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.

Rendez-vous (1985) was co-written and directed by André Téchiné. It's a vehicle for the now-famous Juliette Binoche.

Juliette Binoche, at age 21, already radiated the star power that became apparent to everyone in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Unfortunately, her contributions to this film were pretty much limited to her luminous skin and her distinctive beauty. This distinctive beauty is fully and totally displayed. (Binoche is not shy.)

The film involves four men who swirl around Binoche like the proverbial moths around a flame. One is a wimp, one is a creep, and one carries a straight razor. (Don't ask). The fourth is Jean-Louis Trintignant. The other three were all young, and were probably happy to work with a well-known director like Téchiné. One can only guess why an established star like Trintignant accepted this role.

Binoche is lovely, especially when dressed in period costume as Shakespeare's Juliet. (She looks like Vivian Leigh in "Gone with the Wind.") However, she is miscast as the wide-eyed young ingénue from the provincial town of Toulouse. Binoche was born in Paris, and she just can't carry off a role in which she is supposed to have just arrived in town to "live her life." Another weak point is her reading of some of Juliet's lines at an casting audition. No actor could read lines that badly. (High school kids trying out for the senior play don't read lines that badly.)

The movie will work well on DVD, which is the way I saw it. If you love La Binoche, and you've seen every other film in which she's starred, I guess you'll have to see this one for the sake of completion. If you haven't seen all of her later films, rent one of those instead.

Notice how the jackets of just about every video, especially the French ones, SHOUT how SEXY the movie is. In Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Blue," par example, Juliette Binoche and the film are touted as being so, so sexy. But it wasn't, and neither was she. However in "Rendez- Vous" you will see a Juliette Binoche with enough sexual power to awaken a dead man-not to say that this movie is as good as Kieslowski's "Blue." It isn't, but it's not bad.

Binoche is full of energy as a provincial French girl with a flair for the stage new to the lights of gay Paree. She plays fast and loose (and natural) with the men she meets, and dodges some serious trouble before working it out with the man she really wants. Characteristically, Director André Téchiné leads us close to the dark side of sex without really offending our sensibilities.

Jean-Louis Trintignant appears in a small role that anticipates his triumphant creation as the admiring older man in Kieslowski's "Trois Couleurs: Rouge" nine years later.

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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.