French Actress Takes on U.S., Life : Movies: ‘The Accompanist’ star Romane Bohringer, who has two hit films in Europe, has a philosophy: ‘I don’t want others to make my life for me. I want to do myself.’

“I think it is important not to become too blase,” said Romane Bohringer, puffing away on a Marlboro and tugging nervously at the sleeve of her sweater.

No problem there. All in black and all of 20, the slight French actress seemed much too intense and passionate during a recent interview. But Bohringer has certainly been put to the test in the last year by the success of two films in Europe that have made her a sensation in her native country. Now she is poised to make a splash in the United States, having already won critical raves with the release of “The Accompanist,” which opened late last month, and with the impending import of “Savage Nights,” later this month.

Last year, Bohringer blazed to French stardom in “Savage Nights,” winning a Cesar (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for her role as Laura, a neurotic teenager obsessively in love with a reckless bisexual man with AIDS. Adding to the drama was the fact that the film was partly autobiographical, the last work of Cyril Collard, a 35-year-old French filmmaker who died of AIDS just three days before “Savage Nights” swept the awards ceremony in March. At the highly emotional event, it fell on Bohringer’s young shoulders to articulate Collard’s legacy before a rapt national audience.

The waifish young actress then played Sophie Vasseur, the shy and passive pianist in Claude Miller’s “The Accompanist.” Set in German-occupied France, the movie about love and betrayal co-stars Romane’s father, Richard Bohringer, best known to American audiences as the cook in the Peter Greenaway film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.”

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Just before the American release of “The Accompanist,” father and daughter visited Manhattan to talk up the film. Over a bowl of white rice and sashimi in the hotel dining room, the self-possessed young actress spoke about her double-whammy career before Bohringer pere joined fille at the table. Although their retinue included a translator, the actress chose to speak in thickly accented English, throwing her hands up in exasperation when she could not find the proper term.

“What is that word?” she asks at one point while describing the poor young musician she plays in “The Accompanist,” whose life is changed when she enters the glamorous and sybaritic world of the Brices, the beautiful soprano Irene (Elena Safonova) and Charles, her collaborationist husband (Richard Bohringer). “That word when you live through the lives of other people?”

Yet while vicarious may well be the term to define the wartime experiences of the demure but aggressively curious Sophie--which include spying on her patroness while she pursues an illicit affair with a handsome Resistance fighter--Bohringer makes it clear that she more closely identifies with the passionate, if slightly demented, Laura in “Savage Nights.”

“There is an inner life that I have which is like Sophie,” says Bohringer, “a place where I like to observe and watch people. To be an actor, I think you must do this. But, in the life of the every day, I’m more passionate, like Laura. I don’t want others to make my life for me. I want to do myself. Sometimes I do it badly, but at least it is I who am doing it.”

Bohringer says it was the “complexities and contradictions of the passions” that drew her to participate in both movies. She was surprised to discovered a sympathy not only for the naive and confused young characters she plays but also for the adults who inhabit a seemingly far more sophisticated and dangerous world.

“I was so moved by this love story in Claude Miller’s movie,” she says. “By the betrayal of this woman and the murder in the heart of this man. When you compare it to the world of a child, a child who knows nothing of this, it is almost too much for her to understand. But you know it has changed her life forever. I like the conflict between these two worlds of the child and the adult.”

Bohringer apparently is straddling some of these same complexities. While she claims that Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” is a favorite movie, she also says that Patrick Dewaere, the iconoclastic and rebellious icon of French cinema, is her idol. Her musical taste runs from Edith Piaf to Guns N’ Roses, and she loves both popular and surrealistic literature. But what moves her, she says, is ambiguity and emotional resonance.

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In fact, acting initially appealed to her, not just because of her father’s success but also because it beckoned as a place where she could work out “all the emotions” that seem to be bursting out of her.

“I had too much feelings for one person,” she says of her difficult teen-age years. “I thought I could not live with all these emotions I had inside me. In order to wash me of them, I had to act. Even in a role like Sophie, you can express so many things.”

The oldest of four children born to the German-French actor and his wife, Bohringer grew up in a suburb outside of Paris and made her film debut in a cameo at 13 in the 1986 film “Kamikaze,” which starred her father. But she says she never really took an acting career seriously until she played Miranda in Paris-based director Peter Brook’s version of “The Tempest,” which played in Paris in 1991.

Cyril Collard, then casting “Savage Nights,” saw the performance and invited her to audition for the role of Laura. Although much of the film would later be improvised, Bohringer was captivated by the rough script that followed the raw and tempestuous journey of Jean, a sex-driven and amoral Parisian cinematographer, who draws into his emotional vortex Samy, a handsome jock, and Laura, a young teen-ager whom he meets on a film. The relationship with Samy is casual and affectionate; the one with the Laura is destructive and masochistic.

For example, although Laura knows he is afflicted with HIV, she insists on having unprotected sex with him. When he callously ignores her later, she hysterically accuses him of infecting her on innumerable messages on his answering machine. (He’s often out of his apartment, either with Samy or seeking anonymous and furtive sex in cruising areas along the Seine.)

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Although the film has been attacked by some gay activists in Europe for telegraphing irresponsible messages about AIDS, particularly to young people, Bohringer defends the movie and its late filmmaker.

“I can’t believe that audiences would imitate Laura’s behavior,” she says. “Cyril said that he was not making a commercial for the Ministry of Health. He was concerned with his vision and these three people. On the contrary, after the movie was out, we learned that a lot of people were coming in to be tested for the virus after seeing it. If you are in love with life--and Jean’s film was a passionate shout of life--then you want to do what you can to live as fully and well as possible.”

Both Bohringers say they grew to love Collard and were crushed by his death. At the night of the Cesars, Romane upon accepting her award burst into tears and regained her composure, she says, by looking at her father in the audience and gaining strength from him to finish her simple acceptance speech.

Romane Bohringer’s next role will be the lead in Martine Dugowson’s “Mina Tannenbaum,” a film about friendship. Meanwhile, the actress leads a rather Bohemian life in the Parisian flat she shares with her two friends. Her boyfriend, she said, is an actor.

Asked if she really finds womanhood as impossible as Sophie apparently discovers it to be, she said, “Yes, but not womanhood so much as life itself. It is difficult, there is a lot of pain and sadness, but I have also learned during this past year, how precious it is.”