Scarlett Johansson may be a terrific actress but when Annabel Crabb met her in London, she couldn't help admiring the young American's other qualities.
What exactly are the rules about breasts? Most Western societies seem cheerfully to sanction the covert admiration of them, so long as the lady in question has left sufficient buttons undone and you don't get caught taking a peek. In England, the general rule is that you pretend staunchly that you didn't notice anything at all, except if they're on page three of The Sun, in which case it's quite acceptable to sticky-tape them to your wall, in selected workplaces at least. And this interview is taking place in England. But, then, Scarlett Johansson is American.
So, I find myself wondering as I sit opposite her, how soon is too soon to congratulate her on her breasts? It's a tricky matter, because Scarlett Johansson is no ordinary double-D cheesecake. At only 21, she's already established herself as one of the most interesting and versatile actors of her generation. Her new film, directed by that fallible old genius Woody Allen, displays bountiful evidence of her professional ability. But it also displays - and to rather eye-popping effect - the parts of Ms Johansson that irrefutably identify her as a mammal.
Watching the film, I couldn't keep my eyes off them. And now, as we face each other over a table at London's ritzy Dorchester Hotel, there they are, hovering - literally and figuratively - between us.
They are, as yet, unmentioned. So, with all the stealth of a spotty teenager whose fingers march lustfully but covertly along the back of his oblivious date's seat at the movies, I ask whether she enjoyed playing a bombshell, a sex symbol. It is, though, her co-star Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who is also in the room, who opens the floodgates.
"I've just got this image in my head of what a bunch of Australian lads are going to think of this film," he sniggers, slapping on a broad Australian accent. "She's got graaayyyyt tits, maaayyyte!"
"Yeah, well, you know," acknowledges Johansson with a beatific smile, "they're the stars of the film, really".
Thank God. They're on the table at last (so to speak). "They should each get an Academy Award," I blurt out. "Particularly for that rain scene," I add, referring to a passionate seduction featuring Rhys Meyers, a wheat field, pelting rain, Ms Johansson's assets and a thin cotton blouse.
Rhys Meyers: "Academy Award? They should get their own 10-picture deal!"
Johansson: "Hopefully my cleavage plays only ..."
Rhys Meyers: "A minor supporting role?"
Johansson: "In terms of my upper body, and my posture. A balancing role."
As it happens, it's not only interviewers and English people who find themselves flummoxed by Ms Johansson's all-too-apparent sculptural perfections. She herself volunteers that she once nearly crashed her car in Los Angeles upon catching sight of a promotional billboard for one of her own films. "They were in the foreground and my head was sort of blurry in the background," she says, ruefully. "It was for The Island, and they printed the biggest billboard I'd ever seen before in my entire life of any kind of advertising. It had Ewan MacGregor on it, maybe, and maybe it was me, but I definitely could tell it was my humungous cleavage."
Rhys Meyers interjects, helpfully: "They should have called it The Two Islands."
Despite the rather Carry On tone of all this, readers should not infer that Scarlett Johansson's talents are confined to the region between her midriff and her finely turned collarbones. Nor that in Nola, the pouting American bombshell she plays in Match Point, she has found a role that exhausts her dramatic repertoire. In forthcoming roles she plays an Amazon warrior queen, the principal character in a film version of The Nanny Diaries, and Lucretia Borgia.
Indeed, Woody Allen, who cast her in Match Point only after an 11th-hour withdrawal by Kate Winslet, was so enamoured of his young star that he promptly cast her in another film, Scoop. "She's irresistible, has a wonderful personality, and she's a tremendous actress," enthused Allen. "It's hard to believe she's as young as she is because she's so far advanced as an actress and sophisticated as a person."
He's at least halfway right. As a person, Johansson comes across like pretty much any other 21-year-old. The low and throaty voice gives way to giggles fairly regularly, before disciplining itself into devout, if slightly wooden, commentary about her craft. The word "like" infests her conversation as thickly as it would the conversation of any other American her age.
But an actress, Johansson displays an astoundingly precocious range. Match Point is her 22nd film, and there are already three more in the can. Her body of work ranges from memorable (The Horse Whisperer, in which the 14-year-old Johansson starred alongside Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas) to execrable (Home Alone 3, Eight Legged Freaks).
Much of this frenetic activity is undoubtedly down to her mother, Melanie Johansson, who has a minor career as a producer and in fact produces the film Amazon, set for release next year, in which her daughter stars as a warrior princess. Johansson's twin brother Hunter, who is three minutes older than she, also has a couple of film credits. But Scarlett Johansson insists it was her obsession to be on screen that drove her early arrival in the world of show business.
And while some of the films are dreadful, she has by dint of sheer energy and talent managed to work with an eclectic range of very different great directors. Three years after working for Redford in 1998 she had a crucial role in the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, opposite Frances McDormand and Billy Bob Thornton. Two years after that, she starred in Lost In Translation, the film that won director Sofia Coppola two Oscars and, alongside Girl With the Pearl Earring, turned Johansson into the thinking man's crumpet.
