A 17-year-old Parisian girl of Algerian parentage struggles to negotiate the conflicting tensions between desire, familial expectation, peer pressure and heritage in debuting writer-director Kamir Aïnouz’s intermittently successful “Honey Cigar.” Refreshingly empowering in how it foregrounds the female gaze together with the young woman’s ownership of her sexual urges, the film too often falls back on paper-thin characterizations that trip up the director’s ambitious attempt to give equal voice to a mélange of weighty personal and political issues. While the core ideas are sound and Zoé Adjani’s charismatic performance imbues those ideas with a soul, the unexceptional screenplay flounders in its attempt to make each issue equally real and multifaceted. Francophone territories will likely account for the lion’s share of the film’s revenue, together with feminist showcases.