la comedie humaine; Setting her sights on the French elite, Parisian filmmaker Agnes Jaoui blends Woody Allen wit with a Jane Austen sensibility.

Byline: John Powers

I always wanted to be famous," says Agnes Jaoui, flashing a fierce little smile that tells you she's not kidding. "Being famous makes you beautiful and sexy-it gives you all the things you don't have."

These days, it's hard to know what the 40-year-old filmmaker might be lacking. Critics hail her as a versatile actress-writer-director with a diamond cutter's eye for middle-class folly-she's the Left Bank's response to Woody Allen. Jaoui's gift for social comedy is on fine display in her new film, Look at Me, which nabbed a top prize at Cannes and opened the last New York Film Festival. Set in the arrondissements of the cultural elite, the movie interweaves the stories of an overweight young singer with the unfortunate name of Lolita, her monstrously self-absorbed father, and her starstruck voice teacher (played by Jaoui herself), whose novelist husband can't wait to become a celebrity so he, too, can start behaving badly. The result is witty, wise, and wonderfully old-fashioned-a barbed yet affectionate look at friendship, ambition, and the corruptions of (you guessed it) fame.

Jaoui obviously knows firsthand the petty jealousies portrayed in Look at Me. She grew up so deeply embedded in a leftist, intellectual milieu that she describes her own career ...