Rendez-vous

André Téchiné made this 1985 film RENDEZ-VOUS before his promising career was established, giving us such fine films as My Favorite Season, The Innocents, The Wild Reeds, Beach Café, Alice and Martin, etc. The sensitivity to character development is tightly wound in this work but some of the finesse that followed his later works is missing. In the end we are left wondering a bit about what happened to almost everyone.

Nina (Juliette Binoche in her first film role) has traveled to Paris from her small home in Toulouse to try her hand at acting and to live the wild life that has been unavailable to her in Toulouse. She beds nearly every man she encounters and acts bit parts in small theaters, barely eking out an existence. Tired of one night stands and sharing quarters with others, she sets out to find her own apartment, stopping in to a realtors office where she encounters Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak) who is immediately smitten with her sensual good looks and manner. Having no place to stay Nina agrees to spend a few days with Paulot in a flat shared with the hauntingly strange Quentin (Lambert Wilson). Nina is oddly attracted to Quentin and is somewhat put off by the fact that Quentin is an actor in a sex theater. We discover Quentin narrowly escaped death some time back when the actress playing Juliet to his Romeo was killed. Nina has an approach/avoidance conflict with Quentin, all the while fending off offers by the pathetic Paulot to care for her. Quentin is killed in a car accident, Nina meets the elderly director Scrutzler (Jean-Louis Trintignant in a splendid cameo role) who promises her the role of Juliet in his casting of the Shakespeare drama, and her career as an actress seems to be launched. Full of self doubt and fear stimulated by the ghost-like appearances of the dead Quentin, Nina prepares for the role, copes with Paulot's advances, shares a flat with him, and is finally left in the stage wings with her focus on becoming an actress challenged with her needs for physical and stable love. And we are left there.

Juliette Binoche is very fine in this her 'maiden voyage' and it is a happy finding that she is far more beautiful (as well as a far better actress) in her current more mature state. Lambert Wilson gives a fine performance, finding the line between lurid sexuality and lonely afterlife ghost a position he easily treads. The film definitely has moments but it is only a hint (and a strong one) of just what to expect form the gifted André Téchiné. Not bad for a twenty year old film! Grady Harp

Oh sooooo disappointing. The most helpful thing I can tell you is Don't Bother! Sure, the acting was great, fearless etc etc. but the script was so very baaad. The writer/director et al- they just couldn't decide WHAT to do with this story. Actually, the only really interesting thing for me in this film- is the performance of Lambert Wilson doing a young Jeremy Irons.'I'm sure my film experiences of him are stunted but I have only known him as a comedic/semi-comedic actor.He does a very riveting job as the tortured soul here. But still, there are so many good films directed by Techine or starring these actors; just skip this one.

Juliette Binoche was only 21 when she made this film, but it was her eighth film. This is really a pointless, offensive, and ridiculous film for which the director was of course awarded Best Director at Cannes, and Binoche was awarded a Best Actress Cesar (which proves how crazy judges can be, and how perverted they are as well). I imagine Juliette Binoche must be hideously embarrassed to think this terrible film of her cavorting around naked in compromising situations is still available on DVD. It is harder than soft porn, and purely gratuitous in its graphic displays. Binoche was not at all interesting at the age of 21, and all of her fascinating qualities developed later when she began to look like a woman: as a girl, she was seriously dull. I do not mean to say that Binoche did a bad job of acting; on the contrary, she did very well, but why bother? This film is a wet dream fantasy of a sick director of the 'let's get the lead actress's kit off quick' school of thought. Everybody in the film is obsessed with sex, death, and all those really new things none of us has ever thought about, so we need the wacko director to remind us. Why didn't he just make a sexy vampire film and be less affected and pompous? If you want horror, death, and sex, there are always vampires to turn to. Instead, we have here a lot of twaddle about Shakespeare and other mock-profundities. How absurd this all is. Binoche ought to get her kit back on. Really, there was no point in taking it off. On the other hand, there is a Cesar for the mantlepiece, I suppose. But was it worth it? This is a film only for psychotics.

When film director André Téchiné made 'Rendez-vous' in 1985, his name was already well known. However, some of his collaborators were anonymous and this film would be a very good launching pad for celebrities. Téchiné offered the lead role and in fact the first consistent role to Juliette Binoche, who at the age of 21 featured in 5 films that year, starting a formidable career. Téchiné's co-writer was Olivier Assayas, in his first screenplay for a feature film, which he wrote in parallel with directing his own debut film. And for Lambert Wilson as well the role here was one of the first important roles, although he had already met with success a year before. Wadeck Stanczak completes the triangle of young actors, also in an important first role, an actor who promised a lot, but whose career has evolved much more disappointingly than those of his famous partners. The film is a psychological thriller set in the world of the young people of Paris in the mid-80s and there are many reasons to be watched with pleasure today, in addition to the film debuts I mentioned.

At the age of 21, Juliette Binoche plays the role of Nina, an 18-year-old girl who comes to Paris to realize her dream of becoming an actress. She manages to get a role in a boulevard comedy, dreaming of big roles while the men around her seem to have no other intentions than to sleep with her. Looking for a reasonably priced apartment, he meets Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak) and Quentin (Lambert Wilson), two young men who are the opposite of each other. The dull clerk Paulot represents mediocre stability, actor Quentin decadent ambition. The triangle throws the girl's life in a whirlwind that mixes passion and ambition, art and pornography, hopes and ghosts of the past.

I usually complain about the length and especially the lengthening of the films when there are not enough artistic or narrative good reasons. In the case of 'Rendez-vous', which only lasts about 80 minutes, I think that an extra 20-30 minutes would have given more psychological depth to the characters and would have allowed the development of some of the themes that are barely suggested in the film. Even so, the characters are well defined and each of the acting creations manages to bring them to life and make us care about them and be curious about their lives beyond what we see on screen. In addition to the trio of young actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant is also cast as a theater director who seems to play a role as a mentor a la 'Pygmalion' for Nina, while hiding dark secrets from the past with repercussions in the lives of the heroes. Shakespeare's Julia becomes a symbol in a film that could have said more about the fascination of theater if it had a little more time to do it. Juliette Binoche is young, beautiful and magnetic, in a role that can get extra-meanings nowadays in the perspective of the fight against the objectification of women. It is one of the reasons, but not the only one, why this foray into the world of Paris in the '80s deserves to be seen and re-seen.

RENDEZ-VOUS comes from Téchinés 'romantic' period of the 70s and early 80s, comprising of BAROCCO, LES SOEURS BRONTE and HOTEL DES AMERIQUES. Of these four films RENDEZ-VOUS is without doubt the most worthwhile and successful.

In her first leading role Juliette Binoche is a revelation as Nina a provincial girl who has moved to Paris in order to pursue an acting career. She becomes involved with two vastly different men the gentle Paulo (Wadeck Stanckzac) and the dangerous and intense Quentin (Lambert Wilson).

Unpredictable and provocative this girl bounces between both men. However her whole world falls apart when one of them commits suicide. Cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet by the compelling Scrutzler (Jean Louis Trintignant) this young girl begins to confront her own behaviour and psychology.

Téchiné's brief film is full of themes about female artistic urgency.

Is there anything this girl will do in life that she will not do on stage.

Should there be? What is the dynamic that drives such an ambitious yet lost girl. the film deals superbly with all these ideas without ever resorting to simplae answers. Aided by Binoche's fearless performance the film is incredibly emotional and romantic, helped in no small part by a stunning Phillippe Sarde score.

RENDEZ-VOUS is an intense and at time difficult film, but it is worth every effort to begin to explore this girls psychological motivations.