Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri: France's funniest film-comedy duo

Who bickers as amusingly as the misfits and fools in Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri's comedies? Well, the pair tell Jonathan Romney, they can think of one couple...

(Eva Vermandel)

Any two actors can swan up the red carpet at Cannes, but it takes something extra to be a proper turn, a double act to remember. In 2004, French writer-actor duo Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri won the Best Screenplay prize there for their film Comme une Image ("Look at Me"). Jaoui, who directed the film, did the traditional thing, pausing on the steps in sumptuous evening décolletée, smiling radiantly for the cameras.

Bacri, meanwhile, hovered with his shirt crumpled, mandatory dicky bow conspicuously missing, five o'clock shadow that was heading for the wee small hours, and an expression suggesting he'd just dined on a bad pickle. During the ceremony itself, Jaoui graciously thanked all those without whom – after which Bacri slouched forward, muttered, "Moi pareil..." (roughly translatable as, "Er, yeah – wot she said"). And the assembled press, watching next door on a live video feed, exploded into joyous applause at the most debonair show of Gallic grouchiness since Serge Gainsbourg.

That night, Jaoui and Bacri could have been characters in one of their own comedies. Two actors meet, become a professional and domestic couple, write two successful stage plays, then turn to the cinema with a series of films which the woman starts to direct. They scoop a prestigious prize in Cannes, but their big night is memorable for unexpected reasons – possibly because the man has forgotten to pack his shaving kit and bow tie.

Four years and one film on, Jaoui and Bacri are visiting London, and couldn't be more cheerful. Jaoui – 44 and glamorous in a no-nonsense, somewhat matronly way – kicks off her shoes and curls up in a Claridge's armchair, stroking her knitted boa. Bacri, 57, is all in black, affable but brows knitted, as if gearing up for an argument on a literary talk show. The couple are here to discuss their new film Let's Talk About the Rain, Jaoui's third as director.

She plays a harassed feminist author turned politician; Bacri, a failed TV journalist making a documentary about her. But that's just one thread of an intricate ensemble piece typical of a team whose upmarket, articulate comedies are often compared to Woody Allen's. What's nice about the duo's films is that they're approachable but elusive: it often takes 20 minutes to work out which characters we're supposed to be watching most closely.

"When we get an idea," says Bacri, "we start exploring the theme; we start out with characters we need, then we'll say, 'OK, now we need someone who such-and-such...', 'Yes, but we also need someone who...', 'Yes, but then what about someone else who...', and we end up with five or six interlocking stories. That's why it's so hard to sum these films up."

"Les pitchs really get me down," says Jaoui. "Pitches... Do you say pitch in English?"

Bacri taps her on the arm. "Excuse me, slight digression..." He launches into a detailed anecdote about a French minister on TV discussing the statistics on women reporting domestic violence. The point of the story is that this minister used a new piece of franglais: "le gap". Bacri looks contemptuously baffled. "A French minister on TV. We have a perfectly good word, l'écart... " He looks to the ceiling with contemptuous bafflement. "Le gap!"

Jaoui looks at him patiently, gives a perfectly calibrated pause, then continues. "So anyway, le pitch. That gets me down." She muses. "Groundhog Day – I'd love to come up with a pitch like that, but we never do. Our films just aren't pitchable."

You could describe Jaoui and Bacri's films as comedies of awkward manners, exploring the impasses people land themselves in, through lack of tact or excess of it. The Taste of Others (2000), their first film with Jaoui directing, had Bacri as a gauche industrialist suddenly turned culture vulture, and Jaoui as a dope-dealing bar worker with reckless taste in men. Look at Me was about a young girl with aspirations to be an opera singer, and the awful, confused adults around her.

As for Let's Talk About the Rain, it's the most explicitly political statement yet from a staunchly leftist couple, in particular a commentary on French racial prejudice; their co-star is Jamel Debbouze, the Maghrebin actor and comic who's practically a showbiz deity in France. "We spend up to a year and a half working on a script," says Bacri, "so we really have to want to work on something. We need something we want to get off our chests."

