If it’s March in New York, it’s the next best thing to April in Paris for the area’s Francophiles and serious film fans (often the same people), as The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance again throw their annual “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema” party of new films.

Now in its 15th year and gracing venues from Lincoln Center to Greenwich Village and Brooklyn from March 11 to 21, the current installment presents New York premieres of about 18 films, of which almost half have U.S. distribution deals that will theoretically take them to commercial theatres. Additionally, a few films still up for grabs (at least by deadline) like The Hedgehog (L’Herisson) will surely land distribution.

Among this year’s live star imports are filmmakers Christian Carion, Michel Gondry, Christophe Honoré, François Ozon, Mona Achache, Lucas Belvaux, Stéphane Brizé, Michel Hazanavicius, Cédric Kahn, Nathan Miller, Laurent Perreau and Riad Sattouf, as well as celebrated actors Yvan Attal, Guillaume Canet (best known stateside for having directed art-house hit Tell No One), Jean Dujardin, Julie Gayet, Virginie Ledoyen and Chiara Mastroianni.

Not on hand are some beloved stars from French cinema’s headier days (Marie-Christine Barrault, Francoise Fabian, Michel Piccoli) who are adding to the Gallic razzle-dazzle via fine performances in Rendez-Vous films of varying quality.

Arguably the strongest film in the line-up is Christian Carion’s highly entertaining spy thriller Farewell (L’affaire Farewell), which was the series opening-night selection. Based somewhat loosely on an actual Cold War spy episode, Farewell travels to ’70s and ’80s Russia, Paris, Washington and Canada to tell the true story of a disillusioned Moscow-based KGB agent (played by actor/director Emir Kusturica) who engages a reluctant Moscow-based French engineer and devoted family man (Canet) to deliver important top-secret documents to the West that will be critical to the fall of the USSR and Communism.

Spanning the Brezhnev/Reagan/Mitterand/Gorbachev eras (with some of these leaders as characters), this sprawling spy thriller, scheduled to arrive in theatres in June from NeoClassics Films, is a cache of great performances, engaging storytelling, and production values that should help crack the b.o. code.

Also ambitious and solid but challenging to Yank art-house tastes is Lucas Belvaux’s Rapt, which gives the kidnapping yarn a new and contemporary spin. The decadent and indulgent life of a multi-millionaire corporate chairman/playboy/gambler/ardent hunter unfolds after a gang of hoods take him hostage and demand many millions.

Inspired by a true incident, this well-made thriller—mostly decorated in the finery that goes with the exec’s lavish and privileged lifestyle—is eye-appealing and mind-absorbing. But his captivity ain’t pretty and his fate may be uglier. The ubiquitous Yvan Attal delivers one of his better performances in his humbled, dethroned master-of-the-universe role. Ultimately, Rapt can’t completely escape the superficiality that its alpha-male “hero” and genre impose. But the appearance of Françoise Fabian (best remembered stateside for her starring role in My Night at Maud’s) as the master’s imperious and insufferably demanding mother will delight seasoned buffs.

The French, understandably, can’t resist the subject of the Resistance, so engrained is it in their collective consciousness and recent, guilt-ridden past. Robert Guédiguian’s The Army of Crime (L'armée du crime), which Lorber Films is distributing, is the latest of many efforts (Jean-Pierre Melville’s recently revived Army of Shadows is one of the most successful) to deal with those in France who dared take action against the country’s Nazi occupiers and collaborators.

While this handsomely produced film takes aim at the oft-overlooked role of the Milice (the French police of the period) who did much of the dirty work for the Nazis and Vichy government, the key angle here is to depict the origins of the Resistance and focus on the overlooked foreigners like Armenians, especially, and Poles, Jews, Spaniards and Italians who joined the cause. The ensemble drama features French star Virginie Ledoyen and many other fine, lesser-known actors but suffers from a very messy beginning that disorients. When the film finally settles into the resisters taking action as their bosses and operatives emerge, the mojo and drama kick in.