Given that track record, it was probably only a matter of time before Woody Allen called. And about 12 months ago, that's just what he did. Allen's latest film had just lost its leading lady, Kate Winslet, and a replacement was urgently needed. Was Ms Johansson interested?
Ms Johansson was interested. "I always wanted to work with Woody, and I have been watching his films since I was 10 years old, so he's always been one of the directors that I've dreamed about, one of those directors where you feel, like, 'Wow, he's got to want me'. And I couldn't believe that my time had come, or that I would even get this opportunity."
She didn't even care what the film was about. "I agreed as soon as the words 'Woody Allen' came out of my agent's mouth. I'm just a huge fan. I did read the script out of curiosity, but it could have been any kind of story, really."
Rhys Meyers - whose previous claim to fame was a role in the 1998 glam-rock epic Velvet Goldmine and his subsequent relationship with the Australian star Toni Collette, which disintegrated several years ago - says he nearly passed out with excitement after getting the Allen call. "I think every young actor pisses themselves with anxiety when they meet any director, regardless of who it is," says the 28-year-old Irishman. "The fact that it's Woody Allen only amplifies it even more, because you don't want to embarrass yourself. You don't want somebody like that, who also is an actor, to think you're shite. What a terrible thing (it would be) for Woody Allen to meet you and then say, 'OK, you're not very interesting, I don't want you in a movie'. It would be heartbreaking."
Of course, that didn't happen. So, what was it like, working with Woody? "He was very very sweet," Rhys Meyers continues. "He was impersonal, but amiable, and the conversation lasted about two minutes. He handed me a script, and he said, 'I don't do much rehearsing. Let's work'. When Woody Allen says that to you, you kind of go, 'You know, that sounds like a f---ing great idea'."
Johansson found her director far more approachable than she'd dared to imagine. "The most surprising thing about Woody was that he had absolutely no ego at all," she says, thoughtfully. "You meet somebody who's not only a film icon but also a popular, cultural icon and I just didn't expect him to be so available. I think that was the most surprising thing. I mean, all of his neuroses we all share, I think. That's what makes his humour so ironic and hysterical to people, that they recognise pieces of themselves in his characters, and in the characters that he's portrayed."
Match Point is Allen's first film made wholly in London. The sentimental New Yorker's fall from grace in his home town has forced him finally to look elsewhere for funding, and this project was embraced willingly by BBC Films and by central London itself, which allowed him to film around its most recognisable landmarks.
Allen's script features Rhys Meyers as Chris, a struggling and ambitious young tennis player who takes up a coaching job at a posh club, where he meets the toffy but amiable Tom (Matthew Goode). With whose sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), Chris more or less immediately falls in love. And with whose foxy fiancee, Nola (Johansson), he slightly less immediately begins a lusty liaison. Torn between two women, Chris is forced to consider an alarming solution.
All of which lands the film, as Allen devotees will swiftly recognise, in territory already explored by his 1989 masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors; the similarity is underscored by a scene early in Match Point in which Rhys Meyers is seen reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which was itself a huge influence on the earlier film.
But that pedigree hasn't helped any. Having welcomed Allen gushingly to their capital, the British film establishment has cooled somewhat in its ardour since the film's release. Allen - who says he never reads reviews anyway - has been accused of getting the British upper class all wrong; one reviewer complained, in injured tones, about the posh father's promise to turn Chris into a good "grouse shooter" when, as everybody knows, a real toff would have said "a good shot".
"(Allen's) stilted rhythms infect the performances, which are awkward," sighed Henry Fitzherbert, of The Sunday Express. "The cast perform as if speaking English for the first time, with the exception of Scarlett Johansson, who plays an American."
Johansson's role in the film is really the first in which her sexuality is the most noticeable thing about her; it marks the completion, perhaps, of her transition from child star to sex symbol by way of a protracted and luminous adolescence.
How does she see this coming of age? "You know, it's hard to see outside of yourself. I don't know how people see me and I really don't care," she says. "I just hope that I am able to continue to play all kinds of roles and that I don't get typecast as as a neurotic bombshell."
Fanatical interest has already been taken in Johansson's off-screen love life. She is believed to be running around with her Black Dahlia co-star Josh Hartnett at the moment, but she says she learned a great and formative lesson several years ago when the world was swept by rumours about a supposed post-Oscars liaison with the snake-hipped Benicio del Toro, who is 17 years her senior.
"They were little rumours," she says, rolling her eyes. "And I said something in an interview, like, 'Yeah, apparently we were having sex in an elevator, which I think is very unsanitary'. And The New York Post - of course it was The Post - picked it up as saying we had sex in an elevator, leaving out the word 'apparently'. So of course it circulated about that quote, you know, saying, 'Oh my God, she's speaking out openly about this crazy affair', and whatever.
"So I learned, early on in my career, that being sarcastic doesn't always go over very well. Ever since, I've been quite straightforward about everything."
Breasts, needless to say, included.