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Reviews
Rendez-vous (1985)
Emotional recollection
There is very mixed opinion on here surrounding Rende-Vous and I was unsure how I feel about the film seeing it 15 years after my first viewing. I needn't have worried I found the film to be an excellent, psychological drama with riveting central performances.
Released in 1985, today the film looks dated, but its focus and themes remain as vibrant as ever. Juliette Binoche gives a startlingly memorable debut as Nina, the provincial actress who in attempting to grasp hold of her destiny is instead cruelly manipulated by circumstance.
I had to smile at the review criticizing her reading of the lines for Romeo & Juliet as being absolutely awful. The fact is that they were supposed to be awful (so in that way the film and Binoche succeed). Nina is a headstrong young girl, but nothing in the film suggests she has any sort of talent in terms of acting, until she meets Scrutzer and can find the emotional maturity necessary to play Juliet. There is of course irony here: Why is there a need for emotional maturity when playing a teenager? The answer of course lies with one of the most important themes at play here: that artistic maturity can only be achieved through real experience - in this case the loneliness and grief Nina needs to experience to come to terms with the character of Juliet.
That the first part of the film and the love-triangle it establishes and cruelly destroys facilitates this is where the film finds it's strength. It's through a coincidence of circumstance that Nina and Scrutzler come to meet in the first place. Had that not happened Nina would not have experienced much of the misery in her life, nor the maturity she later grasps.
The first part of the film is stunningly tight with Techine tightly creating a sense of obsession among the three main characters (Nina, Quentin and Paulo). This sort of focus is missing from Techine's later films such as Les Temoins, Alice et Martin and Loin and had he displayed the same control on those as he does here they would have been even better for it.
As the story arcs and Trintignant's Scrutzler comes to the fore the film finds it's final equilibrium as do the characters. This is not the stuff of happy endings, but is instead that of realization and in the case of the actress emotional recollection which empowers her ability to perform.
In her leading debut Binoche is very strong, it's not hard to see why the French press were so excited by her in this role and why it opened the path to her (still) magnificent career. She creates in Nina a figure of pathos mixed with a coarse ignorance that is slowly eroded to reveal a significant intellect and talent - on stage and off, on screen and off.