Isa (Élodie Bouchez), a drifter in her early twenties, fetches up in Lille, northern France. She befriends seamstress Marie (Natacha Regnier), who is apartment-sitting for a Mrs Val and her teenage daughter, both comatose after a car crash. They befriend two bouncers at a local club, Charly and Fredo (Patrick Mercando, Jo Prestia), but gradually - and against both her own and Isa's better judgement - Marie finds herself falling for wealthy, womanising club owner Chriss (Grégoire Colin).

Zonca's debut has more of an affinity with Agnès Vada's Vagabonde or Laurent Bouhnik's grisly Sélect Hotel - films about living on the precarious exploitative economic fringes of society - than standard middle-class French art house fare. It's well observed and superbly played by its two principals. Isa is the resilient one, her spirit unbroken, always ready to make do. Marie, initially, we read as self-possessed, capable, making her betrayal and eventual disintegration all the more painful. She is sucked into herself even as Isa reaches outside of her tiny world, visiting the silent Sandrine in hospital after her mother has died.

Humane, moving and, crucially, unsentimental, Zonca's film is one of the most impressive French debuts of recent years.