Louis Garrel in Love Songs Courtesy of IFC Films

Louis Garrel is wearing a black turban. The headdress emphasizes his milk white complexion and dark doe-eyes, but it also serves to underscore his willful determination to stand out from the crowd, to march to his own drum. Reserved and thoughtful, Garrel is not seeking approval and is not out to impress. He is who he is. On a side table an ashtray is filled to the brim with cigarette butts. He does not light up during the interview but his vague brooding restlessness leaves the impression that he is anxiously awaiting his next smoke break.

For most American audiences, Garrel is the guy in all those French films with threesomes. "Ménage à trois, yes. You know, it's my destiny," he concedes. Certainly, most of the roles he has played have been characters with a very laissez-faire approach to relationships and an open, fluid view of sexuality. In Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003), Garrel and co-star Eva Green are a brother-sister duo who seduce an impressionable young American (Michael Pitt) studying in Paris during the 1968 riots. In Ma Mère (2004), he is Pierre, a sulky antisocial teenager who joins his mother (Isabelle Huppert) on the Canary Islands, where he is introduced into a hedonistic world of illicit sex. Mother and son end up in bed with a third person before pursuing their own incestuous bond. And in Dans Paris (2006), as the apparently carefree and jovial Jonathan, Garrel's character hops from one bed to another but is concealing a deep personal loss.

From Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game to Truffaut's Jules and Jim, French cinema is punctuated with films that tackle complex multiple-partner relationships yet the movie that Garrel singles out as a major inspiration is Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore. "It's in black and white. It's a very important movie in France. It's the story of [a character played by] Jean-Pierre Léaud and two women, Bernadette Lafont and another actress [Françoise Lebrun], who are all living together… It's a small and strong and passionate movie."

Eva Green, Michael Pitt (reflected in mirror), and Louis Garrel in The Dreamers Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Small and strong and passionate are all adjectives that could be applied to Garrel's latest film on release in the United States, Love Songs. He plays Ismaël, who is (unsurprisingly!) the center of a love triangle, but this time he is caught between his live-in girlfriend, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and a fellow journalist at the newspaper where he works, Alice (Clotilde Hesme). But after Julie's sudden death, Ismaël finds he needs to escape the emotional weight of mourning and instead finds solace and passion in the arms of a young male student (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet). Love Songs is Garrel's third movie with director Christophe Honoré, and the film bears the hallmarks of their prior collaborations. But what sets this film apart from all of Garrel's previous projects is that it is a modern-day musical in which the actors burst into song in order to express their emotions. When asked if he is a fan of musicals in general, Garrel is unequivocal: "No. Not at all... I don't know why I'm not [very] much interested in music. I pick up some stuff from my friends, but I'm not a passionate [music lover]." However, he's quick to note one chanteuse of the moment who has grabbed his attention and whom he admits was an inspiration: "Amy Winehouse," he smiles and lights up when he mentions her name, "You can tell that I love her. She's brilliant. She's a great actress on stage when she sings... She knows the gestures, she knows the voice... She's a genius. She's so powerful sexually."