“Actresses” marks the second directorial effort from French actress of Italian extraction Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Whereas in her previous effort, the semi-autobiographical “It’s Easier for a Camel” about a spoiled middle-aged woman (Tedeschi) who takes a really long time to find out money can’t buy happiness, the muddled message in “Actresses” is either you can’t force love, or when single, childless women approach menopause they go completely insane.

Marcelline (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is a successful actress. Forty, single and childless, she has entered full-on midlife crisis mode, and is desperate to have a child. To make matters worse, not only is she being constantly harassed by her mother (Marysa Borini), but her doctor tells her that she is chock full of male hormones, so her biological clock is like a ticking time bomb. Upon receiving this news, Marcelline visits her local church, lights a candle and prays for god to bless her with a lover and child, offering to renounce fame and fortune in return. Her private life is taking a toll on her work, as Marcelline struggles through rehearsals for Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.” At one point, she can’t decide which hand she should use to open a door, much to the chagrin of her tyrannical director Denis (Mathieu Amalric), with whom she has furious sex despite the fact he bats for the other team.

Things get even stranger from here as Marcelline gets all “Hamlet” on us, haunted by the ghosts of her father, her dead ex-boyfriend, and Natalia Petrovna (Valeria Golino), the character she’s playing onstage. The thin line between fiction and reality is further blurred when life begins to imitate art for the troubled actress as she, like the character she plays, toys with the affections of young, strapping fellow thespian Eric (Louis Garrel). The only place Marcelline finds some peace and harmony is in the pool swimming laps to oldies tunes at the local YMCA.

On the other end of the spectrum is Nathalie (Noemie Lvovsky, who cowrote the film with Tedeschi), a married mother of two who’s also in a bit of a midlife funk, resulting in her misguided – and unreciprocated – sexual passes at her boss, the aforementioned Denis (including a little “Misery”-esque bondage session - albeit with decidedly different results).

While the performances are serviceable, the narrative of “Actresses” is riddled with holes, and the tone of the film is very uneven. The main problem is that the self-deprecating Marcelline isn’t an appealing character. What is meant to be neuroses – i.e. a female Woody Allen – just seems like all kinds of crazy, as Marcelline is at one point caught trying to breastfeed her friend’s child. Let’s recap: Marcelline converses with ghosts, beds gay men while cock-teasing the men she actually likes (Eric), and tries to breastfeed her friend’s kid - emotionally unstable, or completely insane? Also, there is what we can call the “House of Sand and Fog” problem: this woman is way too attractive to be in this desperate a situation. Tedeschi, who resembles a curvier Vera Farmiga, is the type of woman (like Jennifer Connelly in “Fog”) who can make a man fall in love with them at the drop of a hat. Furthermore, the ending of “Actresses” is a carbon copy of another recent Louis Garrel film, “Dans Paris.” However unlike “Paris,” Garrel’s talents are really underused here, as his one-dimensional character is reduced to a mere prop in this patchy, tone-deaf and ultimately unfunny film.