In addition to worthy genre-oriented offerings, a number of smaller, more auteurist, even quirky films remind why French films over the years have appealed stateside. Lorber Films will be releasing Mademoiselle Chambon, Stéphane Brizé’s delicate and finely observed drama about the attraction between a rugged married construction worker and quietly refined young woman who is his son’s teacher. This observant, moving tale, which recently landed the César award for best adapted screenplay, follows mason Jean (Vincent Lindon) as he finds himself increasingly attracted to his son's lovely, violin-playing schoolteacher (Sandrine Kiberlain). The filmmaker creates magic with silences and pauses, but, sadly, filmgoers today don’t step out for silences and pauses. Still, Lorber deserves to see some impressive business that should be helped by critical nods and positive chatter.

Another gem in this category of modest but affecting films is The Hedgehog (Le hérisson), inventively directed and adapted by Mona Achache from Muriel Barbary’s popular novel. This charmer provides another star turn for vet comedienne Josiane Balasko as the seemingly coarse, brittle concierge for a ritzy Paris apartment building who unexpectedly bonds with a rich, elegant Japanese gentleman. Surveying this unlikely coupling is the precocious and rebellious pre-teen daughter of deadened bourgeois parents—a business-obsessed father and his neurotic, pill-popping wife, both in denial of their daughter’s misery and their own.

The filmmaker saves from cliché what could have been a superficial family, also including an unfeeling, spoiled older sister, and pulls outstanding performances from Balasko, Garance Le Guillermic as the young snooper (she’s an upscale modern version of Zazie of Zazie dans le metro), and Togo Igawa as the wise Japanese widower who uncovers his concierge’s inner and outer beauty. The film, which recalls some elements of the award-winning Séraphine, is wise, perceptive, and smartly surprising in many ways.

Another jewel in this year’s Rendez-Vous collection is Philippe Lioret’s immigrant drama Welcome that Film Movement is handling. Vincent Lindon gives one of two sterling Rendez-Vous performances as a blue-collar guy (the other is in the equally wonderful Mademoiselle Chambon). Here, he’s a swimming coach at a public pool in the port town of Calais, which is beset by illegals trying to escape to the U.K. Firat Ayverdi co-stars as the 17-year-old Kurd refugee he tries to help. Welcome is a superior effort that manages to address important issues in a gripping and beautifully acted, written and directed drama, also helped by the actual Calais locales and subtle music track.

Again proving that the French are especially adept at giving decadence a precious, elegant spin, Rendez-Vous includes François Ozon’s Hideaway (Le refuge), a small, semi-precious gem that features as its young heroine a pregnant, former heroin-using, attractive, rich idler. She inexplicably survives the tainted heroin that kills her young, attractive, rich, idle junkie partner (the appealing actor Melvil Poupaud, who shoots up very convincingly) and moves to a gorgeous oceanside cottage where her late partner’s young, attractive, rich, idle brother—not a junkie but gay—shows up and cares for her as she nears term.

Bad behavior here is so beside Ozon’s point, but what is his point? Parenthood is unpredictable? Rich, gay slackers might make great dads? Everything’s so very pretty and you can practically smell the salty, flower-scented air. Isabelle Carré in the lead as pregnant Mousse is actually pregnant and her character is as light, airy, appealing and transient as her name suggests. In his first big-screen appearance, French singer Louis-Ronan Choisy is fine as her young, rich, pretty gay guardian. But it’s all, ahem, pretty superficial.

Like Le refuge, which Strand releases this summer, a number of other smaller films at Rendez-Vous were superbly acted, nicely written and directed, but lacked that je ne sais quoi that is otherwise know as “heft.”



As a study of obsession, Cédric Kahn’s Regrets (Les Regrets) does score points. Yvan Attal stars as a happily married, up-and-coming Paris architect who returns to his rural hometown to visit his dying mother. He accidentally bumps into his former high-school girlfriend, with whom he begins an obsessive affair that ultimately threatens to destroy his life. Love never looked so foolish or obsession so real—or human dignity so beside the point.

