu Amalric), who makes love to her in spite of the fact that he likes to bone guys. Off stage, she bemoans the state of her biological clock, which she subjects to excessive amounts of chlorine at Le YMCA. Bruni Tedeschi relishes in the ontology of the self, collaging her character's frustrations as a woman and artist. This is the same delicious recipe for Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating, but Actresses' batter of lunatic snippets from the lives of Marcelline and Denis's assistant, Nathalie (Noémie Lvovsky), fails to congeal into a heady structural puzzle, or into a particularly affecting exercise in female empathy.