Queer Cinema Takes Center Stage at Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2025

The 30th edition of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival begins on March 6 in New York City. Presented by Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center, this year's event brings 23 French features, with several titles screening for the first time in the U.S. Like in prior years, the festival brings a diverse and eclectic mix of films from the country credited with inventing cinema.

And whether it's queer icons, characters, and narratives either on the screen or behind the camera, this year's Rendez-Vous has them spread throughout their almost two dozen films. After watching most of this year's features, here's a preview of some titles playing.

Chosen Families

Coincidentally, Marie-Claude's son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) gets out of prison around the same time, and Michelle bonds with him after she hires him to help her around the house. Anyone familiar with Ozon's past work knows he loves to throw down plot twists, so it goes without saying that "When Fall is Coming" takes some turns once it gets all the necessary exposition out of the way. And while Ozon isn't making a film like "Sitcom" or "Summer of 85" here, "When Fall is Coming" takes the concept of families of choice and runs with it into a dark direction; the reveal that Michelle and Marie-Claude were sex workers in their younger years turns out to be a savvy bit of foreshadowing about their familiarity with having a chosen family.

Ozon isn't the most consistent filmmaker, which is true of the uneven ways he navigates several ambiguities in story and characterization here, but "When Fall is Coming" remains interesting in terms of how it chooses to let its plot play out. What begins as a sympathetic look at a woman in the twilight years of her life shifts into a strange sort of thriller that's too subdued to ever confidently describe it as such. It's a slippery film for better and worse, sometimes hard to grasp and other times falling flat on its face.

Keep it French...

Opening night film "Three Friends" will do French cinema no favors in terms of challenging some of its common stereotypes, and there's nothing wrong with that. Writer/director Emmanuel Mouret's look at three women and their romantic entanglements is a mostly light dramedy about the messy ways people navigate their relationships and feelings, where emotions win over logic and infidelity gets treated with a shrug.

I'll try my best to explain the fun, knotty dynamics. Alice (Camille Cottin) is with longtime boyfriend Eric (Grégoire Ludig), but she doesn't know that he's having an affair with her close friend Rebecca (Sara Forestier). But when Alice tells Rebecca she's having an affair with someone, Rebecca finds herself in the middle of a messy situation she can't easily escape. Meanwhile, Alice and Rebecca's friend, Joan (India Hair), has fallen out of love with her boyfriend, Victor (Vincent Macaigne), and after their relationship comes to a tragic end, she finds herself in a love triangle with a new coworker and his close friend who just moved to town.

Mouret, who specializes in this particular mélange of romance, comedy, and drama, pulls off another solid and entertaining examination of people stumbling their way through matters of the heart, told through impressively staged long takes that puts the performances of his talented ensemble front and center. The Alice/Rebecca plotline provides most of the fun, while Joan's navigation through grief and starting over is where the film's own heart lies, with a sincerity whose power can sneak up on you given the overall breezy tone.

One of three films in this year's lineup starring "Titane" actor Vincent Lindon, "The Second Act" offers a different kind of French variety through its meta satire on the film industry. Director Quentin Dupieux (also known as the musician Mr. Oizo) has carved out a prolific career as a filmmaker in France, cranking out at least one film every year while collecting France's biggest stars like Pokémon. Here, he's gathered Lindon, Louis Garrel, Léa Seydoux, and rising star Raphaël Quenard as four actors starring in a disastrous production wrapped in so many self-aware layers there's no point in trying to peel them apart.

Through all the confusion, "The Second Act" addresses buzzy issues like cancel culture (through a lengthy conversation that starts with a character's transphobia and gets worse from there), AI, sexual identity (through some deliberately placed reveals in the final act), and much more. The film opened last year's Cannes Film Festival, which makes sense given the cast's star power, its poking fun at the industry, and a short runtime. It's hard to say whether or not audiences outside of that specific context will get much out of "The Second Act."

...But Make it Hollywood

An ambitious, high concept sci-fi with a fair chunk of dialogue in English, "Planet B" tries its damndest to broaden its international appeal with mixed results. Set in 2039 in a dystopian France, Aude Léa Rapin's film has "Blue is the Warmest Color" and "Passages" star Adèle Exarchopoulos playing an activist who's arrested with several fellow "terrorists." They soon wake up on Planet B, a fancy seaside estate that's the world's first virtual prison. At the same time, an immigrant worker (Souheila Yacoub) at the government facility running Planet B gets her hands on a virtual headset that lets her access the secret prison, where she secretly works with the captives to expose Planet B to the public and free them.

Léa Rapin's film is both straightforward and spread too thin, with an obvious message about how the disenfranchised will always find a way to come together and overthrow their oppressors, even in the age of virtual reality and heightened surveillance. But the juggling plotlines of Exarchopoulos in the prison and Yacoub in the real world leaves little room to develop its characters. Luckily, the high concept keeps "Planet B" chugging along, and the compelling screen presences of both Exarchopoulos and Yacoub make up for what the film lacks. If anything, "Planet B" could double as a strong pitch for a series adaptation somewhere like Netflix, where it'd make a nice pairing with "Black Mirror."

Dividing Lines

French cinemagoers love to watch people from different societal backgrounds coming together, like in Emmanuel Courcol's "The Marching Band." A bonafide hit in its home country, the film sold more tickets than "Wicked" at the French box office when the musical juggernaut opened. The film begins with successful conductor Thibault (Benjamin Lavernhe) finding out he has leukemia, and in the search for a bone marrow donor he discovers he's adopted and has a biological brother, a lower class factory worker named Jimmy (Pierre Lottin).

The two get to know each other, and Thibault's discovery that Jimmy has a similar knack for music (through his perfect pitch and love of jazz records) makes him feel guilty about his privilege in getting adopted by a more well-to-do family. I hope that, this far into describing the film, it goes without saying how patronizing "The Marching Band" is in concept and execution, with Thibault discovering that people below him have their own inner lives and crude, yet heartfelt, ways of showing love for each other.

Elsewhere in the Rendez-Vous, Patricia Mazuy's "Visiting Hours" also deals with two characters crossing class lines with more intelligence and awareness. Isabelle Huppert plays Alma, the wealthy wife of an imprisoned neurosurgeon, who takes an interest in Mina (Hafsia Herzi), a dry cleaner whose husband is an inmate at the same prison as Alma's. After encountering each other during a prison visit, Alma aggressively befriends Mina by letting her stay at her mansion and pulling strings to get her a new job close by.

Mazuy lets the differences between the two women come out naturally as we learn more about them, and as time goes on the things that separate them widen into a gulf that threatens to swallow both of them. The screenplay establishes and subverts expectations through the introduction of genre elements, setting up conflicts before deflating them as soon as they're supposed to come to a head. It's an interesting effort by Mazuy, and a nice counter to the more palatable takes on similar ideas in films like "The Marching Band."

Another effort is Claire Burger's "Foreign Tongue," which looks at French high schooler Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) as she moves to Germany to live with pen pal Lena (Josefa Heinsius) for several weeks to get away from being bullied at her school in France. It's a coming-of-age story in a contemporary setting, as Lena's political activism has her constantly worried about the rise of the far-right in Germany and across Europe. But Burger's interests in exploring social and political themes through Fanny and Lena's friendship/blossoming romance amounts to a surface level take, as more conventional characterization and narrative makes the thornier elements amount to pit stops along the way of discovering oneself.