With Restless (Le bel âge), director Laurent Perreau gives us the wonderful Michel Piccoli and not a lot more. Piccoli stars as a grandfather at odds with his aloof granddaughter, a rebellious teen who lives with him in his sprawling, musty provincial home. There is much froideur before she finally learns of his mysterious past as a Resistance fighter and the two—like the film itself—warm up.

The filmmaking team of Claude Miller and son Nathan Miller, with I'm Happy That My Mother Is Alive (Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante), are a little more assured in their storytelling but have still fashioned another small film difficult to warm to. Based on a true story, the movie jumps around chronologically as it follows young hero Thomas’ search for his real birth mother and the surprising, near-tragic outcome of that search.

Too many of these smaller films failed to deliver main characters who somehow resonate and this absence was a lesson. Con-artist anti-heroes (driven or demented or both) are often a good—read colorful—bet (from those in Sweet Smell of Success and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz to The King of Comedy and Catch Me If You Can, among others), but François Cluzet (Tell No One), who stars in the lamely titled In the Beginning (A l'origine), understandably can do little with the largely mute, one-note, reactive petty con-man “hero” handed him. The result is that Xavier Giannoli’s film, which is based on an actual incident of a nobody getting a stretch of highway built in an economically smacked northern French town, falls as flat as that highway.

Yes, the message comes across that just being able to work in these troubled times can be glorious. And there’s some interest generated by how this road project somehow evolves without real euros thrown at it. But even the participation of Emmanuelle Devos, who won a Best Supporting César for her role of the town’s mayor, is little help. Inscrutably, she falls for Cluzet’s lowlife scam artist. Even the immensely watchable French perennial Gérard Depardieu as the menacing brute who used to fence the hero’s stolen goods is a mere footnote.

Bloated can still mean small, as in writer-director Christophe Honoré’s Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille tu n'iras pas danser), an IFC Films pick-up that dithers along into something forgettable. Yes, the film touches on issues of family, love, commitment and mortality, but the touch is oh-so-light. Chiara Mastroianni plays the eponymous single Paris-based mother and independently spirited heroine who, having shucked job and husband, joins family for a holiday reunion at her parents’ comfortable country home in Brittany.

Her kids are darling, her parents quirky and loving, her siblings better-adjusted in their own lives, her ex-husband an adversary, and the bucolic setting of the family home is to die for, etc. There’s plenty of focus on Lena’s neuroses that set her apart from family. The only message that emerges is that, no matter her problems, life’s good.

French film fans of a certain age will welcome the participation of Marie-Christine Barrault as Lena’s together mother. Barrault made a splash stateside in her small but memorable 1969 theatrical film debut My Night at Maud’s and, indelibly, in her breakthrough 1975 art-house hit Cousin, Cousine.

Rendez-Vous again had its share of deeply oddball “What is the purpose here?” curiosities. Xabi Molia’s grim drama 8 Times Up (Huit Fois Debout) gives us two losers, likeable enough but far from luminous or interesting, in his tale of two unemployed souls floundering in a small French town. Embracing the sad state of employment in France, the film gives us a male hero and archery buff (Denis Podalydes) who’s just lousy at interviews but does find some footing doing canvassing for market research. The neighbor he befriends, before both lose their lodgings, is a loser on several fronts (Julie Gayet). Not just a lousy mother, she can’t keep a job as a bus depot cleaner on night shift. The couple try living in the nearby forest, but it’s no refuge for any of us. The filmmaker makes much of the film’s rich music component; if only he had that much consideration for his audience.

In some cases, as with filmmaker/music-video director Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart (L'épine dans le Coeur), the only doc in the Rendez-Vous line-up, the quandary of elusive purpose is sidelined by other virtues.

