Rendez-Vous With French Cinema 2023 [Film Festival Preview]

Rendez-Vous With French Cinema comes to Film At Lincoln Center once again thanks to the teams at FLC and UniFrance, and will run from March 2-12. Here is our preview of this year’s slate, highlighting a few gems from the lineup:

Starting off our coverage of this year’s Rendez-vous With French Cinema is one of the festival’s most hotly anticipated films. From beloved director Philippe Garrel comes The Plough, which marks both one of the director’s rare excursions into the world of color and also a markedly familial work, with his son (Louis, himself a director with a film at this festival) and two daughters (Esther and Lena) all in supporting roles. Drawing from his father’s time as a puppeteer, Garrel’s film stars Aurelien Recoing as Simon, a head of a puppeteering collective who works alongside his children, despite ever-growing fears about his own aging beginning to crop up.

Those fears come to a head when, after appointing his assistant Peter (Damien Mongin) to the troupe, Simon passes away, sending the film’s dramatic thrust into motion. While much will be said about Garrel choosing to shoot this film in color, with that more “alive” palette comes a film of comparatively great warmth, a more approachable register than many of the films in Garrel’s canon. Clearly a somewhat autobiographical work, the performances here are beautiful in their naturalism, particularly the three Garrel children, all of whom give in performances with varying degrees of greatness. Garrel’s focus on gesture and human interactions are still very much at the fore here, coming to real life in moments like Simon’s son hitting on Peter’s ex-wife, played by Mathilde Weil. Its in these moments that, while he may worry about entering old age, we discover that Philippe Garrel still hasn’t lost a step.

Next up is one of the many genre films featured in this year’s lineup. Entitled The Night of the 12th, the film comes from director Dominik Moll who is best known for thrillers like 2019’s quietly great Only The Animals. A film of a much different vibe, The Night of the 12th is a haunting crime thriller following the story of Clara, a young woman brutally set on fire following a house party.

Born out of writer Pauline Guena’s 18.3, a mammoth chronicle of murder investigations in France akin to David Simon’s seminal Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, Night is a devastating police procedural starring Bastien Bouillon and Bouli Lanners, both of whom give incredible performances as partners hunting down the monster who did this. While very much about the nuts and bolts of the case, the film’s greatness comes not out of its literal scope but its ability to use this investigation to further dive into the inherent misogyny that plagues modern-day society. Feeling very much in conversation with the recent strain of “true crime” dramas, Night of the 12th is an expertly made and performed study of toxic masculinity and its many shapes and forms. A real knockout.

Finally, we’ll close out this short preview of this year’s festival with one of the more approachable works within its lineup. Diary Of A Fleeting Affair is ostensibly little more than that, with director Emmanuel Mouret introducing viewers to Simon (Vincent Macaigne) a seemingly happily married man who sparks the titular affair after meeting the beautiful Charlotte (Sandrine Kiberlain). However, the two have a very specific ground rule, in that this will be an affair completely void of any actual feelings.

As one can guess, that doesn’t stay the case as over the span of the affair (which viewers only become privy to snippets of thanks to a rather fascinating use of time throughout the film), and the two begin to have a connection that neither of them ever expected. Rooted heavily in the classic French romantic drama mold, the film is gorgeously composed, with the streets of Paris rarely ever looking quite as vibrant and engrossing. Interiors are perfectly lit and envelop the viewer in a sense of intimacy rarely seen in today’s cinema. Pair that opposite crackerjack performances from both leads (particularly Macaigne, who remains one of the more underrated actors in modern cinema) and you have a romantic drama that stands above many other recent entries in the genre. Sexy, lushly composed and warm, Diary Of A Fleeting Affair is a film made by and for the hopeless romantic in all of us.