Several films in this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema program will soon be released in theaters—notably When Fall Is Coming, the latest from the ever-prolific François Ozon, along with Being Maria, Jessica Palud’s dramatization of Maria Schneider’s experience on the set of Last Tango in Paris, starring an intense Anamaria Vartolomei as Maria. Others may have their only New York screenings during the festival. DJ Mehdi: Made in France, a six-part documentary miniseries, recounts the brief life and lasting influence of the French rap artist and DJ, who died at age 34. For now, this screening might be New Yorkers’ only chance to see Thibaut de Longeville’s illuminating four-hour portrait of his close friend.

Patricia Mazuy’s serial-killer black comedy Paul Sanchez Is Back!, part of Rendez-Vous 2019, featured tonal shifts that were often jarring. Mazuy’s latest film, Visiting Hours, opts for subtler transitions to tell the story of two women from vastly different backgrounds. Alma (Isabelle Huppert), a wealthy bourgeois wife, and Mina (Hafsia Herzi), a working-class North African mother of two, meet at the prison where they each visit their incarcerated husbands. For Alma, these visits have become routine—a way to pass the time. When she notices Mina unable to gain entry to see her husband, Alma offers her a ride home. A tentative bond forms, and before long, Alma—whose spacious, upper-class home is near the prison—invites Mina and her children to stay with her to make future visits easier.

But why is Alma extending this olive branch? Is she simply bored with her privileged life, or is there genuine empathy behind her actions? Class dynamics simmer beneath the surface of Mazuy’s drama, though she wisely focuses on Alma and Mina as fully realized women rather than symbols of societal contrast. Still, their divide is impossible to ignore—most pointedly in a dinner party scene where Alma’s wealthy friends assume Mina is the new maid. Huppert, as ever, excels at playing characters who remain just out of emotional reach, while Herzi is quietly devastating as Mina, weighed down by a loneliness that likely predates her husband’s incarceration.

Set in a small South Korean seaside city, Winter in Sokcho explores the quiet struggles of Son-ha (newcomer Kim Seung-ah), a young hotel receptionist enduring the off-season doldrums. Her aging mother, a fishmonger, worries that Son-ha is waiting too long to marry, while her boyfriend, dreaming of becoming a model in Seoul, casually suggests she have plastic surgery. When a middle-aged French graphic novelist, Yan Kerrand (Roschdy Zem), checks into the hotel hoping to find inspiration, Son-ha glimpses the possibility of something beyond her stagnant life. She becomes his informal guide, leading him to local sites, including a trip to the tense border between North and South Korea.

Director Koya Kamura delicately unspools the threads of Son-ha’s life, which is marked by uncertainty—she is half-French, half-Korean (as is the director), and her mother has always been evasive about her absent father. With the arrival of this enigmatic Frenchman, Son-ha suddenly finds herself confronting questions about her identity. Kamura emphasizes the surrogate parent-child dynamic between Son-ha and Yan, while whimsical animated sequences by Agnès Patron offer insight into Son-ha’s inner world. Kamura and cinematographer Élodie Tahtane capture the bleak beauty of the coastal setting, while Zem and Kim—remarkably assured in her first film role—bring understated depth to these two isolated figures and their attempts at connection, however tentative.

Films by director Sophie Fillières have previously appeared at Rendez-Vous, including Gentille (2005) and In Bed with Victoria (2016). This year’s edition includes her final film, This Life of Mine, completed just before her death at 58. The film cuts close to the bone in its self-lacerating portrait of Barbie (Agnès Jaoui), a middle-aged writer struggling with the mental toll of a faltering career and distant relationships with her adult children. After a brief hospital stay, Barbie attempts to regain stability, culminating in a trip to rural England, where she buys a tiny plot of land solely to claim the title of “princess.”

The film’s disjointed structure feels less like an intentional reflection of Barbie’s fractured mental state than the result of Fillières’s passing before post-production was completed. Her children finished the film based on her notes, but the narrative feels strained and uneven. Still, Fillières asks a great deal of Jaoui, who keeps the seams from showing. Her complex performance takes the full measure of Barbie’s personal difficulties, exasperating behavior, and, finally, her renewed vigor for life.