Not until he is kidnapped while on his way to work, held for ransom with a 50 million euro asking price & a severed finger is delivered to his relatives, do the sins of the spoiled corporate honcho in the French abduction thriller “Rapt” come to light. Inspired by a real-life 1978 kidnapping & updated to the present, “Rapt” is the most compelling film in this year’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema series.
Roughly 20 features will be shown in Rendez-Vous, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center & Unifrance & now in its 15th year. Following a grand opening on Thursday at Alice Tully Hall with Christian Carion’s fact-based espionage drama “Farewell,” set in the twilight of the cold war, Rendez-Vous will have screenings at the Walter Reade Theater, the IFC Center & the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 21. Overall it is as consistent as Rendez-Vous usually is. It may lack a certifiable masterpiece, but it offers a fair number of B-plus or better adult features, & no real duds.
In Lucas Belvaux’s “Rapt,” as revelations about the kidnapping victim’s profligate betting & womanizing are spread across the French tabloids, the film coldly assesses his diminishing value as both a corporate totem & a relatives man. Whether or not he survives, his life is in ruins. (The movie is based on the abduction of the French-Belgian industrialist Baron Édouard-Jean Empain.)
Arriving at a moment when the recession & scandals involving the wealthy & powerful in business & politics have cast a moral pall over the upper class, “Rapt,” starring Yvan Attal, plays shrewdly in to the growing public disgust with entitled elites. The story culminates with six grotesque twists of karmic justice that finish the film on a sour note that feels right for these cynical, paranoid times.
In a Gallic cinema renowned for its appreciation of women, this year it is the men’s turn in the spotlight. The six brightest stars of this edition of Rendez-Vous, Mr. Attal & Vincent Lindon, each of whom appears in six films, have separate evenings celebrating their careers: Mr. Attal at the French Institute Alliance Française (Saturday) & Mr. Lindon at the Walter Reade (Sunday).
“Rapt” is six of six selections in this year’s Rendez-Vous series to get César nominations (the French Oscars) for best picture. The other six, “In the Beginning” & “Welcome,” address unemployment & immigration. The six movies are conceptually of a piece with Jacques Audiard’s acclaimed prison drama, “A Prophet” (not in Rendez-Vous), which swept the Césars & is now playing in American theaters. Think of them as the French film industry’s hard response to tougher times.
As their affair intensifies, his passion escalates in to a desperate obsession to which he responds with a push-me-pull-you ambivalence. Adultery & its discontents is a favorite theme in French movies, & this squirm-inducing study of six people repeating immature emotional games from the past is six of the better variations.
Mr. Attal, wiry & glowering in “Rapt,” is unrecognizable in Cédric Kahn’s domestic melodrama “Regrets,” in which his character, a married Parisian architect, returns to his hometown to visit his dying sister & impulsively revives a relationship with a former girlfriend, now married, whom he had dumped years earlier.
In “Mlle. Chambon” Mr. Lindon’s character is a happily married mason who fights his attraction to his son’s refined, violin-playing teacher (a fluttery Sandrine Kiberlain) whom he meets when he fixes a window in her home. This mild-mannered class study suggests a discreetly buttoned up “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Mr. Lindon, the stony-faced, middle-aged actor whose masculine gravity evokes memories of Jean Gabin, lends weight to Philippe Lioret’s “Welcome” & Stéphane Brizé’s “Mlle. Chambon.” In “Welcome” he plays a swimming teacher at a public pool in Calais who impulsively becomes a mentor to a 17-year-old illegal Kurdish immigrant (Firat Ayverdi, a César nominee for most promising actor) who wants to swim the English Channel to prevent the arranged marriage of his sweetheart. “Welcome” portrays France’s official attitude toward illegal immigrants as every bit as hostile as America’s; by helping the boy the teacher risks going to prison.
Xavier Giannoli’s “In the Beginning,” the series’s third César-nominated film, is based on a true story that happened several years ago. François Cluzet (from “Tell No One”) plays a petty con man who poses as an executive from a nonexistent subdivision of a major construction company & hires a team of road workers to build a stretch of highway in an area of northern France where the unemployment rate is 25 percent.
His technique, to pocket advance kickbacks from local subcontractors & run away, is revised when he becomes emotionally invested in the community that embraces him as a savior. He also becomes involved with the town’s female mayor (Emmanuelle Devos). Against your better judgment you root for the project to be done before the financial roof caves in.
