City of Lights, City of Angels: 27 French films in L.A.

Among other returning COLCOA vets, writer-director Rémi Bezançon, whose delightfully frothy romantic comedy Love is in the Air played the festival in 2006, brings a similarly deft touch to The First Day of the Rest of Your Life, which views the passage of time in an ordinary French family by honing in on four key dates (a son moving out, a daughter losing her virginity, a wedding, a funeral) over the course of a decade. And photographer and documentarian Raymond Depardon (whose 10th District Court screened in 2005) is back with the Cannes-awarded Modern Life, the third in his series of lovely, lyrical portraits of rural French farm living — a way of life that seems to be ending even as Depardon is filming it.

Last but by no means least: Christoph Honoré, the self-styled Nouvelle Vague standard-bearer whose previous two films (Dans Paris and Love Songs) were undone by their terminal Godard- and Truffaut-isms, makes a welcome descent from the Parnassus of cinephilia with La belle personne, a clever transposition of Madame de Lafayette’s landmark 17th-century novel The Princess of Cleves (previously filmed by the likes of Andrzej Zulawski and Manoel de Oliveira) to the confines of a contemporary Paris lycée. There, the appearance of an anonymous love letter leads the new girl in class (dark, translucent beauty Léa Seydoux, soon to be seen in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards) away from the affections of the devoted Otto (Love Songs’ Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) and toward the lustful glances of her Italian professor (Louis Garrel as yet another bedheaded object of desire). The air, as per usual with Honoré, is one of romantic fatalism, but here it feels earned rather than belabored. Even when, late in the film, the director’s trademark pansexuality rears its inevitable head, it does so with marked lack of ostentation. Which counts, in my book, as something even more surprising than Liam Neeson as an action hero.

Dieu merci: The ladies of God’s Offices

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CITY OF LIGHTS, CITY OF ANGELS | Directors Guild of America | Mon.-Sun., April 20-26 | www.colcoa.com