This year marks the second Rendez-Vous with French Cinema held under the coronavirus lockdown, and although we are all Zoom-adapted by now, some of us yearn for the hustle and bustle of the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, which, along with UniFrance, presents the annual survey of new French-language movies. All but one of the titles below were selected to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, cancelled last year because of the pandemic. And for the first time ever, the series will be available to viewers in the United States and its territories online—like many film festivals over the last 12 months, it is now an online event.

Given that tickets for Rendez-Vous usually sell out quickly, this year’s edition is an opportunity for more filmgoers within and outside of New York City to explore the programming and to get hint of what would have entertained the glittering crowds at Cannes. For those curious about sampling some of the selections, the entries below deal with the status of France’s North African population, tackle issues on the job, revel in the pleasures of youth and romance, and even take a neo-noir detour. 

RED SOIL

A sturdy workplace drama that takes on nuance as it goes along, Farid Bentoumi’s Red Soil belongs in the company of whistleblower stories like Silkwood and Norma Rae, only with a complicating family twist. A bright young nurse of Maghreb descent takes a job at a small-town chemical plant. Nour (Zita Hanrot) is soon disturbed by what she sees on-site: safety shortcuts, health issues, and environmentally damaging pollution and dumping. Her objections arouse hostility from management. But what really stings is that the individual who tries hardest to deny and cover up her findings is the man who arranged the job for her—Slimane, her father (Sami Bouajila).

Red Soil builds a sense of foreboding and high stakes while trying to be fair to both sides of the argument. As descendants of North African immigrants, Nour and her father work under the unspoken assumption that they have to look busier and perform better than their apathetic co-workers. Corporate fat cats are not the only ones invested in preserving the plant; Slimane sees himself as an aggrieved underdog who worked his way up, crusades to save local jobs, and will go the extra mile to defend the company’s honor. 

Red Soil convincingly creates pathos as father and daughter are bewildered by the collapse of their once warm, supportive relationship, and the film as a whole is elevated by fine acting from a plaintive Bouajila and from Hanrot, who combines relatability with subtle star power. 

IBRAHIM

Trouble between a father and son in a dissatisfied Maghreb community forms the stony, silent heart of Ibrahim, this time in Paris. The titular teenager (Abdelrani Bendaher) is a listless lycée student interested only in soccer; the film’s director and writer Samir Guesmi plays his laconic, grim father, Ahmed. The mother and wife long gone, these two depend on each other more than they would like to, with the father providing a spartan home and Ibrahim helping his illiterate dad write checks out of the family’s meager income. Dad badly needs dentures that will allow him to move up to a more lucrative waiter position in the brasserie where he works, and Guesmi devises an affecting moment when Ahmed tries on makeshift teeth in the mirror to fill the gaps.

Into this uneasy balance strides Achille (Rabah Nait Oufella from Nocturama), a stereotypically charismatic sleaze who enlists Ibrahim in a shoplifting scheme. A boy so timid and gangly seems an unpromising criminal, and sure enough, Ibrahim is soon caught in the act, his father summoned, and the two of them shaken down for a “fine” by two French sharpies who recall Les Misérables’s Thénardiers. The encounter is a reminder of the father and son’s powerlessness.

Ibrahim will be driven to desperate acts to finance his father’s dental work, limits will be tested, and secrets may be revealed, before Ibrahim changes course into a teen love story just as nonverbal and withholding as the family relationship. Not only that, but part of it takes place in a very odd location that may be a flight of fancy or just a test of credulity. Oh, well, at least we get a grin from Ibrahim in a movie distinctly light on them and a sense of hope and redemption, although we’re not sure exactly how we got there. Ça suffit, perhaps.

SPRING BLOSSOM

The central character of Spring Blossom is also a high school student, and like Ibrahim, the film casts its writer and director as a main character. But Blossom is as tender and high-spirited as Ibrahim is dour, and reflects a milieu as bourgeois as Ibrahim’s is straitened. Coltish Suzanne Lindon, daughter of French cinema royalty Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, stars as Suzanne, a girl of 16 bored with her immature classmates and secure but restless within the bosom of an affectionate family. Walking past a theater near her house, Suzanne notices a slender, moody thirty-something actor, Raphaël (Arnaud Valois), enjoying a cigarette. And he notices her too. Soon they are engaged in glances, tentative conversations, and finally a cautious attraction. 

Their growing relationship is age-inappropriate, a fact the film deals with by matter-of-factly not dealing with it. Lindon makes us understand why these two loners are drawn to each other. In contrast to those around them, both are comfortable with their bodies—the two mirror each other’s movements in a charming sequence at a café table, spontaneously miming in wordless synch. When Raphaël shows interest, Suzanne breaks into a joyous dance down the street. Moments of sheer exuberance like these give the film a freshness beyond the usual coming of-age ritual. 

Spring Blossom’s writing can count too much on the appeal of its leads to carry an emotional story line. Scenes and the film itself end abruptly. But at a well-paced 70 minutes, its central tête-à-tête brings together youthful awkwardness with old-fashioned grace. 

THE LOVERS

The preceding movies all seem French in their particular way, but Nicole Garcia’s The Lovers comes off as stateless even down to its generic title. If anything, this gun-metal gray noirish thriller, which premiered at the in-person Venice Film Festival, resembles nothing so much as the films of German director Christian Petzold, only without the specters of moral reckoning and internal conflict. 

Lisa (Stacy Martin, a younger, more normcore version of Petzold regular Nina Hoss), is in love with slender, serpentine Simon (Pierre Niney), a drug dealer who’s sure that he can sell lots of class A drugs without anything going wrong. Until the day it does, of course, and a client overdoses after the bagman refuses to call an ambulance. Panicked Simon flees France and leaves Lisa to make a hardscrabble living as best she can working at a nightclub coat check. There she catches the eye of Léo, a shady, wealthy, and considerably older businessman (Benoît Magimel, who has officially made the transition from pretty boy to character actor). Fast forward to the now married Lisa and Léo vacationing in Mauritius while looking for a child to adopt. Who do you think shows up as a staffer at their hotel, staring down Lisa with those shifty, sexy eyes?

The lovers reignite their passion behind Léo’s back in Geneva, where the couple live, squabbling among themselves and hoping to outsmart him for his fortune.  It tells you a lot that the boorish alpha male in this trio is actually the one with the most emotional intelligence; Léo knows that Lisa doesn’t love him and reflects ruefully, “Sometimes money isn’t enough.” True, sometimes good sense comes in handy too, and coincidence is on your side. The lack of both will end up in an undoing for someone that may come as choc but not much of surprise in this stylish but thin, uninvolving movie.