New York City’s annual festival Rendez-Vous with French Cinema opens tonight and features offerings that recall themes familiar from American movies: a creepy nanny, a teenage girl’s rebellion, and a sort of Sleepless in Seattle à la française. Although familiar, the following films are vital and in touch with contemporary issues. Sadly, actors and directors won’t be coming to the screenings owing to the current coronavirus epidemic. Hopefully, New Yorkers should be able to appreciate the films absent a star-studded launch.

THE PERFECT NANNY

The nanny in question talks a good game at her job interview, but viewers might warily ask themselves….isn’t she a little scary? Her bulging eyes and scornful laugh might frighten some employers away, but the mom assessing her could really use some help with les enfants. So madame makes the tightly wound older woman an offer, and a nightmare begins in Lucie Borleteau’s The Perfect Nanny, an uneven thriller whose scares come in fits and starts. It’s based on the best-selling and critically acclaimed novel Lullaby by Leïla Slimani, which in turn is based a horrific real-life event. 

Record producer Paul (Antoine Reinartz) and his wife Myriam (Leïla Bekhti) lead a comfortable bourgeois existence with their five-year-old daughter and baby boy, but life has grown hectic for Myriam, who yearns to return to work as a lawyer. The new nanny is the answer to the parents’ prayers. Louise (Karin Viard, formidably uptight) loves to cook, clean, and pamper the children. She even arrives early to prepare the couple’s morning coffee. So what if she occasionally lashes out in rage, behaves bizarrely, or oversteps her place, this last transgression in Paris and the most unthinkable of all? Thank God, they have some help at least.

It takes a long time for Paul and Myriam to notice that anything’s wrong until Louise starts lurking in corners, endangers the children, and finally goes full-on bunny-boiling bonkers (and worse). How did we get here? The Perfect Nanny alludes to class resentments but holds back from really exploring them. Louise seems to have led a desperately lonely life, but we never get inside her mind. The story arc frustratingly fails to gain steam, even given the raw power of Viard’s acting in some truly shocking scenes. Material this lurid could use a director with a firmer hand building tension—and a forbidden taste for fromage. Perhaps even an American, God forbid.

PAPICHA

Mounia Meddour’s directorial debut returns to France’s troubled former colony of Algeria, where the teen coming-of-age melodrama takes place amid the country’s late-1990s’ civil war. Nedjma (Lyna Khoudri) and her best friend sneak out of their college dorm at night to hit the disco, excitedly putting on sexy outfits and makeup in the back of a taxi to a house-music thump. But the outing is more than a lark; the girls hastily cover their hair with headscarves to get past the masked Islamic militia who wait at checkpoints with guns drawn. The stakes are high, and Nedjma will have to negotiate them every day.

The teenager has aspirations as a fashion designer, but increasingly grim, radicalized Algeria is the wrong place for her talents. (Meddour effectively uses the city of Algiers as an intimidating, underlit but alluring backdrop.) All of Nedjma’s friends are desperate to flee the country, but she hankers to stay and fight, angrily defying the country’s sneering machos, street harassers, and corrupt officials, along with the mean girls and uptight college teachers familiar from Western teen movies. Sometimes this combination of particular and universal challenges offers an intriguing glimpse at a multilayered society. At other times, it feels as though Nedjma is taking some very big (and unrealistic) risks, taunting armed zealots the same way she would flip off a school rival.

A murder sharpens the focus, and Papicha heads into tragedy and back out again. The unconvincing staging of action scenes drains some of their power, but Khoudri’s fiery performance and the  glimpses of a nation’s descent into darkness give Papicha pathos beyond a party girl’s rebellion.

Last month Khoudri won the Most Promising Actress César Award and the movie the Best First Film honor, beating out such high-profile films as Atlantics and Les Misérables.

SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE

In a world of nonstop online connection, can we ever truly connect? Cédric Klapisch’s wistful Someone, Somewhere poses this question in a way that eventually wins you over in spite of a marked lack of originality. Klapisch is a maker of feel-good crowd-pleasers like Back to Burgundy and L’Auberge Espagnole, and his sympathetic, humanistic touch prevails throughout a story that can border on overly indulgent toward its melancholy protagonists. 

Naive but hunky Rémy (François Civil), a refugee from the French sticks, works in a warehouse and seems confounded by the social demands of the world around him. Living in the building right next door from him, Mélanie (Ana Girardot) is a scientist held back by a lack of self-confidence. Unknown to each other, the two disconnected young people perambulate through their downtrodden yet photogenic Paris neighborhood, their paths never quite crossing. Trains barreling forward on nearby tracks serve as symbols of life passing Rémy and Mélanie by. Will these two lonely souls finally come together?

Klapisch keeps his story moving with lots of business involving work travails, dating mishaps, and what-a-crazy-world explorations of internet hooking up, set pieces which would have been fresher five or even 10 years ago. A kind-hearted male yenta stands by to drive the point home that any meaningful encounter must take place amid the spontaneity and clutter of the real world, not online.

For all Someone‘s fluff, Klapisch gains our trust as he lets us get to know Mélanie and Rémy, who are troubled by pasts that may not be extraordinary but feel painful nonetheless. Rémy and Mélanie will have to work on themselves before their destinies can fall in line—a message perhaps more powerful in France than in perpetually self-seeking America. It’s thanks to the director’s affection for the duo that we can put aside our skepticism and root for characters who take honest risks as they reach out for fuller, less isolated lives.