Rendez-Vous With French Cinema 2023 Puts Queer Identity in the Spotlight

As we enter the final stretch of this year's awards season, those who choose to follow the horse race leading up to the Oscars might want to look elsewhere for a bit of a break. For those in New York City, Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema provides an ideal opportunity to get a glimpse at contemporary French films, with hits from both the festival circuit and the country's box office.

Now in its 28th edition, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema kicks off on March 2 with 21 films, along with several free panels with some of the filmmakers in this year's selection. And with several films in the 2023 lineup dealing with LGBTQ+ subjects and themes, the festival has a free talk scheduled about queer identities on screen, with French filmmakers Christophe Honoré ("Winter Boy") and Florent Gouëlou ("Three Nights a Week"), along with American directors Vuk Lungulov-Klotz ("Mutt") and Georden West ("Playland"), who both had films premiere this year at the Sundance and Rotterdam film festivals.

Both "Winter Boy" and "Three Nights a Week" don't make up the entirety of queer-themed selections at this year's Rendez-Vous, but they provide a good glimpse at the different portrayals of queerness among the line-up. Honoré's "Winter Boy" is a personal work for the director, which portrays the ways in which teenager Lucas (Paul Kircher) grapples with the sudden loss of his father, with the help of his artist brother (Vincent Lacoste) and mother (Juliette Binoche). Florent Gouëlou's "Three Nights a Week" follows photographer Baptiste (Pablo Pauly), whose introduction to the world of drag has him cross paths with drag queen Cookie Kunty (Romain Eck), and their blossoming romance helps Baptiste discover more about his own identity and sexuality.

Elsewhere in the programme, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's "Forever Young" takes place in the '80s at Les Amandiers, a famous theater school run by the late Patrice Chéreau (played by Louis Garrel), where a group of first year students get a crash course in life as they deal with sex, love, death, addiction, failure, and plenty more. And Léa Mysius' "The Five Devils" is a bizarre, supernatural story about a young girl (Sally Dramé) who discovers a special ability that gives her insight on the dark past of her mother ("Blue is the Warmest Color" star Adèle Exarchopoulos). All four of these films showcase a variety in style and direction, yet they all touch upon themes of self-awareness and discovery, and when put together in a programme like this they make for a compelling glimpse at the varying ways people can tackle queerness in film, whether through an autobiographical lens, a crowd-pleasing romance, or an offbeat genre exercise.

If those areas aren't of interest to you, the festival offers other avenues to go down. On the genre side, there's Quentin Dupieux's "Smoking Causes Coughing," which brings together a starry ensemble of French actors in a zany horror/comedy/action anthology, where a team building exercise for a group of superheroes turns into a competition over who can tell the scarier story, with Dupieux's dry wit allowed to fly off into any direction he pleases. For something much darker, Patricia Mazuy's "Saturn Bowling" is a brutal look at male chauvinism and privilege, with a police officer investigating a young woman's brutal murder without knowing his own brother is the culprit.

Mazuy's film might be too grim for some people (its premiere last summer at the Locarno Festival had walkouts over its violence), but it's not the only "policier" at the Rendez-Vous. Far more accessible is "The Night of the 12th," Dominik Moll's true crime story about a young woman who gets lit on fire by a masked assailant while walking home at night. Homicide detectives Yohan (Bastien Bouillon) and Marceau (Bouli Lanners) try to solve the murder, which amounts to a series of red herrings and dead ends that makes the two men become even more obsessed with finding the killer. Moll's film is a neat and tidy package, and its treatment of a real-life murder as a symbol for greater societal ills may not work for everyone, but it's a bonafide success; the film just nabbed six César awards in France, including Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. Fans of the crime genre shouldn't miss "The Night of the 12th" or "Saturn Bowling," although if I had to choose I'd prefer the dark, challenging nature of the latter film over Moll's broadened approach.

There are plenty more films to choose from within this year's lineup, and most of them are bound to have an appeal to either the most casual or hardened cinephile. Legendary filmmaker Philippe Garrel's latest film "The Plough," which just won Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival, screens along with his son Louis Garrel's "The Innocent," which recently picked up some César awards. Viewers looking for something fun should try Sébastien Marnier's "The Origin of Evil," a campy thriller full of twists and turns that brings to mind Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite." And then there's Virginie Efira, who just picked up the Best Actress César for her performance in opening night film "Paris Memories" where she tries to reunite with a fellow survivor of a terrorist attack. The charged subject matter of "Paris Memories" might explain why it won an award, but I would argue the better performance by Efira is in "Other People's Children," where she plays a woman trying to connect with the young daughter of her new boyfriend (Roschdy Zem). Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski handles more nuanced material with her exploration of relationships and motherhood, which gives the film a false sense of being a low-key affair. "Other People's Children" ends up being far more than that though, thanks to Efira's strong performance and Zlotowski's ability to have her film touch on larger themes around desire and self-fulfillment in ways that come out of her story organically.

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