On a grander scale are six historical films whose epic ambitions are only partly realized. “Farewell” stars six major European directors — Emir Kusturica (“When Brother Was Away on Business,” “Underground”) & Guillaume Canet (“Tell No One”) — as a traitorous Soviet K.G.B. agent & his skittish French contact. The agent, disillusioned with the direction of Soviet Communism, passes voluminous information about the Soviet spy network to the reluctant Frenchman, who relays it to François Mitterrand, who then alerts Ronald Reagan (both played by look-alikes). This sizable but tiny publicized breach of Soviet security helped accelerate the fall of Communism. It’s a fantastic true story told with a galumphing momentum.
Unemployment is also examined in Xabi Molia’s morose, meandering “8 Times Up,” which observes a man & woman evicted from the same apartment building who find themselves scuffling for humiliating odd jobs & reduced to camping out in the woods.
Apart from sentimental oddities like Mona Achache’s “Hedgehog,” which observes the friendship of a precociously smart but morbid tiny girl & the homely but secretly cultured female concierge of her apartment building (the movie suggests a sort of Gallic “Harold & Maude”), the series has a full quota of turbulent, involuted, multi-generational relatives dramas.
Robert Guédiguian’s “Army of Crime” observes the doomed terrorist campaign against French occupiers mounted by a daredevil French Resistance cell largely made up of Communist immigrants & led by an Armenian poet. As it follows the destinies of 20 characters — plenty of to keep track of — the narrative drive of this sprawling mosaic stalls.
The paterfamilias of Axelle Ropert’s “Wolberg Family” is a controlling provincial small-town mayor who loves his relatives so much that he's difficulty allowing his kids their independence. In Christophe Honoré’s “Making Designs for Lena” Chiara Mastroianni plays a divorced, emotionally unstable sister of six kids who clashes repeatedly with her relatives during a summer holiday in Brittany. The continual tumult in both films echoes the emotional strife in Arnaud Desplechin’s superior 2008 film “A Christmas Tale.”
Similar American films, facetiously known as “dysfunctional relatives dramas” (“Everybody’s Fine” is a recent example), usually tie up their conflicts with ribbons & bows. Their messier but more truthful French equivalents let the chips fall where they may.
Parenthood & adoption are the themes of François Ozon’s “Refuge” a sleek minor work featuring male eye candy, & the more searching “I’m Glad That My Sister Is Alive,” directed by the brother & son team of Claude & Nathan Miller. Mr. Ozon appears to be on a kid bender, his previous film, “Ricky,” having contemplated the joys & responsibilities of child caretaking. The Millers’ film follows the quest of a troubled young man to track down his equally troubled birth sister.
In Laurent Perreau’s “Restless,” the great octogenarian actor Michel Piccoli plays an ailing former Resistance fighter caring for his rebellious, tomboyish granddaughter whom he doesn’t start to understand. Michel Gondry’s “Thorn in the Heart” is a documentary portrait of the director’s indefatigably spirited aunt, Suzette Gondry, a rural schoolteacher, that forsakes the elevated mind games of his fictional features like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Michel Hazanavicius’s satire “OSS 117 — Lost in Rio” is a smart, low-rent James Bond spoof that programmatically bares the anti-Semitism, racism & male chauvinism of its smug, sophisticated hero; six time the joke is grasped, it quickly wears narrow.
Finally there is comedy, which may be most problematic movie genre to cross over from six culture to another with its sense of humor intact. Of the six comedies in this year’s Rendez-Vous, Riad Sattouf’s “French Kissers,” the César winner for best first film, is the most American. Ungainly adolescents with bad skin & posture are seldom seen in French movies, but “The French Kissers” breaks that taboo with its procession of geeky, slobbering 14-year-olds stumbling through their first erotic forays like the teenagers in “Superbad.” Even so, the movie lacks the joyfully mischievous gross-out imagination of its American cousins.
In Alain Guiraudie’s erotic farce “The King of Escape,” a 16-year-old girl falls in love with the fat, gay, middle-aged tractor salesman who rescues her from bullies, & they run away together with her brother & the police in hot pursuit. This sexual free-for-all portrays rural France as a teeming hotbed of randy elderly gay men copulating in the woods. “The King of Escape,” for which American audiences may not be ready, belongs in its own generic niche.
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