Though Jaoui directs their films, the process is still collaborative. "I deal with technical stuff, but I don't make artistic decisions unless Jean-Pierre is in agreement." As for the writing, they still do it longhand, side by side on a sofa, going through their scripts line by line. "We're not really computer people," says Jaoui. "I like to have my notebooks with all the crossings out."

The duo both have North African Jewish origins: born near Paris, Jaoui trained as a classical singer before turning to the stage, and met the Algerian-born Bacri when they were acting in Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. Their first stage plays together, Cuisine et Dépendances (1991) and Un Air de Famille (1994) were hugely successful, and subsequently filmed. They often talk about returning to theatre, but it never quite happens. "I always felt guilty about that," Jaoui admits.

"Guilty of abandoning theatre, the poor relation," Bacri says. "Actually, it's not such a poor relation. You earn a lot more money in the theatre. If you're a playwright, and your show runs for a year and a half, the money just flows in. But we fell into cinema and we can never get away because..."

"Because cinema's fun," Jaoui interjects, "and theatre is so expensive. In theatre, you end up with a depressing audience, not at all mixed. All kinds of people come to see our films, people who never get to the theatre."

"Fifty euros to see a play? It's terrible," says Bacri. "How much does it cost here?" I offer some prices, and his jaw juts in disbelief.

Jaoui gestures at my notepad. "You look more like a psychoanalyst than an interviewer," she says. "With the armchair and everything," adds Bacri. Perhaps I should put them on couches, I suggest; they obligingly drape themselves over their chairs. Analysis is a favourite topic of Jaoui's, whose mother was a therapist: "I'll bet you $1,000 that 90 per cent of American writers have been in analysis. You can tell from the way they write. I'm talking about TV series. The Sopranos..."

"Six Fite Eundeur," Bacri interjects.

Jaoui: "...even if there's not actually a shrink on screen."

It still rankles with the pair that they were long snubbed by highbrow French cinephiles. "We made people laugh," says Bacri. "For certain sections of the press, that's unforgivable." But their image changed when they wrote for veteran auteur Alain Resnais, on his musical On Connait la Chanson ("Same Old Song", 1997), and adapted his improbable 1993 Alan Ayckbourn double-bill Smoking/No Smoking – although parts of the original didn't make the Channel crossing. "There were whole sections we didn't translate, because they were too English – about cricket or Shakespeare."

Jaoui and Bacri no longer live together, and have separate lives professionally and personally: both sustain outside acting careers, and Jaoui has a sideline as a Latin chanteuse, recording in Spanish and Portuguese. Earlier this year, she also adopted two young children from Brazil. But she and Bacri still very much have the dynamic of a couple. They occasionally lapse into little flurries of sotto voce argument, Bacri at one point turning to me and saying, "Nothing – just a bit of wordplay."

Once they're done promoting Let's Talk About the Rain, it's time to go back to the sofa and the writing process. "We need to sit down," says Bacri, face slipping into the sour-herring look that's his on-screen trademark: you can't tell if he's dreading the prospect of the work or relishing it. "Personally," says Jaoui, "I'm bubbling over with ideas," and beams at him. Who wouldn't love to be a fly on the wall when the notebooks come out?

'Let's Talk About the Rain' (12A) is in selected cinemas nationwide

In good company: Four more double acts made in comedy heaven

Woody Allen & Diane Keaton

Cinema's definitive beauty and the geek teamed up in Play it Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975) before Keaton fully shared centre stage in 1977's Annie Hall. After Keaton paired off with Warren Beatty, Mia Farrow stepped into Allen's partner-muse role

Katharine Hepburn & Spencer Tracy

These partners on screen and in real life perfected the archetype of the classy dame and pugnacious galoot, sparring in nine films including Adam's Rib (1949) and later the race-relations comedy drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

Mike Nichols & Elaine May

Both are stalwart directors at the brainier end of Hollywood (May – A New Leaf, 1971; Nichols – The Graduate, 1967; Angels In America, 2003; and Charlie Wilson's War, 2007). But the two made their name, improbably, as a fast-talking stand-up duo in the early-1960s

Mike Leigh & Alison Steadman

Director Leigh and his former wife earn their place in comedy history thanks to two monstrous creations: cheese-and-pineapple hostess Beverly in 1977's Abigail's Party and hapless camper Candice-Marie in Nuts in May (1976). JR