Gondry, who directed art-house darling Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and just completed The Green Hornet, focuses on his strong-willed aunt, former teacher Suzette Gondry, who lives in the sticks of south-central France with her pleasantly strange, apparently gay and obviously troubled son, Jean-Yves. This Oscilloscope Laboratories release, moving around chronologically and geographically, reeks of authenticity as Gondry and the home movies present old friends, family members, students and colleagues doing whatever, whenever. As an ethnographic foray, Thorn affords a fly-on-the-wall look at a decent French family embedded in the hinterlands and not putting on airs for the camera. But the doc never digs into its characters to unearth what makes them tick or tremble.

Axelle Ropert’s The Wolberg Family (La famille Wolberg) is another curiosity that inspires the question “What is this about?” The drama examines a Jewish family in a provincial French town, with emphasis on the paterfamilias who is also the workaholic, ultra-bourgeois mayor. Tension does kick in by way of a bohemian, free-spirited brother-in-law who visits, the discovery that the mayor’s wife has been having an affair, and a terrible illness that takes hold. But, hey, it’s France and it’s life and things happen. Again, here’s a film that fails to convey any explanation or exploration beneath the exposition.

Of course, films seemingly conceived as pure entertainment can thrive on glossy surfaces alone. OSS 117: Lost in Rio (OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus) is an eye-candy franchise spoof that sends up—and sends back nostalgia for—the deliciously silly James Bond and Pink Panther franchises, the music of Henry Mancini and John Barry, those playful Saul Bass credits, yum retro décor, and split-screen excesses. Also spiced with some comic jabs at anti-Semitism, this latest OSS spy adventure brings cool-in-his-own-mind spy Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (Jean Dujardin)—and an Israeli Mossad babe—to a very picturesque Brazil to find a Nazi-in-hiding.

A less successful entertainment blast touted a tad too ambitiously as a Gallic American Pie or Superbad, The French Kissers (Les Beaux gosses) follows two horny, geeky Brittany teens obsessed with girls, love, porn, breasts, their own privates in various stages of arousal, masturbation, and kisses (not necessarily in that order). The better films of this ilk possess plenty of humor (including laugh-inducing raunchiness) and memorable moments of feeling that go beyond the mere physical. But credit filmmaker Riad Sattouf with drawing convincing performances for a film that just won the César for Best First Feature.

And, per usual, hélas, there were a few entries that should have been stopped at customs. The King of Escape (Le Roi de l’evasion) is a full-bore reminder that the French and Americans are also an ocean apart on certain matters of sex. Alain Guiraudie’s drama gives us an apparently gay, beefy (a “bear” in gay parlance), forty-ish tractor salesman who gives up cruising in the bushes for a go at heterosexuality with a rebellious and devouring 16-year-old girl who far surpasses Lolita’s sexual precocity. Its near-pornographic content aside, the film is dramatically limp. King comprises a ridiculous hodgepodge of quirky anecdotes, encounters and characters, all ending with the couple (the hero only in briefs) on the run through the woods.

Another disappointment is masterly director Jules Dassin’s 1959 French-Italian co-production The Law (La Loi), whose only excuse can be that the great director and wife-to-be Melina Mercouri, who stars, were on holiday as well as location. Pitched between a romantic melodrama and a ’50s art film, this broad survey of the sassy and corrupt denizens of a picturesque southern Italian seaside town boasts an all-star cast of such legends as Yves Montand, Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni, Melina Mercouri and Pierre Brasseur. Neither art film nor charming romantic melodrama, the Oscilloscope Laboratories release is a kind of failed Bread, Love and Jealousy that features supposedly colorful villagers carrying on as supposedly colorful local mobsters and colorful con artists attempt to pull all the strings. Like its sultry heroine (Lollobrigida), the film teases but doesn’t deliver. It promises to be a juicy bit of ’50s foreign film nostalgia, but silly, flat and forced is what audiences get.

Overall, the Rendez-Vous selections did impress with a few real discoveries and a wealth of fine acting as many stars found their “moments.” If only too many weak stories and uninteresting characters hadn’t deprived audiences of theirs.