If you were asked to name one thing living in NYC offers that almost no other city in the world does, what would that be? And my answer came to mind before any initial question after watching previews of the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema festival. It’s the cheek by jowl of everyday existence from sublimity to sewer. One could so easily see an NYC equivalent in every one of the films on view. And there really is something for everyone in this fest. From the quirky/cuteness (some may feel cloying) of Audrey Tautou vehicle Delicacy (La Délicatesse) to Jean-François Laguionie’s startlingly beautiful animation The Painting (Le Tableau) - presented in collaboration with the New York International Children’s Film Festival . And from the all too close for comfort jobless/rental struggle of Louise Wimmer or The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro) to the indifference and self-regard of Guilty (Présumé coupable) and 38 Witnesses (38 Témoins) .

If there was only time for one of these in a busy schedule? That’s a very hard ‘ask’ but Robert Guédiguian’s Snows of Kilimanjaro (March 6/8/10) would certainly be on the tip of the tongue. For years he’s been crafting films about the minutai of Marseilles life with the same ensemble of fine, dedicated actors. A description of the film resonates with social-realist arthouse boredom. Yet it’s deceptively simple and thoroughly involving what this director achieves with almost no music, no clever camera work, armed only with an observant eye. Guédiguian even takes a step back by the end of the movie (underscored with dolce French lilting classical) - not so much satirizing his characters forgiving noblesse oblige nature rather asking his audience how they might have behaved after experiencing such trauma.

Far scarier than the deadly perversions of The Last Screening (well executed in every way but a film that would make a double-bill from sometime back with Diane Bertrand's The Ring Finger springs to mind more vividly) is Vincent Garenq’s Guilty (March 5/6/8). Again, an all too familiar factual tale of how an innocent man becomes a town’s scapegoat and only by a hair’s breath survives the prison ordeal while the wheels of justice slowly grind. The ending will infuriate. Missing the first few minutes of 38 Witnesses (inspired by New York’s 1964 Kitty Genovese case), I later found perhaps it would have been more interesting not to have initially seen the crime. And it’s a bit of a spoiler to relate the crux of the narrative. The setting is the port of Le Havre – a French town recently becoming an arthouse star location. Director Lucas Belvaux observes his characters rather than probing them a la Claude Chabol, a style that will either be a little less engaging or like me you’ll find intriguing i.e. you never really get to know anyone particularly. Even Le Havre. Yet the complicity/complexity of human silence in this small town opens a dialectic about whether or not truth changes anything when the dead will never wake again.

Mathieu Demy’s (son of famed Jaques and Agnes Varda) Americano (March 3/4/6) plumbs similar territory of whether knowing the past makes our present let alone future on this earth any better. Actor-writer-director Demy, as you’d expect/hope creates a visually involving journey (cinematographer Georges Lechaptois) as the estranged Paris son who must head to Los Angeles after his mother’s death and sort out affairs only to find that he must head off to Mexico in his quest. Louise Wimmer ’s (March 3/5/6) odyssey is less clear though superficially crystalline as she survives another day by sleeping in her car rather than with men. Corinne Masiero (more a French TV actress and relative newcomer to film) is mesmeric in demanding us to stare into her character’s opacity. Again: describing the film sounds rather like the syllabus for an adult-education course in social work. But even the rather upbeat ending isn’t as foregrounded in hope and favor of ‘the system’ as it seems.

There’s a lot in 18 Years Old and Rising (March 5/10) that’s poignant, nuanced and keeps bobbing to the surface in the sea of Frédéric Louf’s Mitterand era tale of late adolescent first love and bourgeois liberal democratic thought- though that mayn’t be enough for some audiences. It’s a little parallel akin to the world created by Xavier Dolan though with all the color bleached away and not a hint of anything beyond the heterosexual. And Louf’s film also brings back memories of Bertrand Tavernier’s 1995 The Bait in which up-keeping the bourgeois carapace is all there is. What drives the film is Louf’s direction of his talented young cast who, though portraying stereotypes, never fall into one dimensionality. Ostracized canvas critters ‘the sketchies’ in The Painting (March 3/4) discover that they can literally swirl themselves into upward mobility and start calling their own brushstrokes. Hard to imagine young kids not being wowed by this. And so besotted are they with today’s techno-gadgetry that kids shouldn't find subtitles at all a problem. And if there is a message to take home it’s probably that we can ultimately create the world we want to live in rather than being dictated by someone else’s color palette. Though certainly in New York someone else's world is but a stone's throw away. The Dardennes brothers The Kid with a Bike opens March 16.

||||_..^/

The best Valentine's Day image I could think of!

Exhibition of posters for the films of Milos Forman (and lots more) at the Czech Center (the what, you ask?? A fab designed building nestling down on E73rd.) And F.Murray Abraham (Amadeus) is starring in the Classic Stage Company production of Brecht's play Galileo -one of the C20th's greatest plays and far from the political didacticism that Brecht is so often saddled with. But more of that and other NYC delights soon..

And....my sole footing into NY Fashion Week at agnès b.'s Howard Street exhibition opening. (PHOTOS HERE)