Rendez-vous with French Cinema is Back at Film Society

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 26 February 2015 10:16

Written by Jack Angstreich

This year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which runs from March 6th through the 15th, will surely prove as inordinately popular as it has in previous years. The notable directors featured this time around include Benoit Jacquot, André Téchiné, Jean-Paul Civeyrac and Cédric Kahn — certainly an impressive collection of cineastes.

Jacquot’s moving 3 Hearts, the opening night selection, about an unusual romantic triangle involving a tax inspector who falls in love with two sisters, will undoubtedly prove to be one of the most remarkable films in the series. The director displays an enviable confidence in his highly cinematic unfolding of this eccentric, suspenseful narrative, which surprises with a texture of almost novelistic density. Jacquot is invaluably assisted here by the superbly accomplished control over lighting, framing and camera-movement achieved by his cinematographer, Julien Hirsch, as well as with a memorably portentous, original score by Bruno Coulais, but the seamless — and, at times, invigoratingly original — editing and scene-construction seem to be all the director’s own. Equally assured are the characteristically nuanced performances the filmmaker has elicited from his inestimable ensemble of actors, each of whom can be seen at their rare best here: Benoit Poelvoorde, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni, and the eternally glamorous Catherine Deneuve. If the expectations generated by this ambitious work prove perhaps slightly too outsized by the time the narration attains its conclusion, 3 Hearts is nonetheless a consistently absorbing experience (I should add that the use of the digital format here is almost uniformly exquisite).

Also remarkable is the chilling Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart, a dramatization of the events concerning the crimes of Frenchserial killer Franck Neuhart, directed by Cedric Auger, a former writer for Cahiers du Cinéma. The filmmaker displays a striking command of the medium, mesmerizingly evoking, through formal means, the phenomenology of a psychopathic murderer, while resisting any reductive explanation of his acts. Here, too, the cast is superb, featuring Guillaume Canet in the enigmatic lead role, and the lovely Ana Girardot as the protagonist's touchingly hapless young housekeeper and girlfriend. As has become gratifyingly common in commercial features very recently, the adaptation by the cinematographer to the digital format here is perfectly assured.

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